A magnetogram of the Sun, revealing bipolar outflow. Credit: National Center for Atmospheric research (NCAR) High Altitude Observatory (HAO)
Jul 16, 2014
“The Sun is new each day”.
— Heraclitus
For a long time it was thought that the anomalous multimillion degree temperature in the solar corona resulted from “steady heating”, therefore, coronal loops at a certain temperature should possess a specific density. However, solar observatory satellites and balloons indicate that coronal loops are of greater density than previously assumed.
Heliophysicists do not know why the temperature of the corona is millions of degrees hotter than the surface. According to the commonly applied thermonuclear fusion model, as distance from the Sun’s surface increases the temperature should decrease. Thermal emission mechanics states that temperature decreases with the square of the distance.
There is a certain amount of confusion when it comes to any theory of solar behavior that does not include electrical activity. Failing to recognize the fundamental structure of coronal loops and how they correspond to the electromagnetic behavior of Birkeland currents has led to ad hoc mechanisms designed to preserve the legitimacy of theories whose time has long since passed.
It is common for solar physicists to discuss plasma as an aspect of the Sun, but to do so in a way that makes its electrical nature seem unimportant. Solar “wind”; “a rain” of charged particles; ionic “impacts”; “clouds of ionized gas”: such terms are meant to convey the inertial aspects of plasma and reduce it to nothing more than hot gas and dust. The majority of astrophysicists are convinced that electricity is not a factor when dealing with the Sun, and they tend to decouple its electrical nature from its magnetic behavior.
Electric charges flowing out of the Sun travel along magnetic flux tubes that have only recently been discovered. These “magnetic tornadoes” are several kilometers wide and allow electric currents to flow directly from the Sun into space—in some cases down into Earths polar regions, generating visible light, radio waves, and X-rays.
An electric discharge in plasma creates a tube-like magnetic sheath along its axis. If enough charge flows through the circuit, that discharge will cause the sheath to glow, sometimes creating a number of other sheaths within it. The sheath is called a “double layer.” Double layers form when positive charges build up in one region of a plasma cloud and negative charges build up nearby. A powerful electric field appears between the two regions, accelerating charged particles. The electric charges spiral in the magnetic fields, and, as mentioned, they emit X-rays, extreme ultraviolet, and sometimes gamma rays.
NASA launched the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft On August 25, 1997. From its location at LaGrange point L1, ACE has been analyzing the solar wind for the last 17 years, providing real-time “space weather” reports about geomagnetic storms. ACE should be able to continue its mission until 2024, although some instruments are failing. Onboard ACE is one instruments that is still going strong: the Solar Wind Electron Proton Alpha Monitor (SWEPAM), designed for direct scrutiny of coronal mass ejections (CME), so-called “interplanetary shockwaves” and the solar wind.
One of the more unusual discoveries by ACE is electron depletion in the solar wind due to “backstreaming electrons” that flow into the Sun from surrounding space. These electrons do not conform to the newest theories about the Sun’s activity, since the conveyance of electric charge is not considered. Consequently, such discoveries are often referred to as “mysterious” when electrical activity presents itself in unexpected ways.
In the conventional view, the Sun accelerates electrons out and away from its surface through a process akin to amplified sound waves. Referred to as “p-modes”, they supposedly cause energetic pulsations in the solar photosphere when they “bounce around” the Sun’s interior. When they travel upward through wave-guides called magnetic flux tubes, they push “hot gas” outward in giant structures called spicules. The spicules rise thousands of kilometers above the photosphere and carry plasma with them.
As retired Professor Donald Scott wrote: “In order to maintain the double layer above the photosphere that causes almost all the observed properties of the Sun, a certain ratio of the number of outgoing positive ions to the number of incoming electrons must exist. Quoting from Ralph Juergens: ‘In a much cited classical review paper of 1929, Irving Langmuir demonstrated that a double sheath (DL) is stable only when the current densities of the positive-ion and electron flows across [through] it are properly related. The ratio of the electron current into the tuft to the positive-ion current out of the tuft must equal the square root of the ion mass divided by the electron mass, which is to say: (electron current/ion current)^2 = ion mass/electron mass = 1836. Thus electron current/ion current = 43.’ So there needs to be a lot more (43 times as many) electrons coming down through the DL as there are positive ions moving outward. Where do they come from?
“In that same year (1979), Earl Milton composed a paper titled, The Not So Stable Sun, in which he wrote: ‘In order to maintain a stable sheath between the photosphere and the corona a great many electrons must flow downward through the sheath for each ion which passes upward. The solar gas shows an increasing percentage of ionized-to-neutral atoms with altitude. Some of the rising neutral atoms become ionized by collision. Some fall back to the solar surface. The rising ions ascend into the corona where they become the solar wind. The descending gas flows back to the Sun between the granules – in these channels the electrical field is such that ions straying out from the sides of the photospheric tufts flow sunward, and hence the electrons flow outward. The presence of these channels is critical to the maintenance of the solar discharge…. Here we have an explanation for the spicules, huge fountains that spit electrons high into the corona.’
“In my opinion, this also explains what causes sunspots. Wherever the #p/#e ratio is not maintained, the DL collapses – the photospheric tufts disappear. So we get a spot in that location.”
In an Electric Universe, the Sun is an anode, or positively charged terminal. The cathode is an invisible “virtual cathode”, called the heliopause, at the farthest limit of the Sun’s coronal discharge, millions of kilometers from its surface. This is the double layer that isolates the Sun’s plasma cell from the galactic plasma that surrounds it. A positive space-charge sheath near the Sun accelerates positive ions, principally protons, to form the solar wind. Within that heliospheric volume, the implied current is sufficient to power the Sun.
Stephen Smith
