Original Post September 13, 2012 Million-degree plasma in the Orion Nebula comes not from the kinetic excitation of cold gas, but from the electric currents of space. “Sometimes I think that astronomy is not so much a science as a series of scandals.” — Halton Arp. For many years…
Original Post September 10, 2012 Rather than simply clouds of dust and gas, spiraling filaments in nebulae suggest electric currents in space. The Orion Nebula is faintly visible to the naked eye as the second star in Orion’s sword. It looks somewhat fuzzy because it is not a star…
Original Post August 27, 2012 Mercury reveals the violence of planetary genesis. Mercury’s story is probably a complicated tale of extremes. The planet’s surface is heavily scarred, with steep-walled canyons, scarps that rise up several kilometers, and craters that penetrate the crust for several kilometers below the mean elevation. The…
Original Post August 22, 2012 Astronomers continue to ignore electricity in space, opting for outdated ideas about gravity and heat. Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that our own Milky Way galaxy is expelling enormous jets of gamma rays from a putative supermassive black hole residing in its…
Original Post August 20, 2012 It twists like a Birkeland Current; it’s stringy like a Birkeland Current; it’s dense like a Birkeland Current; but Everyone Knows (if they want to pursue a career in astronomy) that There is No Such Thing as Electricity in Space. The press release for…
Original Post August 16, 2012 Recent X-class solar flares have ignited the polar lights. An electrically active magnetotail (or plasma tail) extends for millions of kilometers from Earth. Charged particles from the Sun, otherwise known as the solar wind, together with ions generated by the Earth, gather in a…
Original Post August 10, 2012 What causes the rapid changes observed in Orion Nebula “protostars”? Using a combination of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the ESA Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers found that so-called “young stars” are changing in brightness much faster than they thought possible. Instead of taking several years…
Original Post August 8, 2012 The significance of life on other planets leaves many unanswered questions. Note: In May 1976 Richard H. Smith, the father of Stephen Smith, TPOD managing editor, speculated about the possibility and significance of extraterrestrial life. The universal feeling that man is unique has been challenged…
Original Post August 3, 2012 A new theory states that dark matter might prevent stars from aging normally and preserve them for billions of years. According to astronomers, the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. It started out with a bang – an explosion occurred and all of existence…
Original Post August 2, 2012 Did tectonic and volcanic forces create the wide, parallel trenches on the Moon? The Moon has seen cataclysmic devastation at some time in its past. There are giant craters, wide and deep valleys, and multi-kilometer long rilles crisscrossing its surface. Conventional theories postulate that the…
