Jun 22, 2018 Kristian Birkeland (December 13, 1867 — Jun 15, 1917) “According to our manner of looking at the matter, every star in the universe would be the seat and field of activity of electric forces of a strength that no one could imagine.” A previous Picture of…
Jun 21, 2018 Electricity moves the Universe. “To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.” — Hannes Alfvén The movement of electric charge through plasma-state material generates electromagnetic…
Jun 20, 2018 Did volcanic eruptions create fractures on Mars? When electricity makes contact with a solid body, such as a planet, electric currents pull charged material from the surface. This results in circular craters, because electromagnetism causes the arcs to maintain right angles to the impact zone. In…
Jun 19, 2018 Titan could be a youthful object. The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid. — Carl Jung Planetary scientists maintain that Titan’s nitrogen and methane atmosphere must be constantly replenished, because ultraviolet light from the distant Sun dissociates gas…
Jun 15, 2018 The most distant object in the Universe? Astronomers announced that the Hubble Space Telescope and the twin, 10-meter Keck telescopes, detected an object 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, making it the most distant object ever detected. Virtually every astronomer bases his or her understanding of the Universe…
Jun 14, 2018 Where do comets come from? The Nebular Hypothesis proposes that the Solar System was born when a cloud of gases and dust shrank to the point where compression started a nuclear chain reaction, giving birth to the Sun, along with an accretion disc circling its equatorial…
Jun 13, 2018 Blackened dune fields can be found on Mars. Martian atmospheric density is less than 1% that of Earth. It is almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide, although nitrogen and argon make up about 3%, with trace elements less than .01%. The temperature varies from a maximum of…
Jun 12, 2018 Electric Universe theory does not depend on something undetectable. “Space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. The currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. The latter are likely to give space, as also…
Jun 11, 2018 Thunderstorms act like particle accelerators, launching massive discharges downward to the ground and upward to space. Earth is an electrically charged object: it maintains an electric field at its surface between 50 and 200 volts per meter: for every meter above the ground the voltage increases. As…
Jun 8, 2018 Juno will circle Jupiter for another four years. Jupiter is the largest planet. It is so large that all of the other planets could fit comfortably inside its 1.77 X 10^15 cubic kilometer volume. Jupiter rotates in 9.925 hours, causing its diameter to be 9275 kilometers more…
