Power in Perspective

A portion of the 36-dish Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). Credit: CSIRO.


Oct 12, 2018

What astronomers call a “Fast Radio Burst” can release more energy in five milliseconds than the Sun does in 80 years!

Assumed distances to such high energy sources is said to be a billion light-years, or more, because of redshift measurements. If that is the case, then the power concentrated in those flashes of energy is equivalent to billions of hydrogen bombs. What could generate those forces?

At the outset, it is important to consider that, in an Electric Universe, radio waves and a range of energy curves are properties of lightning bolts. Computer simulations demonstrate that plasma phenomena are scalable over several orders of magnitude: they behave in the same way and illustrate basic premises whether in atoms or galaxies.

Recently, physicists working with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) announced the discovery of so many FRB sources that they effectively doubled the catalogue listings. According to Dr. Jean-Pierre Macquart, from the Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, bursts travel for “billions of years”, passing through intergalactic material along the way.

“Each time this happens, the different wavelengths that make up a burst are slowed by different amounts…Timing the arrival of the different wavelengths tells us how much material the burst has travelled through on its journey.”

Assumptions about distance and the density of matter in the Universe are built on previous assumptions about the size of the Universe and its age. Lightwaves traveling for billions of years through uncounted clouds of gas and dust betrays a factual presumption underlying all ideas about distance and conditions in the Universe. Its size it based on Big Bang theory, and black holes factor in when FRB energies are discussed by the mainstream. Collisions among black holes, or the explosion of black holes, are held forth as “explanations” for the energy signatures.

However, laboratory experiments confirm that plasma formations in space can be modeled in the laboratory due to their scalability. Under similar conditions, plasma discharges produce the same formations independent of size. Since duration is proportional to size, an electric spark that lasts for microseconds in the laboratory might last for years at the stellar scale, or for millions of years at the galactic scale. Or, they might suddenly erupt and then dim again.

Electric Universe cosmologists postulate that FRBs are actually occurring in nearby galactic neighborhoods, so they are not unimaginably powerful, and not coming from the edge the Universe. As previously written, plasma discharges in the form of exploding double layers can accelerate particles in ways that are unfamiliar to consensus astrophysicists.

Plasma physicist and Nobel laureate, Dr. Hannes Alfvén thought that “exploding double layers” should be considered a new class of celestial object. Electricity is responsible for stellar and galactic behaviors, and when the current density gets too high, double layers in those circuits catastrophically release their excess energy, appearing as FRBs, X-rays, or flares of ultraviolet light.

Alfvén wrote:

“A study of how a number of the most used textbooks in astrophysics treat important concepts like double layers, critical velocity, pinch effects and circuits is made. It is found that students using these textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of these, in spite of the fact that some of them have been well known for half a century (e.g., double layers, Langmuir, 1929: pinch effect, Bennet, 1934).”

If correct, FRBs are actually nearby, so are less energetic. Plasma is the correct way to interpret their behavior, but it is exploding double layers that impel them. Rather than relying on mathematical phantoms like black holes, why not create real, testable hypotheses and work them up with real, physical models? Perhaps FRBs are really flashes of cosmic lightning erupting from electrified clouds of plasma on an immense scale.

Stephen Smith

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