Global Warming in the Ice Age
Original Post December 22, 2014 The melting of the glacial ice sheets in North America, Europe and elsewhere was a stochastic process. Long periods of slow melting alternated with bursts of accelerated melting. Between the Late Glacial Maximum and the early Holocene, global sea level rose by 100 to 130 ...
Cosmic Lightning
Original Post December 9, 2014 Many fast, high energy phenomena could be due to something astronomers do not expect. Some things are familiar, even though they are not easily explained. The aurorae at each of Earth's poles are familiar to most people, although the way they form is not completely understood ...
Super Flares
Original Post October 17, 2014 The Crab Nebula is surprisingly energetic. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected several unidentified sources of intense gamma-ray emissions that are not seen in any other frequencies. NASA launched the telescope on June 11, 2008. Its primary mission is to detect high frequency electromagnetic ...
I’m Singeing in the Rain
Original Post October 7, 2014 Ionic rain from Saturn's rings. Saturn's plasmasphere is an electrical environment, causing everything from dark-mode plasma discharges to lightning bolts that flash across the ring plane. When Cassini entered orbit around the giant planet, mission specialists were shocked to discover lightning of immense power, up to a million times more powerful than ...
Electronic Nebula
Original Post October 1, 2014 Pulsars are more like oscillating circuits. On July 4, 1054 CE, Chinese astrologers saw a "guest star" near Zeta Tauri in the constellation Taurus. They record that it was bright enough to shine in daylight, but lasted only about a year before fading out. John ...
Lost for Words (Part 2 of 2)
Original Post September 22, 2014 An essential building block of a sound theory is the recognition that Jewish legend was considerably more elaborate than the sterile version of the story come down in the ‘first book of Moses’. More than a hint of an intended coup d’état is gleaned from ...
Lost for Words (Part 1 of 2)
Original Post September 19, 2014 From a comparative viewpoint, perhaps the most common ‘contaminations’ in mythological data are distorted echoes of the Hebrew myths of paradise, Noah’s flood and the tower of Babel, conveyed to exotic societies by Christian missionaries. Similar to stratigraphical clues in archaeological excavations, elements of language, ...
Star Drive
Original Post September 10, 2014 Electric Universe theory assumes Earth and the Sun are electrically connected. Previous Picture of the Day articles discuss the linkages between the flow of electric charge through the galaxy, solar electric currents, and terrestrial electric currents. Earth's environment is also driven by those cosmic electrical ...
SunShots
Original Post September 4, 2014 In the study of myth, the question of metaphors presents many a challenge. When does a ‘sun’ literally refer to the quotidian sun and when is it a metaphor for some other bright sky light? Hard-and-fast rules are risky; every tradition is best examined in its ...
Ski Enceladus
Original Post August 21, 2014 This small moon is said to be covered with powdery snow. Enceladus was one of the Gigantes, or Titans, who were overthrown by Zeus and his minions. It is perhaps an ironic name, since it is a tiny world only 494 kilometers in diameter. Its gravitational ...
Merger or Division?
Original Post August 13, 2014 Are colliding galaxies actually separating? Astronomer Halton Arp discovered several relationships between various galaxies, and between galaxies and quasars, that led him to speculate that redshift is not an indicator of recessional speed or of distance to remote celestial objects. Observations of those remote objects ...
Butterflies on a String
Original Post August 7, 2014 Modern astronomy has a planetary nebula (PN) problem: Gravity can’t do what PNs do. Astronomers invent a kind of pseudo-magnetism to fill the explanatory holes. This pseudo-magnetism is a reified presumption that’s unplugged from the electric currents that generate real magnetic forces. Consensus theory has PNs ...
Comets, Planets in Chaos and Plasma Mythology
Original Post July 30, 2014 Thomas Short, writing in the 18th century, chronicled the many calamities that decimated mankind over four thousand years. Plagues, earthquakes, drought, pestilence and incredible floods. As you read through Short's curious book, you are struck by the appearance of bright comets in numbers unmatched by ...
Stars in the Plasma Focus
Original Post July 22, 2014 Supernovae are what Hannes Alfvén called them: exploding double layers. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is relatively small, irregular galaxy approximately 168,000 light-years from Earth. The distance is approximate, because different parallax values are obtained when different measuring sticks are used. Within the LMC is an object commonly ...
Plateau du Vercors
Original Post July 8, 2014 Aciculate peaks and curvilinear ridges outline giant circular depressions in the French Alps. As previously written, stone monoliths can be found all over the world. There are colossal formations that make up the French Alps, for instance. In particular, Mont Aiguille (Needle Mountain) is similar to the structures from ...
Burning Questions
Original Post July 3, 2014 If folk memory is anything to go by, global warming in its most dreaded form is a thing of the past. The universality of flood myths is widely known, but fewer people are aware that traditions of unbearable heat, often leading to a devastating Weltbrand, are ...
The Worldwide Web—A Common Thread
Original Post June 26, 2014 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 ...
More Stars Than the Eye of Theory Can See
Original Post June 19, 2014 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 ...
Water in Stars?
Original Post June 12, 2014 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 ...
Deepest Space
Original Post June 6, 2014 Is the Hubble Space Telescope seeing billions of years into the past? How far away are things? In an Electric Universe, the answer is not what is commonly presented in science journals. Astronomers are fitted with spectacles that can see distances only in terms of ...
Holes in Space
Original Post May 23, 2014 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 ...
The Polarized Milky Way
Original Post May 15, 2014 Electromagnetic fields guide light in specific ways. The image above is from the Planck satellite, now defunct, that was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in May 2005, along with the Herschel Space Observatory, which also recently ended its mission. According to ESA, Planck's ...
Lunar Crater Anomalies
Original Post May 8, 2014 Elongated craters on the Moon are said to come from "grazing impactors." In one of the earliest Pictures of the Day by the late Amy Acheson, the question was asked, how do you make a crater? When astronomers began to observe the Moon centuries ago, ...
A Bend in Time
Original Post May 1, 2014 A University of Michigan press release announces “warped space-time” around a so-called “neutron star”. Could electricity provide a better explanation? The smeared lines of an iron spectrum have given NASA and University of Michigan astronomers another mystery to solve when it comes to explaining the universe. Using the ...
What Is Electricity?
Original Post April 24, 2014 The Electric Universe hypothesis proposes that electricity lights the stars and forms the web of galaxy clusters in the Universe. But what is it? First, “electricity” is a catchall term that describes several different phenomena: piezoelectric, thermoelectric, and even bioelectric activity are all forms of electricity ...
