A picture and essay from the perspective of the Electric Universe.
Jan 27, 2017 Plasma phenomena are similar no matter how big or how small. Almost ten years ago, astronomers discovered an energy signature they called a “Fast Radio Burst”, or FRB. The event lasted five milliseconds, reportedly releasing more energy than the Sun puts out in a month. Distance…
Jan 26, 2016 Does tectonic activity form the mountains on Io over eons of time? South Boösaule Montes is approximately 18 kilometers high and covers 17,900 square kilometers, making it one of the tallest mountains in the Solar System. It happens to be located on Jupiter’s moon, Io. How did the…
Jan 25, 2017 Black holes are said to collide. NASA launched the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) aboard a Pegasus rocket on June 13, 2012. A new X-ray image highlights a “monster of a galactic mashup”: two colliding galaxies, known as Arp 299, with “supermassive black holes” inside them. According…
Jan 24, 2016 Electricity is the active agent on Enceladus. A previous Picture of the Day announced that the Cassini space probe, currently orbiting Saturn, was about to fly through one of the plumes of vapor that erupt from the southern plains of its moon, Enceladus. Enceladus is a…
Jan 23. 2017 Electricity plays a role in Solar System dynamics. Mimas is a small moon, only 397 kilometers in diameter. It is similar in size to Enceladus and to one of Neptune’s moons, Proteus. As the image at the top of the page highlights, a giant crater dominates…
Jan 20, 2107 Two types of pulsars. The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus. — Werner Heisenberg: Letter to Niels Bohr, June 20, 1932. Quoted in Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (1992) by…
Jan 19, 2016 Astronomical research tends to instigate foregone conclusions. The Picture of the Day never considers questions that requires a search for subjective meaning in the Universe. Analyzing the observations from NASA and others is enough, in most instances, to draw correspondence between theories in peer-reviewed journals and…
Jan 18, 2017 The quiet Sun. Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow In an Electric Universe, the Sun is an anode, or positively charged terminal, with an invisible virtual cathode, called the heliopause, at the farthest…
Apr 17, 2016 Electromagnetism rules the Universe. Birkeland currents transport electric charges through space along twisting electromagnetic filaments that can span intergalactic distances. They are seen at all cosmic scales because almost every celestial object in the Universe is filamentary. Planetary nebulae are webs of lighted tendrils; energetic galaxies emit…
Jan 16, 2017 Mercury reveals an unusual blend of minerals, along with a thin atmosphere. Of all the rocky bodies in the Solar System, Mercury ranks third in size behind Ganymede and Titan. Mercury is 4878 kilometers in diameter, making it slightly larger than the Moon. Mercury’s mean orbital…
