Aug 31, 2018 Rocky bodies in the Solar System display plasma effects. “Because in the beginning was the plasma.” — From Hannes Alfvén’s 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture. Astrogeologists determine asteroid composition and formation estimates based on their anomalous cratering. As written in the past, asteroids 253 Mathilde, 243 Ida, and…
Aug 30, 2018 The MAVEN Mission continues in orbit around Mars. Mars is approximately 6793 kilometers in diameter, about half that of Earth, with a substantially lower average temperature at minus 63 Celsius, compared to Earth at plus 13 Celsius. Atmospheric density on Mars is equivalent to standing on…
Can you learn anything new if you limit yourself to verifying what you think you already know? This question reaches to the very heart of scientific reliability, and today is perhaps more relevant in cosmology than any other scientific endeavor. Gravitational theory has been verified many, many times – but…
Aug 29, 2018 What powers coronal mass ejections? According to a recent press release, solar flares are driven by magnetized loops of plasma. The magnetic fields in the “magnetic flux ropes” experience “reconnection events” in which the field lines break and then reconnect, causing explosions of “magnetic energy.” Some of that…
Aug 28, 2018 Cassini’s data will be analyzed for years to come. The Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere on Friday, September 16, 2017. Since its original orbital insertion in 2004, it found hurricanes surging through Saturn’s atmosphere, along with lightning storms lasting for years at a time….
Aug 27, 2018 The Kepler Space Telescope is defunct. The Kepler Space Telescope was launched March 7, 2009 on a planetary search mission. Before problems occurred, Kepler identified 989 “confirmed” planets around other stars. Kepler did not use Doppler shift as its means of detection. It used a photometer to…
The surface of the Earth is a canvas that portrays the artistry and power of the forces that created it. Electric Earth presents a theory of the mechanisms of past cataclysm and how they relate to the forces we see at work in nature today. Through the unfiltered lens of…
Aug 24, 2018 Stars are not born out of frigid emptiness. Gravity is a weak force compared to electromagnetism. When objects fall in Earth’s gravitational field, they accelerate with a sluggish 9 meters-per-second, squared. However, when they encounter the electromagnetic fields of some substance, like a sidewalk, they decelerate instantly;…
Aug 23, 2018 Before the space age, astronomers looked up at the night sky and saw points and patches of light. With the aid of telescopes they could see more points and patches, and with the aid of spectroscopes they could discover what the points and patches were made…
Astronomers recently reported what is being hailed as the “first radio telescope detection of a planetary mass object beyond our solar system.” The object, which is being described as a possible “rogue planet,” is challenging some of the astronomers’ bedrock ideas about, among other things, the assumed differences between gas…
