Ballistic Cosmic Rays

Mel Acheson: Ballistic Cosmic Rays.

The European Space Agency announces that cosmic rays are caused by supernova shock waves.

A recent press release from the European Southern Observatory announces that “a unique ‘ballistic study’” proves that cosmic rays are caused by supernova shock waves bumping particles to near light speed.

One author of the study noted that astronomers have thought that for a long time, raising the question among skeptics whether the study proves instead the bias of belief: one tends to see (and to prove) what one believes. The author concludes: “that proves it.” Upon critical examination, “proves it” is found to mean that it’s allowed by my theory, so if I exclude all other possible theories mine has to be true.

One has to wonder: if these particle accelerators in the Milky Way are so “very efficient,” the particle physicists at the Large Hadron Collider should replace their inefficient electromagnetic device with one based on the new ballistic laws of electromagnetism. The particles can be accelerated by directing shock waves from explosions to bump them to high velocities. Farther down the ballistics totem pole, dentists can replace their inefficient x-ray machines that generate x-rays by accelerating electrons with electric fields, substituting the new machines that work with tiny but powerful shock waves. Your next x-ray won’t just buzz, it’ll bang.

The efficiency of transfer of energy from shock waves to particles and the number of particles so affected can only be determined by counting the number of cosmic rays and guessing the number of supernovae that could produce them. The theory must take as its initial assumption the conclusion it is said to prove, hence proving that tautologies are…tautologous.

Filaments. Pairs of filaments. Pairs of filaments spiraling around each other. Pairs of pairs of twisting filaments. Anyone familiar with plasma will immediately recognize them (in the image above, as in almost any image of a so-called supernova remnant) as Birkeland currents. Only an astronomer in intellectual free-fall with his eyes squeezed shut could fail to see plasma. And so astronomers see “gas” and “ballistics” where plasma researchers see electric currents, double layers, and electric fields. It’s probably significant that the press release uses the term “particles” exclusively, never “charged particles,” despite mentioning that they are protons.

When these twisted structures were first discovered, some astronomers tried to explain them with a physics of twisted shock waves. They never mentioned Birkeland currents. The physics was more twisted than the shock waves, and the astronomers moved on to more tractable problems. Now a few astronomers are beginning to refer to Birkeland currents but only with the assumption that they “don’t do anything.”

But Birkeland currents do “do things.” The study’s author is correct to note that “the energy that is used for particle acceleration is at the expense of heating” but is mistaken to append “the gas, which is therefore much colder than theory predicts.” It’s not gas, it’s plasma, and the study is using the wrong theory.

Birkeland currents are also known as field-aligned currents because the electric field of the current is aligned with the magnetic field. Charged particles are therefore accelerated in the direction of the field. Their random motion—which is what temperature measures—is reduced; therefore the plasma which they make up appears “colder” than would be expected from their being bumped by a shock wave in gas.

Perhaps it’s not the cosmic rays that have gone ballistic but the astronomers.

UCLA Scientists Discover Birkeland Currents

Science Daily: Surprise In Earth's Upper Atmosphere: Mode Of Energy Transfer From The Solar Wind.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2009) — UCLA atmospheric scientists have discovered a previously unknown [to the mainstream] basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth's magnetosphere. The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, could improve the safety and reliability of spacecraft that operate in the upper atmosphere.

"It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down," said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a co-author of the research, which is in press in two companion papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The sun, in addition to emitting radiation, emits a stream of ionized particles called the solar wind that affects the Earth and other planets in the solar system. The solar wind, which carries the particles from the sun's magnetic field, known as the interplanetary magnetic field, takes about three or four days to reach the Earth. When the charged electrical particles approach the Earth, they carve out a highly magnetized region — the magnetosphere — which surrounds and protects the Earth.

Charged particles carry currents, which cause significant modifications in the Earth's magnetosphere. This region is where communications spacecraft operate and where the energy releases in space known as substorms wreak havoc on satellites, power grids and communications systems.

...

"Any space physicist, including me, would have said a year ago there could not be substorms when the interplanetary magnetic field was staying northward, but that's wrong," Lyons said.

Inside the Aurorae

Michael Armstrong: Inside the Aurorae.

There has been a long history of resistance to the electrical Birkeland current explanation for polar aurorae. Now there should be no doubt.

For those who have never experienced them, auroras consist of fluctuating light manifestations seen against or below the sky in the extreme north--and southern latitudes. These scintillating lights can take the form of diffuse patches or dancing streamers, bouncing arcs, shifting rays and, quite often, ephemeral hanging draperies which seem to sway in an unfelt wind. One of the most magnificent, if somewhat eerie, of natural phenomena, these lights can, and do, appear in varying shades of red, yellow, green, blue and purple. The rapidity of their ever changing glittering behavior makes them a difficult subject to capture in still photography. Their life-like nature, however, could not but capture man's imagination.

Eventually it became quite evident that the aurora borealis, or northern lights, had a tendency to disrupt compass readings, a situation which had become something of a threat to navigation. In 1740, Anders Celsius, the inventor of the centigrade scale named after him, had already interpreted the aurora as an electromagnetic phenomenon when he, too, repeatedly noticed that a big compass needle on his desk changed its orientation every time an aurora appeared in the sky above Uppsala, Sweden. So did his brother-in-law, Olaf Peter Hiorter, who spent the entire year between 1741 and 1742 observing compass needles going awry at each appearance of the lights.

In 1861, Benjamin Marsh also "endeavored to show that an auroral streamer is a current of electricity which, originating in the upper portions of [the] atmosphere and following upward the magnetic curve which passes through its base" reaches "far beyond the supposed limits. of the atmosphere."

And again in 1883, Selim Lemstron, a professor from Finland, reported the relationships he had presumed to exist between auroras and electrical activity. He accomplished this by artificially producing a "low-level aurora" that stretched to 400 feet above ground through a vast electrical apparatus he installed on top of a hill near Kultala, Finland. At the time, this was considered "the only known experiment that successfully reproduced the properties of the aurora on a large scale."

Yet even so, electrical or otherwise, no one had yet managed to discover what it was that actually caused these scintillating lights.

This new contender was the Norwegian Kristian Olaf Birkeland (1867-1917), whom we have had occasion to mention earlier in passing. From his base in Christiania, later renamed Oslo, Birkeland devoted a great portion of his life to an intensive investigation of the baffling aurora borealis. During this period of his life he mounted expeditions to remote icy regions, carting instruments and survival equipment up steep crags, setting up camps in the most dismal of weathers, in order to be able to study the phenomenon at first hand.

Having been instructed in electromagnetism early in his career, it is not surprising that he, too, sought an electromagnetic solution to the creation of the auroras. In this he was additionally motivated by the work of William Crookes in England who had established that cathode rays in gas-discharge tubes can be deflected by a magnet. Birkeland therefore wondered whether electrons—which is what cathode rays really amount to—could be ejected by the Sun toward Earth. If such electrons could be captured by Earth's magnetic field, he reasoned, chances were they would be directed toward the poles. As these electrons flowed through the upper atmosphere might they not even glow just as could be seen in laboratory discharge-tubes?

That was the kernel of Birkeland's theory, which was laughed out of court by just about every one of his scientific colleagues. One saving grace, which in the long run saved just about nothing was the acceptance of his theory by the English physicist Sydney Chapman. But even this did not last long. Having been warned by others that an electric current flowing from [the] Sun was an impossibility, Chapman ended up declaring Birkeland wrong in his assumptions. Even later, when Hannes Alfven went out of his way in replicating Birkeland's terella experiments for him, Chapman refused to change his mind.

Having spent the final days of his life in a study of the zodiacal light, some say Birkeland died of mercury poisoning inhaled during his long hours in laboratory experimentation. Most agree that he died, at the age of fifty, "broken in spirit and in intellect, disheartened by the harsh reaction to his theory."

Forty-four years had to pass before Birkeland could be vindicated. It all started in 1961 when, on its way to the Moon, the Soviet Lunik 2 spacecraft encountered a stream of electric particles flowing [from] the Sun. But so reluctant were western scientists in accepting such evidence that they branded the Soviet data unreliable out of hand. The following year, however, the same stream of "electrified gas," traveling "at speeds ranging from 300 to 700 kilometers a second," was recorded by the instruments aboard NASA's Mariner II spacecraft while on its way to Venus. It was the first indication of what was later termed the "solar wind."

Further evidence was collected in 1966 by a U.S. Navy navigation satellite which consistently recorded magnetic disturbances on almost every pass it made over Earth's polar regions.

"Since 1967 scientists have been looking at the satellite data in relation to phenomena such as the Northern Lights, rediscovering Birkeland's extraordinarily prophetic theories and completely reassessing his work. Today, he is credited as the first scientist to propose an essentially correct explanation of the aurora borealis, supported by theoretical, observational, and experimental evidence."

The vertical currents that reach earth through the interaction of the so-called solar wind were, in 1967, designated as, "Birkeland currents" by Alex Dessler. As they have now become understood Birkeland currents constitute helical plasmas that can be produced in laboratory experiments, but that can also stretch over vast distances in the immensity of space. Such a galactic Birkeland current recently discovered has been dubbed the Double Helix Nebula, which has unfortunately been described as a twisted magnetic flux tube. As Donald Scott has however indicated, it can "clearly be seen as a pair of helical current filaments in a plasma."

Nevertheless, as Lucy Jago noted, "rejection of his theories probably slowed the advance of geomagnetic and auroral physics for nearly half a century."

Intragalactic Electric Circuits

Stephen Smith: Bubble Magnets.

Astronomers say that exploding bubbles of magnetic energy might have helped form galaxy clusters.

A little over fifty years ago, before space shuttles, before the Hubble Space Telescope, and before satellite technology, electricity in space was not considered. Because the first teams of space scientists were "steely eyed missile men" with backgrounds in aeronautics and chemical fuel reactions, when evidence for electric current flow around Earth was found it was called a "radiation belt."

Although Kristian Birkeland had conducted experiments almost fifty years before the first science package was launched into Earth orbit, electricity remained unfamiliar to researchers conditioned to think in terms of gravity and mass. They had no concept of charged particles generating filamentary structures that could interact and create energetic phenomena—Birkeland's terella research and his study of Earth's aurorae were forgotten.

That lack of familiarity continues today when moving charged particles from the Sun are called a “wind” instead of an electric current. Charged particles impinging on a planet or a moon are referred to as a “rain” instead of an electrical discharge. Ionized particles moving within a helical magnetic field are called "jets of hot gas" instead of field-aligned flows of electricity. When abrupt changes in the density and speed of charged particles are observed, those changes are called a “shock wave” instead of a double layer. Birkeland continues to fret from beyond the pale.

Magnetic fields in space can be detected more easily than electric currents, so modern astronomers think that the fields are fragments left over from the Big Bang. They write a blank check based on that conclusion to explain how the primordial structures that make up the universe were formed. An analysis of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory seems to indicate that "bubbles" over 60,000 light years in diameter are slowly percolating out of galaxy clusters. Within this cosmic fizz are supposed to be intense magnetic fields that are released when the bubbles burst. Research teams speculate that the fields detected in remote galaxy clusters are caused by the bursting bubbles.

Galaxy clusters are thought to be made of individual galaxies embedded in hot gases and dark matter, so astronomers were surprised to find the bubbles, or cavities, within the overall x-ray emissions detected by Chandra. Inside most of the cavities are bright radio sources that could be caused by the explosion of highly energetic particles, but the cause of the explosions and the source of the particles is not known.

Even so, according to Brian McNamara from Ohio University: "We've known for the past 15 to 20 years that magnetic fields exist [in galaxy clusters], but we didn't understand how they got there. This could be a viable mechanism."

The fact that moving charges constitute an electric current and that those currents generate magnetic fields has been known since the days of Michael Faraday. However, since "perception is reality," as the saying goes, a lack of knowledge means a lack of vision. As previously stated, charged particles in motion constitute an electric current and that current is wrapped in a magnetic field. As more charged particles accelerate in the same direction the magnetic field gets stronger. That is a familiar idea to electrical engineers, but when astronomers find magnetism in space they are mystified. They resort to ironic ideas about galaxy-wide voids with magnetic fields frozen inside them.

Another fact that is not considered when attempts are made to explain structure in the universe (or smaller-scale planetary examples) is that for charged particles to move, they must move in a circuit. Hannes Alfvén, the father of plasma cosmology, identified several interacting circuits in the Earth's magnetosphere. One of those circuits forms the polar aurorae due to electric current effects linking the Sun with our planet's charged environment.

On the largest scale of all, the universe, larger energetic events are not explained by reference to local conditions. The effects of an entire circuit—which may encompass clusters of galaxies—must be considered. For this reason, while the consensus scientific worldview only permits isolated galactic "islands" in space, the Electric Universe hypothesis emphasizes connectivity with a vast network of electrically active "transmission lines." That spatial wiring is composed of Birkeland currents.

Loops and filaments suddenly expand and explode, throwing off massive bubbles of plasma that can accelerate to near light-speed. Jets from opposite poles of a galaxy end in energetic clouds emitting copious radio and x-ray frequencies. These are facts based in plasma science and not the traditional theories of gas kinetics, gravity, or particle physics. Astrophysicists see magnetic fields, but they do not perceive the underlying electricity, so they are at a loss to explain them.
Plasma behaves in unfamiliar ways. Its similarities to hot gas are overshadowed by its differences. It is habitual perception that makes it difficult to see plasma as something different. By breaking free from a priori assumptions, the unfamiliar behavior of plasma will become familiar and astronomers will perceive a new universe.

Mainstream Scientists Discover Magnetism

"And that the shooting stars are as it were sparks which glance off from the movement of the pole. And that winds are produced by the rarefaction of the air by the sun and by their drying up as they get towards the pole and are born away from it. And that thunderstorms are produced by heat falling upon the clouds. And that earthquakes come from the upper air falling upon that under the earth; for when this last is moved, the earth upheld by it is shaken." -- Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, "About Anaxagoras"

Eureka! But still they are afraid to call it a Birkeland current. And they are forgetting Winston Bostick and Anthony Peratt. Science in amnesia: First laboratory experiment to accurately model stellar jets explains mysterious 'knots'. (Hat tip: Anaconda)

Some of the most breathtaking objects in the cosmos are the jets of matter streaming out of stars, but astrophysicists have long been at a loss to explain how these jets achieve their varied shapes. Now, laboratory research detailed in the current issue of Astrophysical Review Letters shows how magnetic forces shape these stellar jets.

"The predominant theory says that jets are essentially fire hoses that shoot out matter in a steady stream, and the stream breaks up as it collides with gas and dust in space—but that doesn't appear to be so after all," says Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, and co-author of the paper. "These experiments are part of an unusal international collaboration of plasma physicists, astronomers and computational scientists. It's a whole new way of doing astrophysics. The experiments strongly suggest that the jets are fired out more like bullets or buckshot. They don't break into pieces—they are formed in pieces."

Frank says the experiment, conducted by Professor Sergey Lebedev's team in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London (www.imperial.ac.uk), may be the best astrophysical experiment that's ever been done. Replicating the physics of a star in a laboratory is exceptionally difficult, he says, but the Imperial experiment matches the known physics of stellar jets surprisingly well. "Lebedev's group at Imperial has absolutely pioneered the use of these experiments for studying astrophysical phenomena. The collaboration between Imperial and Rochester has been going on for almost 5 years and now it is bearing some extraordinary fruit."

At Imperial, Lebedev sent a high-powered pulse of energy into an aluminum disk. In less than a few billions of a second, the aluminum began to evaporate, creating a cloud of plasma very similar to the plasma cloud surrounding a young star. Where the energy flowed into the center of the disk, the aluminum eroded completely, creating a hole through which a magnetic field from beneath the disk could penetrate."

The field initially pushes aside the plasma, forming a bubble within it, says Frank, who carried out the astrophysical analysis of the experiment. As the field penetrates further and the bubble grows, however, the magnetic fields begin to warp and twist, creating a knot in the jet. Almost immediately, a new magnetic bubble forms inside the base of the first as the first is propelled away, and the process repeats.

Frank likens the magnetic fields' affect on the jet to a rubber band tightly wrapped around a tube of toothpaste—the field holds the jet together, but it also pinches the jet into bulges as it does.

"We can see these beautiful jets in space, but we have no way to see what the magnetic fields look like," says Frank. "I can't go out and stick probes in a star, but here we can get some idea—and it looks like the field is a weird, tangled mess."

Frank says other aspects of the experiment, such as the way in which the jets radiatively cool the plasma in the same way jets radiatively cool their parent stars, make the series of experiments an important tool for studying stellar jets. With this new model, he says, astrophysicists do not have to assume that the knotted jets they see in nature mean some unknown phenomenon interrupted the jets' flow of material.

Now, says Frank, some experiments that were once far beyond astrophysicists' reach have been, literally, brought down to Earth.

Twisted Comet Tails and Spiral Sunspots

Birkeland currents and plasma pinches to think about.

Via Universe Today and Louis Hissink's Crazy World.

Billions of Electron Volts Hitting the Earth

ATIC, the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, a NASA funded balloon-borne instrument high over Antarctica, has detected Birkeland currents with energies of 300-800 billion electron Volts, thousands of times the energy of X-rays.

Chang, et al.,: An excess of cosmic ray electrons at energies of 300–800 GeV.

Galactic cosmic rays consist of protons, electrons and ions, most of which are believed to be accelerated to relativistic speeds in supernova remnants1, 2, 3. All components of the cosmic rays show an intensity that decreases as a power law with increasing energy (for example as E-2.7). Electrons in particular lose energy rapidly through synchrotron and inverse Compton processes, resulting in a relatively short lifetime (about 105 years) and a rapidly falling intensity, which raises the possibility of seeing the contribution from individual nearby sources (less than one kiloparsec away)4. Here we report an excess of galactic cosmic-ray electrons at energies of 300–800 GeV, which indicates a nearby source of energetic electrons. Such a source could be an unseen astrophysical object (such as a pulsar5 or micro-quasar6) that accelerates electrons to those energies, or the electrons could arise from the annihilation of dark matter particles (such as a Kaluza–Klein particle7 with a mass of about 620 GeV).

Nope, no mass there. They must be talking about two electrons max.

"Freund's (2003) experimental work confirms the infrared radiation emission nature of such geodynamic anomalies and processes. It is therefore logical that Earth's geodynamics are driven by electro-motive force (EMF), or rather, electromagnetic anisotropic concentration processes, and surely not by the conventional physically inadequate heat-engine bulk convection formalism. In other words, volts and amperes control tectonism and all geodynamic phenomena...." -- Stavros T. Tassos (seismologist) and David J. Ford (geologist), 2005

Tassos, S.T., and Ford, D.J., An Integrated Alternative Conceptual Framework to Heat Engine Earth, Plate Tectonics, and Elastic Rebound, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 19, Number 1, Pages 43-90, 2005

Birkeland Currents

Via NASA Electric Currents from Space (Hat tip: Anaconda)

When in 1973 the navy satellite Triad (see history) flew through this region in a low-altitude orbit, its magnetometer indeed detected the signatures of two large sheets of electric current, one coming down on the morning side of the auroral zone, one going up on the evening side, as expected. Because Kristian Birkeland had proposed long before currents which linked Earth and space in this fashion, they were named Birkeland currents (by Schield, Dessler and Freeman, in a 1969 article predicting some of the features observed by Triad). Typically, each sheet carries a million amperes or more.

1 million amperes or more? Nope, no mass there...LOL.



Potemra, T.A., Observation of Birkeland Currents with the TRIAD Satellite, Astrophysics and Space Science, Volume 58, Number 1, Pages 207-226, Sep 1978