Lunar Mascons
Original Post April 16, 2014 What caused the mass concentrations on the Moon? Consensus scientific theories postulate that the Moon experienced extreme selenological activity early in its history. Cataclysmic devastation occurred at some time in the past. Giant craters, wide and deep valleys, and multi-kilometer long rilles crisscross its surface ...
I’m Singeing in the Rain
Original Post April 11, 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 ...
Electrified Bee Seeks Flower for Mutual Charge Exchange
Original Post April 4, 2014 Bees can sense the electric fields generated by flowers Previous Picture of the Day articles discuss aspects of biology that rely on electricity. Whether it is the transportation of nutrients and electrolytic compound in and out of cells, or the motive action of bacterial flagella, ...
Electromagnetic Enigma
Original Post March 31, 2014 What is lurking near the center of our galaxy? According this May 2013 article published in Nature, a "magnetized neutron star", otherwise known as a "magnetar" is spinning at an amazing speed near the Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) region of the Milky Way. Sagittarius A* ...
Signs of Life?
Original Post March 19, 2014 Sulfur is abundant on Mars. "My hour is almost come, when I to sulphureous and tormenting flames must render up myself." Hamlet: Act 1 Scene 5 --- William Shakespeare According to the Electric Universe theory, diversity exists among the Sun's planetary family because they were ...
Island Universes
Original Post March 13, 2014 Galactic magnetic fields were discovered more than 50 years ago. Astronomers continue to ask basic questions about galaxies: what generates their magnetic fields? What gives those fields their shape and their strength? Researchers using the latest computer simulations think they have found the answers. Cool ...
Rock Science
Original Post March 6, 2014 Things may be carved in stone and still be nebulous. Petroglyphs come without captions; clues of their intended meanings are more often missing than not. Yet though certainty is rarely to be had, the quest for the meaning of rock art is as legitimate as ...
Blast of Gas
Original Post February 27, 2014 The large ALMA radio telescope in Chile has discovered that “billowing columns” of “gas” are “fleeing” from gravitational forces that would snare them into new stars. The size of the Sculptor Galaxy depends on the outcome. Unless, of course, star formation is not so much ...
Solar Supernova
Original Post February 24, 2014 How do supernovae relate to the Sun? On June 7, 2011 the Sun erupted with the largest plasma event yet recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. SDO was launched on February 11, 2010 into a geosynchronous orbit, with plans for a five-year mission. It is ...
Ironstone Fulgurites
Original Post February 14, 2014 Strange formations within a sandstone matrix are found throughout the Blue Mountains. Exactly what are sandstone and ironstone? The classic explanation is that they are both sedimentary rock, which means they are deposited in layers. In the Blue Mountains near Sydney, the sandstone layer is ...
Greenland: Once a Viking Paradise
Original Post February 5, 2014 The "Little Ice Age" impact on Europe was sudden and ferocious. Using its weapons of plague, famine and (perhaps controversially) earthquake, the so-called "Little Ice age" reduced the population of Europe by around 30 to 50 percent. The virulence and death toll of the 1348 ...
Gravitation as Frog
Original Post January 30, 2014 A gravity-only Universe cannot explain certain discrepancies. Ilya Prigogine, from a young age, was concerned that accepted physical theory had a couple of glaring discrepancies from observation: determinism and time symmetry. Most observations are of contingency and irreversibility. No one has yet seen an egg ...
Good as Gold
Original Post January 23, 2014 The proverbial ‘golden age’ is a classic case study in the difference between local and global themes in mythology. It was the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) who first introduced a systematic distinction between universal ‘elementary ideas’ (Elementargedanke) and culture-specific ‘folk ideas’ (Volksgedanke) in 1860 ...
Why the Lower Corona of the Sun Is Hotter Than the Photosphere
Original Post January 17, 2014 The chaos of Brownian motion produces the high temperature we see in the solar corona. Of all the ideas offered up as being an explanation of the extreme temperature (more than 2 million Kelvin) measured in the lower corona of our Sun, the simplest is ...
Adolescent Galaxy
Original Post January 9, 2014 NGC 4666 is one of the younger additions to the Virgo cluster of galaxies. It has also apparently given birth to another generation. The galaxy lies eight degrees south of M49, the great-grandmother of the Virgo cluster. Whether NGC 4666 is the daughter of M49 ...
Currents of Thought
Original Post January 1, 2014 Did Helena Blavatsky and Sir William Crookes inadvertently help to discredit early theories of electromagnetism in the cosmos? Long before the Space Age, theories of a fourth, ‘radiant’ state of matter and electromagnetic explanations of the polar aurora, the zodiacal light, comets, the sun and ...
