Resistance of the Solar Plasma

[psychegram]

Okay, I know this is probably in the wrong place ... I looked for but was unable to find the 'self-introduction' thread so if there's a more apt place for this to be, hopefully one of the moderators will move it there (thanks guys.) That said there's a question at the end of this directly pertinent from a physics point of view.

Anyhow, I'm a graduate student in the astronomy program at a Canadian university. I've been interested in the EU model since first coming across it, oh, a year or two back, during my extended hiatus from academia (which while it means I'm older than the other masters' students, and a bit rusty on the math, lets just say my conceptual frame is somewhat broader). I first heard of the plasma cosmos some time ago, in the context of 'but no one takes that rubbish seriously' and of course, besotted as I was with the Big Bang the whole glorious theoretical edifice of modern astrophysics, promptly paid no more attention to the idea. Then it crossed my mind one day (in the midst of a period during which I was calling into question all of my life's previous assumptions) that I'd never actually heard any proof for why, precisely, plasma cosmology was bunk and decided to google the term and see what google spat back ... and discovered the suggestion that the stars are so many Christmas tree lights, and that the cosmos is animated by an almost life-like energy that binds all together in a dynamic but all-connecting web.

It really is a trip sitting in lecture listening about dark energy the expansion of the universe and wondering, 'am I the only one who can see how transparently full of shit this is?'

Recently I asked a professor how we knew that stars generated power internally, rather than having it externally delivered, which lead to a discussion of some of the basic ideas of EU (which so far as I know he was hearing for the first time ... or maybe not.) His response (after comparing the idea to Holocaust denial and gesturing towards a century of theoretical development that surely couldn't be that wrong) was to suggest I tackle the problem of how much current would be necessary to power the Sun.

So, let's get down to business:

Using what is no doubt a vastly oversimplified model, take the Sun as a compact resistor of overall resistance R and power output P. With the total incoming current as I, we have

P=I^2*R

Now, P is simply the power output of the Sun, roughly 3.8e26 W. The sticky part is of course the other two quantities.

First, the question of the current: there's the heliospheric current sheet, whose current is known to be directed inwards towards the Sun, with a total current I of 3e9 A (here's a question, somewhat related: what's the orientation of the HCS wrt the newly discovered ribbon?) Is this the only current we should expect? I notice from the EU model that it seems to call for inward polar currents (which I believe have actually been observed, yes?) in which case is there an estimate of how strong these would have to be? At any rate if we take these quantities for P and I, as given, we find that the Sun's resistance must be R=4.2*10^7 ohms.

Now here's the really sticky part: the resistance. What is the overall resistance of the Sun? Essentially we have a ball of plasma, and I was able to find two equations that seemed relevant here. The first was to take the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lundquist_numberLundquist number S and solve for the plasma resitivity, eta ... and of course to solve for the Alfven speed, and make an estimate of the characteristic length of the medium. The magnetic field would seem to be an issue too: how would the magnetic field vary inside an electric star? If it's a variable it makes calculating eta precisely that much more difficult. However, making the assumptions that what we're most concerned with is the photosphere (where most of the power is being dissipated), and taking its characteristic density, magnetic field strength and choosing a typical length scale of 10^6 m (and with the Lundquist number S being O(10^3)) I got a resistivity of 6.3*10^-4 ohm meters.

Another approach I took was to take the Spitzer equation for the conductivity of a plasma,

1/sigma=10^3*T^-(3/2)

Taking T as that of the photosphere we get a resistivity of 2.3*10^-3 ohm m, within an order of magnitude of the first.

However this too gives me an expression for the resistivity, and I'm not entirely sure how to move back and forth between the resistivity and the resistance. Of course

eta=R*(A/L)

where A is cross-sectional area and L is the length but ... those dimensions are rather more apt for cylinder of some sort and what we actually have is a spherical shell resistor, so we can take (stop me if I'm wrong) the surface area of the Sun (6.08e18 m^2)and the depth of the photosphere as approx 4e5 m, together with 1.4e-3 as the average of the resistivity obtained through the two methods above, to solve for R=9.21e-17 ohms.

So back to the original equation,

P=I^2*R => I=sqrt(P/R) = 2.01e21 A

Which if we compare it to the measured heliospheric current sheet which clocks in at 3e9 A, we don't have anywhere like near enough current coming in....

Obviously something's off in the calculations here, or in the theoretical assumptions. Anyhow, this seems like it should be a pretty easy EU question ... if anyone can give me some feedback on this problem, I'd be much obliged.

[Lloyd]

* Good to meet yet another potential fan of EU theory. I'm pretty sure you have the right board, so I don't expect this thread will be moved. Maybe they'll want to merge it with another one though, but they may be satisfied with it as is too.
* Your thread title refers to resistance. The resistance seems likely to vary a lot at various places near the sun's photosphere, because there seem to be currents coming in and going out in several parts of the chromosphere.
* Here's perhaps the most relevant part of a thread on this forum called "Question about the current powering the sun"
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... d5d2b997bf
It seems to cover some or much of what you're discussing.
* Here's a TPOD about the sun's electric circuit:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2009/ ... larity.htm
* You should probably look over these TPODs about the sun, if you haven't already:
http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/00subjectx.htm#Solar
* Here's a link to do a search on this site for "sun", "amp" and "Alfven":
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=site%3At ... ccc08a197a
* You can tell your professor that there are a number of major scientists who have believed in an electric universe: Christian Birkeland, Winston Bostick, Hannes Alfven, C. Bruce, Anthony Peratt, not to mention those who collaborated to put this website together, i.e. Wal Thornhill, Don Scott, Mel Acheson, Tom Wilson and many engineers and other knowledgeable amateurs. Have you looked over Thornhill's site yet: http://holoscience.com ?

[junglelord]

You forgot that Nikola Tesla believed in the EU as well as TT Brown.

[psychegram]

Thanks Lloyd! The forum link was exactly what I'm looking for (or so it appears on a first pass).

I've been all over holoscience and all the rest of the websites for a while now ... hence I consider myself to have a pretty good grasp of the theory, from a qualitative standpoint. Quantitatively, that's another issue, and as one of the main criticisms consistently leveled against EU is that it consistently fails to provide hard numbers ... well, that's an issue that needs dealing with (the other criticism you hear so often in the mainstream astronomy forums - Where are the papers?? - is pretty transparently bullshit on the face of it, since obviously a theory no one can get grant money or observing time to follow up on, will not generate much of a literature. I expect there was a fair time between the publication of Copernicus' theory and the general acceptance of heliocentrism when most of the published literature and academic discourse focused on the old geocentric model ... but I digress.)

Back to the question of physics ... the nonsensical answers I was getting would seem to be a result of the overly simplistic electrostatic model I was applying. Or was it the assumptions? Shouldn't a high level, global analysis of the circuit more or less come down to P=I^2*R? Neglecting entirely the more detailed structure of the system, of course. Or is it pretty much a mug's came trying to calculate the global resistance of the Sun?

btw ... Tesla is one of my hereoes

[Birkeland]

Where are the papers??

Here you'll find some.

[vukcevic]

Psychegram, I being an electronic engineer, developed my ideas long before I heard of EU (heard of it first during an argument with Dr. Svalgaard), and found have something in common but do not accept it for granted, as I do not totally accept or reject ‘classical’ view.
I think there are two problems here, may be not entirely compatible with EU ideas.
- Sun does generate lot of its power internally, to reach some 3000+ C or whatever temperature to be within sunspots umbra. The remainder is only surface heated by electric currents, hence further increase to 5600C, and up to million of degrees further up.
To calculate solar power separate two parts.
Calculate power released by main body, than power of the outer layers taking account of amount of mass (less mass, less power required to raise the temperature) in the surface layers: photosphere, chromosphere and corona, i.e. those which are above sunspot umbra temperature.
I hope this make sense to you and your professor.
I would be interested in your result.
btw ... Tesla is my hero too. My student days lab overlooked his statue:

and I am proud that the airport, I frequently fly to and from, was recently given name: Nikola Tesla
If somebody was to destroy Tesla's inventions, the world would simply stop

[earls]

Yes, good point, do remember to subtract out the mass of the sun.

Current In != Out

Current In + Mass of Sun = Out

The discharge (current in) into the gas (mass) will give you your output.

So how do you create a positive feed back current flux through a gas (plasma) to sustain fusion?

[jjohnson]

Welcome, Psychegram! You are just the type of open-minded skeptic we need to engage and listen to on this forum. You are on target when you note that it is a closed circle of "why don't you publish something useful that we can read " and "except in the appropriate peer-reviewed journals that we read." We DO need more hard science, and more people like you who can attack some of the math and make models which can be showed to be applicable. A good place to start is with our own star, I have finally concluded.

First, it's close enough to be directly (and indirectly) measurable. Second, there appear to be some grudging moves here and there in the establishment toward acknowledging that there is more to at least the magnetism part of EM operating in near space. We'll get to the "E" part later on. Third, people can relate a lot more closely to "the Sun" than to "a binary star called F G Sagittae, 8000 light years away in the center of the Henize 1-5 planetary nebula. F G isn't directly responsible for our global warming or cooling right now. Relevance to our public audience is important.

I see some variance in the reported value for solar power, but what needs to be made quite clear in working through models is, are we talking incident electrical and kinematic (the latter likely negligible) power or the radiated power calculated from observations and measurements of the solar spectrum? They can be equal in the EU model only if losses in and out are negligible, or equal, and it doesn't much matter in the fusion model where all the necessary power to produce the radiant output is internally generated. If you enter 5800K as the blackbody equivalent temperature of the Sun, you get a specific radiated power (my term


since it is per square meter per second) of about 6.42 x 107 W / m²/s. With a


radius of 6.96 x 108m, the surface area emitting power (i.e., radiating) is about


1.52 x 1018 m², yielding a total power output of 9.75 x 1025


W/s. This is about an order of magnitude less than the more commonly found value of 3.85 x


1026. So, the Sun isn't a perfect blackbody, or its power output is higher than


Wien's and Stefan-Boltzmann's Laws predict, or our dimensions are wrong. The point is, is all the incoming electric power sufficient to cause the radiant output, plus losses inherent in the process? You are trying to figure out how lossy the Sun is by figuring its resistance. (I'm glad this isn't AC - I am really bad at that.) Are you looking at the R of the entire heliosphere, which the incident drift current must overcome, or the resistance internal to the sun in those currents, say, below the corona? Incoming or internal resistance? Is the outbound solar wind (the majority of whose mass is hydrogen ions - protons - being accelerated away via magnetic fields) the main resistance to incoming electrons? Are there more inbound than outbound electrons? Plasmas are orders of magnitude better conductors than metals (the silver, gold kind of metals), but they are not loss-free conductors. As Don Scott noted to me, we do not know what the voltage drop actually is from the cathode heliosphere to the anode, or between the photosphere and the chromosphere. We need to determine those to solve some of the mysteries like what is the resistance. Scott's book Electric Sky discusses dynamic plasma resistance on p. 104 and references the plot on Figure 13. Unfortunately this plot, as well as the EU modified H-R diagram do not have numeric values associated with the axes. (That was what I was trying to work out, to associate stellar color models with specific power densities when Don pointed out the problem of lack of certain rather useful measurements associated with all this.)

Keep working on this stuff. Report back. Ask the questions - you have a large and interested help-group here, also without all the answers. Do not be shy to try to e-mail or call the EU books' authors and get their insights. Oddly enough, I would be interested to find out that there are flaws in the EU theory, since I am bound by scientific inquisitiveness to consider that, but I would be more than delighted to see work showing that it is more than plausible, it is scientifically observable, mathematically describable, and it answers more questions more forthrightly than what we have now. Good on yer, mate!

moderator edit: lines with exponents double spaced for reasons of legibility

[jjohnson]

Vukcevic, if you have a 3000K 'blackbody' radiating inside a 5800K radiator, can you combine their energies and get a combined power output? Or is the photosphere opaque to the internal energy quotient? If they could combine, this would increase my calculated specific power at


the photospheric surface to about 6.88 x 106W / m² / s, and boost the total


radiated power up to 1.05 x 1026, at least in the ballpark. The corona is at a


very elevated temperature, but I don't think it can behave like a blackbody radiator because a lot of its 'temperature' is kinetic (high speed field-aligned, low-collision rate ions) and not thermal, i.e., collision-induced with consequent radiation. Of course, blackbody radiation is only a 'good approximation' to the actual, complex spectrum of any star, with its absorption lines and emission lines in the blackbody or graybody background.

One of the attractive things about the fusion model at first, is its initial-impression plausibility. That has kept faith alive since 1926 or so. Several very sticky questions have been raised by the EU writings, not least is, "why can't we throw enough money at simulating a confined plasma fusion process here on Earth over a period of many decades to show that it is even possible for that to be occurring inside the Sun like our physicists claim?" The best thing about the electric star model is that it should be able to be shown that it requires no out-of-the observable-universe phenomena deep inside a star in order to function correctly. Can we show that? I think the jury is still out on the details like voltage drops from out there to in here, and what is the actual net electron flux onto the Sun, and do the polar jets create surface areas which are dimmer (or brighter) than the other surface areas, and so on. I hope that we will be getting more and even better data from continuing experiments. Of course, since none of us has any leverage as to what experiments are run and who releases how much of the gathered data and how are the data interpreted, good luck to us. V, your spreadsheets and graphs showing predictive abilities utilizing magnetic relationships and alignments are impressive, and since they utilize those factors instead of simply gravity or neutrino counts they dovetail neatly into the kind of capabilities we would like to see generated in the EU paradigm

Wal Thornhill's carefully reasoned predictions are a great step in this direction, too, and I hope we have many more as things get tidied up and more predictable. In many ways the plasma universe is much more complex and chaotic than the Faierie Dust universe, which makes it hard to deal with in neat, straightforward ways. We have to come from behind on two fronts, then, plausibility with both the public and the Science Guild, and arguably a much more complicated model to develop and make usable.

moderator edit: lines with exponents double spaced for reasons of legibility

[Lloyd]

* Have yous read the thread called Mathematical Criticism of the Electrical Sun at
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1474&sid=187bcd917b ... eea#p17258?
* That post is from Don Scott via Steve Smith. Some of the posts following it also seem helpful.
* There may be ways to estimate solar electrical values by knowing those at Earth. I know there was a thread here last year or so about the current reaching Earth. I think it was even calculated or measured by NASA or another mainstream source.
* Oh, and have you seen Thornhill's latest article at http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=74fgmwne? I was just reading Allyn's post on the Electric Sun thread and he's discussing it. Here's one of several interesting images from the article:
* And the caption says: This diagram shows a conceptual cross-section along the central axis of the stellar Z-pinch at the Sun’s position. Whether the double layers exist within or outside the heliosphere is unknown. The diameter of the encircling cylinder is unknown. That of supernova 1987A is of the order of a light-year, which would make the diameter of the heliosphere more than 600 times smaller! Note that as a rotating charged body the Sun’s magnetic field is not aligned with the interstellar magnetic field and Z-pinch axis. The Sun’s magnetic field only has influence within the tiny heliosphere but it is modulated by galactic currents. Alfvén’s axial “double layers” (DLs) have been included although their distance from the Sun is unknown. DLs are produced in current carrying plasma and are the one region where charge separation takes place in plasma and a high voltage is generated across them (see discussion below).
* I guess that's not very helpful. Data on the current sheet or solar wind form would probably be better.

[vukcevic]

Jjohnson : Vukcevic, if you have a 3000K 'blackbody' radiating inside a 5800K radiator, can you combine their energies and get a combined power output?

Thermal convection energy transfer – no (normally would not reach very far anyway).
Electromagnetic radiation (low frequencies through infrared, visible, x rays etc ; i.e. whole spectrum) – yes.

[jjohnson]

Thanks, V. I wasn't even thinking thermal convection - if that were the case the direction would more likely be downward, no? High temp to lower?

[vukcevic]

Yes, indeed so. However, neither thermonuclear event (fusion) nor an external electrical current heating is essential for maintaining high temperature in the Sun’s interior. It is estimated that the Earth’s core has temperatures well in excess of 3000C, as this graph from University of Nevada shows
http://www.physics.unlv.edu/~jeffery/as ... rature.png
There are no indications that this is a result of external factors.

[psychegram]

Okay, so I think I figured out the problem. It arose in the penultimate step of the calculation, converting the resistivity I calculated into the resistance. They're related by the following equation:

rho=R*A/L

Where rho = current density, R=resistance, A=cross sectional area and L=length. Now, the problem was that I was defining A as the surface area of the Sun, and L as the depth of the photosphere ... that's almost exactly the inverse of what, in fact, I want to do! Because if you look at the model, of course you've got these two currents impinging on the solar anode at the poles, and then winding their way around the surface in ever widening arcs as they spiral in towards the center, causing the plasma to fluoresce in arc mode along the way.

Without knowing too precisely the dimensions of this current flow, we can imagine that the relevant region won't be much deeper than the photosphere so as a rough approximation, let A be that depth squared (A=1.6x10^11 m^2). Since we're only going for a ballpark figure here we'll just round that to 10^11 m^2. The 'length' of this wire will be whatever length is required for a \'wire' with this cross sectional area to wrap around the Sun. As a (very, very rough) approximation, let's make that twice the circumference (likely higher), which gets us L=8.7x10^9 m, which is close enough we'll also set to 10^10 m. We then have (with rho calculated in the first post as being around 10^-3 ohm meters)

R=rho*L/A=10^-4 ohms

Going back to the original equation

P=I^2*R => I=sqrt(P/R)=sqrt(3.8x10^26/10^-4)=1.9x10^15 A

Which is significantly larger than the 3x10^9 A current found in the heliospheric current sheet BUT we're assuming anyways that the primary current is polar. At any rate this seems a significantly more reasonable result.

Thanks for all the help ,everyone! I've learned quite a bit this week.

[Lloyd]

Psych.: [The professor's] response was to suggest I tackle the problem of how much current would be necessary to power the Sun.

* I don't understand electricity and the formulas real well, but, if you're seeking to find how much current it would take to power the sun, the formulas I remember are: P=IE and E=IR or power in watts etc = current in amps times EMF or electromotive force in volts. If you don't know the EMF, you can get it from E=IR, i.e. EMF = current in amps times resistance in ohms.
* Is the power of the sun known? Can the power be determined by how much energy the sun is radiating? The visible light energy being radiated is rather constant, but I read that the ultraviolet and other frequencies are more variable. How many watt light bulb is the sun? If the power of a light bulb can be measured by measuring the light coming from it at some distance, can the sun's wattage be similarly measured?