Getting Sloshed

Dec 20, 2011 Is hot gas sloshing in a gravitational wine glass—or is astrophysicists’ reasoning going in a circle? A recent press release explains: “Like wine in a glass, vast clouds of hot gas are sloshing back and forth….” The blue image is assembled electronically from x-ray data and superimposed…

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Number Three

Dec 16, 2011 New images of the third largest asteroid reveal etched chasms and deep holes. The Dawn mission continues in orbit around Vesta. Vesta is ranked high among minor planets, with Pallas (531 kilometers) and Ceres (952 kilometers) as its larger cousins. Ceres is also part of the Dawn…

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Bubbling Plasma

Dec 15, 2011 Enceladus joins other celestial objects that produce “magnetic bubbles.” In a recent Picture of the Day, the so-called “bubbles” of magnetism supposedly found by the Voyager spacecraft at the boundary where the Sun’s heliosphere meets the ISM (interstellar medium) were explained as Langmuir sheaths, or electrically charged…

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Solar Stagnation

Dec 14, 2011 Matter from the Interstellar Medium has been detected by Voyager 1. A postulate of the Electric Sun hypothesis presupposes the Sun to be the positive terminal in a circuit, or anode. The negative electrode, or “virtual” cathode, is known as the heliosphere, a shell of charged particles…

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Twisted Pairs

Dec 13, 2011 A remote galaxy is said to host two black holes. Could an electrical explanation better fit the observation? Electric Universe advocates propose that electric currents in plasma generate magnetic fields that constrict the current. As previous Picture of the Day articles point out, the constricted channel is…

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