Jul 19, 2012 An X-2 class solar flare recently missed a direct impact with Earth. Heliophysicists classify solar flares according to their brightness in X-ray wavelengths. C-class flares are the smallest on the scale, with X-ray measurements in the 10^-6 watts per square meter range (W/m^2), while X-class flares…
Collaborators, an invitation to you: We are filming the NPA 19th Annual Conference next week in Albuquerque, and we’d like to have a list of questions to present to our interviewees. If you go to https://vimeo.com/channels/theconversation, you can see example interview segments from the Electric Universe 2012 Conference. Just below…
July 18, 2012 In June 2012, a team of 4 Japanese researchers revealed in Nature that “an extremely energetic event occurred around our space environment in AD 775.” An analysis of Japanese cedar trees showed a “rapid increase” in the concentration of radiocarbon for that year, matched by a…
July 17, 2012 Some so-called “neutron star pulsars” are said to create nebulae as they spin. The standard model of stellar evolution proposes that pulsars are neutron stars rotating at incredible speed. For example, PSR J1748-2446ad, in the globular cluster Terzan 5, is reported to be spinning at almost 43,000 revolutions…
July 16, 2012 Are geologic events cyclic? It seems possible that plasma interactions with Earth and other charged bodies in space or the impact on our biosphere from ion beams, could disrupt all the elemental changes that are used to date rocks. Earth could be much younger than the…
July 13, 2012 Is this elongated crater in the Negev desert the result of water erosion? Ramon Crater in Israel is the largest erosion crater known, measuring 40 kilometers long by 10 kilometers at its widest point. The Hebrew word “makhtesh” actually means “cirque”, a bowl-shaped depression at the upper…
July 12, 2012 El Gordo is so called because it is the biggest, brightest, and hottest pair of colliding galaxy clusters known to astronomers. Astronomers “know” that El Gordo is over 7 billion light-years from Earth. This knowledge derives from the amount by which El Gordo’s light is shifted toward the red…
July 11, 2012 Could wild electromagnetic activity hold the key to the madness that is war and revolution? You lie strapped to a bed as 800 Milliamps of electrical current pounds through your brain. Your depressive numbness is slowly replaced with elation. Miraculously your suicidal brain has reprogrammed. But…
July 10, 2012 How the Sun’s interior generates its magnetic field is a long-standing mystery for heliophysicists. It is commonly believed that there is an electromagnetic dynamo inside the Sun. That dynamo has long been thought to be powered by two forces: the “stretching and winding” of magnetic fields…
July 09, 2012 Plasma instabilities are a better explanation for the Milky Way’s strangely distorted central ring. According to a recent press release, “…observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.” The ring observation is not new,…
