dahlenaz wrote:The flash point does not seem to be as high as stated above,,, clouds don't form at 12-15
miles up and the time between the flash and the first concussion seems to support a low level fragmentation
maybe you meant 12-15,000 feet.
No, I meant 12~15 miles.
The latest estimate of the altitude of the bolide when it broke up was 27 km, based on the locations of observers, and the apparent angle of the bolide from the horizon for each observer. This is consistent with other measurements. The meteorite fragments were found about 40 km from Chelyabinsk. The hypotenuse of that 27/40 triangle is 48.25 km, giving the line-of-sight distance. With the speed of sound at the relevant altitudes being roughly 300 m/s, the sonic boom would have arrived 2.68 minutes after the point of nearest approach. I read somewhere that it was 2 minutes 50 seconds, which is 2.83 minutes. So I think that the estimates are reasonably accurate. Now, 27 km above the surface is well into the stratosphere, where there is little-to-no water vapor. So I'm still of the opinion that the "clouds" were made of smoke from arc discharges onto the surface of the bolide.
dahlenaz wrote:Upon fragmentation the dynamics change violently but the twin trails seem to indicate that forward momentum was not altered greatly by the blast. [...] The cloud which is spread along the fragmentation region takes on a life of its own, which may misrepresent the behavior of the fragments. A lot was happening in those few seconds of fragmentation and continued well after the fragments departed. This raises the requirements for the explanation of this event beyond that of a solid body at extreme altitude.
...
Indeed, that's why I'm not really thinking that the bolide "exploded"
per se -- rather, it could have simply broken up. The flares were from charge recombination and molecular reformation, entirely within the nitrogen and oxygen in the stratosphere. The charge separation caused by a bolide can persist for tens of minutes in the atmosphere, so a flare that persisted for a second or two is not surprising. And clearly, the flare wasn't moving. So this was the stationary air recombining.
viscount aero wrote:NASA themselves uses that reference to describe meteor entry and charge separation.
I know.
Meteorologists say that thunderstorm electrification is triboelectricity, from hail falling through the air!
But that just ain't right...
Anyway, I agree with your main point that friction causes ionization.
dahlenaz wrote:If the meteor cloud was as high as proposed then there must have been extra moisture
provided by the meteor itself upon breakup, where else would it come from?
The meteorite fragments have been classified as chondrites, which typically contain silicon, aluminum, iron, nickel, etc. But maybe the meteoroids are actually just dirty snowballs, and the chondrite material is the dirt, and where nothing is left of the snowball except (in some cases) a cloud.
I dunno... Spectral analysis on the cloud would have told the whole story, if anybody had bothered doing it, instead of running around fixing broken windows in the middle of the winter.
dahlenaz wrote:With reference to Charles' suggestion, offered earlier and drawn in two dimensional form, i have two question;
Will this action hold to the twin parallel output from a sphere or would it be more toroidal as a 3D
representation of the same image would offer?
I'm still trying to figure out how to draw it in 3D without getting even more confused -- it's actually a complex environment, if I have it figured correctly.
My
2D drawing only shows one of the magnetic lines of force -- the one facing in the direction of travel, which I'm saying will redirect electrons into the bolide, and burn holes into the axes, producing smoke. Yet the solenoidal field would be fully toroidal, and I'm not showing the other lines of force. I "think" that these will be less effective in redirecting electrons into the bolide. In the case of the leading line of force, the particles shedding off of the shock front begin traveling in the same direction as the magnetic line of force. Once organized into a Birkeland current, I'm saying that the electrons will then follow the lines of force into the bolide, pretty much the same way charged particles from the Sun follow the Earth's lines of force into the aurora. But what about particles that wrap around the sides? I don't think that those particles are redirected toward the poles as much, because their direction is too different from the magnetic lines of force. Is that true? Anyway, whatever is true of the solar wind interacting with the Earth's magnetosphere will be true of the air impacting the magnetic field of the bolide.
viscount aero wrote:When the Space Shuttle would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere it would take several minutes and heat up to thousands of degrees. The Shuttle is also very massive and metres across in all directions. Even though it would create a sonic boom, the Shuttle's re-entry dynamics never had the effect upon the air as if a bomb exploded.
True, except in the case of the
Columbia disaster. But even then, I'd disagree with the characterization of there having been an explosion. The Shuttle broke up, and there were several
flare-ups. Megalightning might have been a contributing factor to the failure of the controlled re-entry, but the real problem was that without maintaining the proper angle of attack, the Shuttle was no match for the frictional heat, and it disintegrated.
@viscount aero: Thanks for your kind comments. I'm just following the evidence, but what I'm finding is that
it leads somewhere. Sometimes I think that some of the people in the thunderbolts crowd are scared to take a closer look, for fear that the evidence will not support their claims that the Universe is electric. Well, fear not.
The Universe is actually electric! So look closely, and the picture will come into sharp focus. Of course, not every EU claim is correct. Nor have all of my claims stood the test of time.
But if we keep questioning, and keep assimilating more and more information, and keep challenging theories to match data, all will be revealed.
The cool part is that with time, it gets easier. It's like putting together a puzzle. You start by fitting individual pieces together. But then you get a sense for what you're actually putting together, and then it gets a lot easier. Well, we're at that point.
These aren't just epiphanies anymore, or alternative hypotheses. These are far more accurate descriptions of the phenomena, based on plausible physics. In other words, this is real science, and we are the pioneers.
Lloyd & I have been discussing how to move this kind of thing along. We'd like to organize workgroups, with expertise in particular topics, to gather up information, and to produce documents explaining the state of the art. Sometimes that means that there are still a number of hypotheses on the table. Well, what are they? What is the evidence? What are the anomalies in the existing theories? We'd like to see review articles that lay all of this stuff out, so that the next person can get it all in one place. And we're thinking of this as being very dynamic, where new information is going to pop up all of the time, presenting new opportunities for increases in the specificity of the theories.
Currently, we use this forum for presenting new information, and hypotheses based on it. That's a great benefit to the people involved in the discussion. But after the fact, how does somebody else get the gist of what was concluded? You have to read the whole thread to understand it, and that's just impossible. So we'd like to see documents that summarize discussions. We believe that this could greatly expand the number of people contributing to this emerging scientific paradigm. A certain number of people are willing to participate in individual threads. But what if every time people get interested in something, they can find a summary document, and go right to the topic of interest, finding out what's already been done, and injecting their 2 cents? In other words, what if we could combine all of these individual efforts into a community project?
So we're trying to define a process for creating and updating such documents. Basically, instead of there being a new thread when new information emerges, making it even more difficult to determine the current status of a topic, rather, a footnote should be added to the existing document, saying exactly where the new information fits in. And that's where the next discussion begins. The "summary" document might have a lot of footnotes, where possible interpretations branch off into their own respective discussions. But then the conclusions of those discussions can be woven back into the summary at some later date.
It sounds like a lot of work, until you compare it to the work that we're already doing in these interminable threads.
How much effort does it take to get up to speed on an issue? How much time is wasted discussing stuff, when there was already a discussion on the same topic? How much duplication of labor is actually going on here? What if we could create centralized resources for each topic, summarizing discussions, so people could build on what has gone before? We believe that we'd see a lot more value. (See
Improve Science and Scientific Method for more info on this.)
So are any of you willing to be in a workgroup on bolides? We're not asking for any additional effort on anybody's part -- just that existing efforts be expended in a slightly different way. Whenever a new thread on bolides pops up on the forum, create a stub article on my site. Maybe enter a few quick comments about some of the things discussed. Later, others in the workgroup can tweak the article, little bits at a time. And be sure to post a link to the summary article back into the thunderbolts thread, so that people reading the thread will also know that there is a summary document in progress. To do a massive amount of scholarship on any particular topic is obviously a big undertaking, and that's not what we're talking about. We're just talking about people having it in the backs of their minds that for every topic, there is a central resource that briefly identifies that main points. So would any of you guys be willing to help out with this?
