February 7, 2020 The prevailing opinion about planetary nebulae usually involves gases and dust “blowing” through them. Additionally, “winds” created by “shock waves” from exploding stars are what astronomers believe form the curls, swirls, and curlicues. In many cases, intense X-ray radiation, or extreme ultraviolet light are said to indicate…
February 5, 2020 Galaxy cluster are like everything else in nature: electrical. Many Picture of the Day articles discuss black holes, because they are often used to “explain” anomalous phenomena in space. As most Electric Universe advocates would insist, they exist only through some mathematical legerdemain, and have nothing to do…
February 4, 2020 The Universe is composed of condensed plasma. We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.— George Berkeley In 1755 Immanuel Kant suggested that the Solar System evolved from a cloud of dust and gas floating in space. The cloud condensed because gravitational attraction…
February 3, 2020 Gravity and other kinetic forces are inadequate when it comes to galactic formations. The Coma Cluster of galaxies is a roughly spherical region about 3.5 million light years in diameter over 300 million light years from Earth. According to calculations, it is one of the most compact…
How and when did the asteroids and comets in our solar system form? For countless decades, astronomers have embraced the story that these small rocky bodies are the primordial leftovers of our solar system’s formation, supposedly from a nebular cloud four and a half billion years ago. Of course, as…
January 31, 2020 Scientists do not understand how the Sun works. For example, how does a coherent magnetic field exist when observations reveal chaos at small scales? Heliophysicists believe that there is a dynamo inside the Sun that is powered by two forces: the “stretching and winding” of magnetic fields…
January 30, 2020 Mars is devoid of any detectable life. Martian areography bears witness to violent events at some time in the past. Images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) reveal scenes of devastation: the North polar terrain, for instance, is six kilometers below the planet’s mean elevation. Burned craters…
In this adaptation of Mel Acheson’s Thunderbolts Picture of the Day (TPOD) “Conceptual Chromatography” Mel leads us on a fascinating thought experiment which scrutinizes some of the foundational tenets of modern science and cosmology. An excerpt from the TPOD… This is fun. Let’s play the game with plate tectonics: Instead…
January 29, 2020 Why is this red giant so puzzling? Betelgeuse is one of the 10 largest stars. If it occupied the Sun’s position, its outer envelope would exceed Jupiter’s mean orbital diameter. It is so diffuse, however, that the orbits of the inner planets might not be affected. Red…
January 27, 2020 Do stars accrete? The Nebular Hypothesis is the common star-forming theory. It is thought that stars condense out of primordial stuff, and that the remaining dust and gas that is not absorbed attracts more material, until it also condenses, but into planets. This is the consensus view…
