Astrophysicists frequently use the phrase ‘magnetic reconnection’ to explain some phenomenon they see in space, but they’re unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. Coronal Mass Ejections and Solar Flares occur when the Sun ejects large amounts of plasma. The experts hypothesized the existence of a previously unknown property of magnetic fields—they named…
Original Post February 27, 2015 Electric currents create magnetic fields in the Sun. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Asking this question always gets a chuckle from a group of kids who haven’t been asked that before. For adults, it confirms their conviction that unanswerable questions must…
Original Post January 17, 2014 The chaos of Brownian motion produces the high temperature we see in the solar corona. Of all the ideas offered up as being an explanation of the extreme temperature (more than 2 million Kelvin) measured in the lower corona of our Sun, the simplest is…
It’s time to put to bed the fairytale of Dark Matter. Something so dark and mysterious that it remains undetected after decades of searching with sophisticated instruments. In 2014, a vast network of plasma filaments—the Intergalactic Web—was discovered that connects many if not all the galaxies in the universe….
Our planet’s polar wind patterns are driven from the outside and not by any surface or internal Earthbound processes or “dynamos”. The main outside source of these polar winds is quite obviously the varying strength and direction of the Birkeland Current stream of electrically charged particles that it delivers…
Original Post December 26, 2011 Electric currents create magnetic fields in the Sun. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Asking this question always gets a chuckle from a group of kids who haven’t been asked that before. For adults, it confirms their conviction that unanswerable questions must…
A joint project between NASA and Lockheed Martin resulted in the mission called IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) launched in 2008. Its purpose was to seek out and measure Energetic Neutral Atoms in the solar system. It did exactly that and as with many NASA projects it has been a…
It may be the greatest surprise for mainstream cosmologists since the dawn of the Space Age: the detection of powerful magnetic fields at all scales throughout the Universe. In recent years, with the ever finer detection of cosmic magnetism, astrophysicists have increasingly sought an answer to the problem — an…
It’s one of the great enduring mysteries of solar physics — why is the sun’s lower corona hundreds of times hotter than the Sun’s photosphere? For many decades, scientists on Earth have sought an answer to the puzzle, though only doing so within the confines of the standard, thermonuclear model…
One of the enduring mysteries in solar physics is the unexpectedly hot temperature of the solar wind as it extends away from the Sun. Recently, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison performed a study to try to find an answer to the puzzle. And their search led…
