Original Post February 8, 2012 Jupiter puts on a periodic light show. Several years ago, Picture of the Day articles discussed the so-called “volcanic” plumes erupting from Jupiter’s moon Io. It was argued that they are plasma discharges from the moon electrically connected to the giant planet. Some astronomers acknowledged…
Original Post February 7, 2012 Where does the idea of constellations come from? And how do these arbitrary groups of stars relate to mythology? The argument shapes up nicely in the light of traditions that name specific constellations as mythical creatures thus conveyed to the night sky. Examples are again…
Original Post February 6, 2012 Where does the idea of constellations come from? And how do these arbitrary groups of stars relate to mythology? The early 20th century saw the ascendancy of a short-lived movement in scholarship called ‘Pan-Babylonianism’, soon bemoaned for its folly. Supporters of this group held that…
Original Post February 3, 2012 Fourteen years ago, Halton Arp published Seeing Red. Chapter 6, “Clusters of Galaxies,” presented his finding that the clusters were low-luminosity high-redshift—and nearby—“star piles.” There was not then and there has not been since any discussion of the difficulties for consensus theories that Arp’s observations…
Original Post February 1, 2012 An X-2 class solar flare recently missed a direct impact with Earth. Heliophysicists classify solar flares according to their brightness in X-ray wavelengths. C-class flares are the smallest on the scale, with X-ray measurements in the 10^-6 watts per square meter range (W/m^2), while X-class…
Original Post January 30, 2012 The Sun is predicted to “hibernate” during its next cycle in 2020. A recent press release states that the Sun’s activity will slow to an unprecedented decline in the next ten years. The prediction is based on “…three independent studies of the sun’s insides, surface,…
Original Post January 27, 2012 It is common knowledge that electric charge must flow in a circuit in order for a magnetic field to be created. On May 30, 1908, Nobel laureate Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was born in Norrköping, Sweden. His work in plasma physics, and the motion of…
Original Post January 25, 2012 El Gordo is so called because it is the biggest, brightest, and hottest pair of colliding galaxy clusters known to astronomers. Astronomers “know” that El Gordo is over 7 billion light-years from Earth. This knowledge derives from the amount by which El Gordo’s light is…
Original Post January 17, 2012 A distant system of planets in proximity to one another challenges current theories. A recent press release from the Kepler Space Telescope research team announced the discovery of an “alien solar system” with six planets. That they are so near to the newly named Kepler-11…
Original Post January 20, 2012 A recent image of the Helix Nebula in the constellation Aquarius exposes more details of its electrical structure. The new infrared image shows radial Birkeland currents (called “strands” in the press release) crossing the concentric rings and converging on the central star. (Will “strands” now…
