March 10, 2020 Most stars revolve in pairs. The stars in the Milky Way travel with one or more companions, so something influences the formation of multiple star systems. Stars are so remote from one another that it is unlikely that binary stars are due to gravitational attraction. On March…
March 6, 2020 Astronomers think FRBs are created from dying stars. About eight years ago, astronomers discovered an energy signature they called a “Fast Radio Burst”, or FRB. The blast of radio waves lasted five milliseconds, releasing more energy than the Sun puts out in a month. Distance to the…
March 5, 2020 The Sun’s heliosheath is spherical. The Interstellar Medium (ISM), through which the Solar System and all other stars in the galaxy are moving, is primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, with some dust particles that are less than one-tenth of a micron in size, making them smaller…
March 4, 2020 Galaxies obey the forces of electricity. According to a recent press release: “Astronomers have known since the late 1950s that the Milky Way’s disc – where most of its hundreds of billions of stars reside – is not flat but somewhat curved upwards on one side and…
March 3, 2020 Why don’t globular clusters fly apart? Globular clusters are an example of how plasma is organized and confined into formations that are difficult to explain. Astronomers believe that globular clusters begin as groups of stars from a single birthing event. According to standard theory, gas and dust…
March 2, 2020 Plasma is the foundation for all celestial phenomena. Electric Universe advocates argue that a flow of electric charge in plasma generates electromagnetic fields that constrict the plasma. As previous Pictures of the Day point out, that constricted channel is known as a Bennett pinch, or z-pinch. The…
February 27, 2020 The solar wind is an electrical phenomenon. Plasma discharges are a better model for solar activity than the gravity community likes to accept. Experiments using a positively charged sphere show that a plasma torus forms above the sphere’s circumference. Charged particles couple the sphere’s middle and lower…
February 25, 2020 Most celestial objects exhibit some kind of filamentation. “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.”— Theodore Roosevelt Every science journal describes the formation of nebulae in terms of “blowing winds” created by shock waves from exploding stars. Nebulae are thought to be…
February 24, 2020 What causes stars to expel large quantities of matter? “The lonely sunsets flare forlornDown valleys dreadly desolate;The lonely mountains soar in scornAs still as death, as stern as fate.”— Robert W. Service XMM-Newton was launched on December 10, 1999 from Kourou, French Guiana. At the time, it…
February 21, 2020 The Sombrero galaxy is larger than expected. A significant contribution to plasma cosmology came from Dr. Anthony L. Peratt, a plasma physicist and protégé of the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén. Dr. Peratt studied plasma formations in the laboratory for many years, monitoring short-duration z-pinch effects, as well…
