Aurora Australis over Antarctica. Credit: Keith Vanderlinde/NSF
Original Post March 19, 2015
Electric Universe theory assumes Earth and the Sun are electrically connected.
Previous Picture of the Day articles discuss the linkages between the flow of electric charge through the galaxy, solar electric currents, and terrestrial electric currents. Earth’s environment is also driven by those cosmic electrical circuits, but those circuits are difficult to detect.
Most conventional research teams see “magnetic energy” as a fundamental force, behaving in ways that Electric Universe proponents do not accept. According to consensus viewpoints, when the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) slants to the South there is faster “magnetic reconnection” between interplanetary and terrestrial field lines, initiating a rapid release of magnetic fields and plasma from Earth’s sunlit side. How this happens, as well as how it begins, are still controversial subjects. In nature energy cannot be destroyed, as the conservation of energy law states, instead it changes state.
For example, when electricity powers a motor and spins a shaft, the electromagnetic force is converted to kinetic energy through angular momentum. It is thought by the mainstream that magnetic energy can also reappear in different forms. During reconnection events, conventional viewpoints say that some of the magnetic energy becomes heat, increasing the velocity of plasma ions and electrons powering electric currents in a circuit linking the plasma sheet with Earth.
Said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences: “We all have thought for our entire careers—I learned it as a graduate student—that this energy transfer rate is primarily controlled by the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field.”
Astrophysicists have found that the IMF can fluctuate in both intensity and orientation. When radar measurements of the ionosphere were analyzed, auroral substorms were seen in that part of Earth’s upper atmosphere ionized by solar radiation. The discovery was surprising to planetary scientists.
According to Lyons: “Any space physicist, including me, would have said…there could not be substorms when the interplanetary magnetic field was staying northward, but that’s wrong. Generally, it’s correct, but when you have a fluctuating interplanetary magnetic field, you can have substorms going off once per hour.”
As the Electric Sun theory insists, there is no such thing as magnetic reconnection, so there is no mystery. The Sun is an anode, or positively charged electrode in the vast electric motor of the galaxy. The cathode is an invisible virtual cathode, called the heliosphere, at the farthest limit of the Sun’s coronal discharge, billions of kilometers from its surface. This is the double layer that isolates the Sun’s plasma cell from the galactic plasma that surrounds it.
In the Electric Universe model, most of the voltage difference between the Sun and the galaxy occurs across the heliospheric boundary sheath. Inside the heliopause the weak electric field centered on the Sun is enough to power the solar discharge. As the theory states, an electric field focused on the Sun accelerates charged particles: the faster they accelerate, the stronger the field. It is that change in particle acceleration that causes the IMF variability and the changes to the electrical input to Earth’s magnetosphere.
Stephen Smith
