TPOD Archive 2013

Dec 31, 2013 What takes place in thunderstorms on Earth is most likely a smaller version of large scale phenomena. "I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present Universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote ...

Dec 30, 2013 Shell gorgets were found in mounds of the prehistoric Mississippian culture, often still reposing on the chest of the wearer. The spider is a recurrent theme on gorgets in mounds in Illinois, Missouri and Tennessee. The early anthropologist William Henry Holmes (1846-1933) observed that the above specimen ...

Dec 27, 2013 Neutron stars are not viable explanations for energetic objects. Recently, the Chandra observatory detected what they are calling the "youngest" X-ray binary star radiating massive amounts of energy into space. The radiation is in X-ray wavelengths, which non-electrical theories can only interpret as being generated by matter ...

Dec 24, 2013 A second generation of stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 stopped evolving. Perhaps they’re waiting for a better theory. The idea that stars evolve is one of those unjustifiable preconceptions with which observations are interpreted and understood. With that idea for ink, astronomers can draw explanatory ...

Dec 23, 2013 Observations better fit the Electric Universe theory. In previous Thunderbolts Picture of the Day articles about the existence of “dark matter” it was noted that it is primarily an add-on, or ad-hoc theory, so that the current gravitational model of the Universe can be preserved. The lack of ...

Dec 20, 2013 Some stars are said to be surrounded by haloes of hot water mixed with carbon dust. Astronomers using the Herschel infrared space observatory discovered a putative cloud of hot water surrounding a giant star in the constellation Leo known as IRC+10216. They were also puzzled by the ...

Dec 19, 2013 Spiraling filaments suggest electric currents in space. Dust at a temperature near absolute zero shows up in the image above as a blue fog deep in the heart of the Eagle nebula. The Eagle nebula, located in the constellation Serpens approximately 7000 light-years away, is supposedly an active "star ...

Dec 18, 2013 The Big Bang theory dominates cosmological theories. A recent press release announced that astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope and the twin, 10-meter Keck telescopes, have found an object 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, making it "...officially the most distant object ever detected." Casey Papovich, an astronomer ...

Dec 17, 2013 The Universe behaves according to the laws of plasma dynamics. In every science journal discussing the behavior of planetary nebulae, the prevailing opinion usually involves gases and dust "blowing" through them, as well as "winds" created by "shock waves" from exploding stars. In many cases, the nebula ...

Dec 16, 2013 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 flares can ...

Dec 13, 2013 Between Bali and its neighbouring island, Lombok, is a slim ten mile sea channel. The channel is the start of the thousands-mile-long Wallace line. It is not only a dividing geological etching beneath the sea, it is also a biological division. On one side of the Line ...

Dec 12, 2013 Was the early Universe powered by "dark matter annihilation"? According to modern cosmologists, the Universe is composed primarily of dark matter. More than 95% of all that exists is unseen and undetectable by the most sensitive instruments yet devised. Many astrophysicists claim that the earliest stellar formations ...

Dec 11, 2013 "Bubbles" of magnetic energy are said to surround the Sun's heliosheath. "In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles, blown in the air." --- John Webster Shortly after the event, astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University's Voyager ...

Dec 10, 2013 NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently discovered this object, which the dusty plasma near the center of the Milky Way obscures in optical light. X-rays penetrate the dust: low-energy signals are red, intermediate-energy signals are green, and high-energy signals are blue. The white dots are stars from the Digitized ...

Dec 09, 2013 Some galaxies exhibit polygonal structures. The term "diocotron instability" is not generally well known. Its use is confined to the field of plasma physics and refers to the distortions that occur when two sheets of plasma flow past each other. It is often confused with the Kelvin-Helmholtz ...

Dec 6, 2013 Stones as large as mountains could be physical evidence for interplanetary lightning bolts on Earth. In the last installment about immense solitary stones that are found all over the world, it was noted that several of them in Australia and Europe could be the result of tremendous ...

Dec 05, 2013 Modern instruments enable astronomers to look at the universe in wavelengths of light beyond human biological limitations. Astronomers are surprised that the x-ray and radio images are different from what they expected. Although they’re looking in a different light, they’re still seeing—trying to understand—with the same concepts and theories from ...

Dec 04, 2013 On every continent are examples of isolated stone mountains that are not easy to explain. Mount Augustus in Australia is an example of a sandstone monolith that could be the largest of those monoliths that also includes Uluru. Mount Augustus, or Burringurrah to the local Wadjari people, ...

Dec 03, 2013 Experimenters slid blocks of dry ice down sand dunes and reproduced some of the features of the long straight grooves on Martian hillsides.* The smart folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory are to be commended for not only thinking up an explanation for the linear gullies on Mars but also ...

Dec 02, 2013 In the gravitational model of the universe, “dark matter” attraction pulls galaxies into filaments. Birkeland currents could be a better explanation. A paper in the astronomical journals and popular press identifies an area of space as a “huge hole” completely empty of matter and energy. "Not only has no ...

Nov 29, 2013 Astronomers claim to have found the galaxies missing in their earlier observations. “Astronomers always knew they were missing some fraction of the galaxies in Lyman-alpha surveys, but for the first time we now have a measurement. The number of missed galaxies is substantial.” So states a press release from ...

Nov 27, 2013 Not all the Southern Continent is frozen. It has areas like other deserts in the world: barren, dry and lifeless. Antarctica is known for being an ice-bound continent covered with glaciers and sheets of ice four kilometers deep. Its only long-term inhabitants are seabirds, seals, whales and ...

Nov 26, 2013 It is a commonly held belief that events on Earth progress according to cycles. One of the principle tenets of Electric Universe theory is that Earth and the Solar System have experienced catastrophic reordering and resurfacing perhaps as little as 5000 years ago. The time varies, but ...

Nov 25, 2013 On October 9, 2013 the Juno spacecraft flew by Earth on its way to Jupiter, where its passage through the ionosphere was detected. NASA launched the Juno Mission to Jupiter on August 5, 2011. After traveling out past the orbit of Mars, the spacecraft returned for a ...

Nov 22, 2013 Observations suggest that cosmic rays are not produced by supernova explosions. Cosmic rays are ionized particles, or fragmented atoms. Electrons are stripped from atoms, leaving them free to move, with positively charged nuclei remaining. The majority of cosmic rays are single protons (hydrogen ions), but uranium and ...