Nov 10, 2017 Stars are electrical entities. The explosion of a star, otherwise known as a supernova, is a terminal event in stellar evolution—the star used up its fuel, collapsed under its own gravity, and then ejected most of its gaseous envelope because of “core rebound”. At least, that is…
Recently, scientists reported in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society the discovery of a theory-shattering exoplanet — one of countless such discoveries in the last two decades. As reported on phys.org on October 31, the hot Jupiter “should not exist according to planet formation theory.” In this episode,…
Nov 9, 2017 What is illuminating this gigantic nebula? Astronomers from the University of California, Santa Cruz recently announced the discovery of a massive cloud of gas called an “enormous Lyman-alpha nebula” (ELAN). The “blob” of gas resides in a region of space thought to be 10 billion light-years…
Nov 8, 2017 The Sun is not a ball of hot gas. The conventional model of how the Sun works relies on thermonuclear processes. Although no direct measurement is possible, temperatures in its core are thought to be more than 15 million Celsius, with compressive strain greater than 340 billion…
Nov 7, 2017 Do galaxies bump into each other? High temperatures in galaxy clusters are an enigma. Because astronomers have only one force in their bags of tricks—gravity—whenever energetic events are found, like high temperatures in the galaxy cluster shown above, it “must be” caused by a gravity-driven collision…
Nov 6, 2017 Aurorae on Jupiter are poorly understood by consensus astrophysicists. Jupiter is 142,984 kilometers in diameter at its equator. A day on Jupiter lasts only 9.925 hours. Its rapid rotational velocity means that its equatorial diameter is 9275 kilometers more than the distance between its poles. According…
A new image released in the last week by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta team underscores the desperate need for new theoretical pathways in comet science. In the picture, we see one of the clearest, perhaps undeniable images to date of an electrical arc discharging on a comet nucleus. In…
Nov 4, 2017 How can water vapor explode from a comet far from the Sun? The Rosetta Cometary Probe was launched March 2, 2004 on a rendezvous mission with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It was in hibernation for most of the trip, only powering up its instruments in January of 2014. One…
In the Space News series, a clear picture of cosmic scale phenomena has emerged: networks of filaments pervade space and are closely linked to the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies. The electric universe and plasma cosmology have always predicted that the filaments are in fact electrical Birkeland currents…
Nov 2, 2017 A curled torus is thought to exist in the center of the Milky Way. “Ring out the false, ring in the true.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson A previous Picture of the Day discussed the twisted ring of material surrounding the nucleus of Galaxy Centaurus A….
