HD 80606b

HD 80606b is a very special planet.

Scientists are now referring to HD 80606b as "everyone's second favorite planet" (after the Earth of course).

HD 80606b has "the most eccentric orbit of any known exoplanet."

Bloomberg: NASA Telescope Spots Weather Changes Outside This Solar System.

Laughlin, 41, a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, said the gaseous planet has an unusual orbit that brings it closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun, and it then shoots out to a distance almost as far away as Earth is from its sun.

“The orbit is extremely eccentric,” Laughlin said. “Of the exoplanets that have been detected -- we’ve observed 300 -- this is the most extreme orbit we’ve seen so far.”

Translation: gravity is a myth.

The Sound of Gravity?

This is too funny. These idiots think that gravity makes noise and that the sounds can be detected. More than that, they say space (nonbeing) and time (tic-toc?) make noise as well. Do you have your tinfoil hat ready? Forget the Electric Universe. I offer you the Holographic Universe: Holographic Universe: Discovery Could Herald New Era In Fundamental Physics.

Craig Hogan, a physicist at Fermilab Centre for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois is convinced that he has found proof in the data of the gravitational wave detector GEO600 of a holographic Universe – and that his ideas could explain mysterious noise in the detector data that has not been explained so far.

The British-German team behind the GEO600, which includes scientists from the School of Physics and Astronomy's Gravitational Physics Group, will now carry out new experiments in the coming months to yield more evidence about Craig Hogan's assumptions. If proved correct, it could help in the quest to bring together quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity.

In order to test the theory of holographic noise, the frequency of GEO600´s maximum sensitivity will be shifted towards ever higher frequencies. The frequency of maximum sensitivity is the tone that the detector can hear best. It is normally adjusted to offer the best chance for hearing exploding stars or merging black holes.

Even if it turns out that the mysterious noise is the same at high frequencies as at the lower ones, this will not constitute proof for Hogan's hypothesis. It would, however, provide a strong motivation for further study. The sensitivity of GEO600 will then be significantly improved by using 'squeezed vacuum' and by the installation of a mode filter in a new vacuum chamber. The technology of 'squeezed vacuum' was particularly refined in Hannover and would be used in a gravitational wave detector for the first time.

Professor Jim Hough of Glasgow University, one of the pioneer developers of gravitational wave detectors, says: 'Craig Hogan made a very interesting prediction. It may be the first of a number of unexpected possibilities to be investigated as gravitational wave detectors become more sensitive.'

Professor Bernard Schutz, Professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy, member of the Gravitational Physics Group at the School, and recently elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society said: "It would be truly remarkable if GEO600 is sensitive to the quantum nature of space and time. The only way to confirm that would be to carry out controlled experiments, the results of which can be solely attributed to holographic noise. Such an experiment would herald a new era in fundamental physics".

Indeed. Or a new era of insanity.

Abandoning Geocentrism and Gravity

The Big Bang hypothesis is a geocentric hypothesis since, according to Big Bangers, redshift indicates that the universe is receding away from the Earth in every direction. It is time to abandon geocentrism and gravity.

Thomas Wilson: From Ptolemy to Dark Matter - Part 1.

Fundamental assumptions have an overwhelming influence on how we interpret and discuss new observations.

One such assumption that shapes our accepted view of the Universe is that gravity dominates the motion of galaxies.

It is difficult to change these types of fundamental belief systems. For example, in the time of the Hellenic astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, it was a widely held fundamental assumption that the Earth was the center of the cosmos. In fact, there were many good reasons to believe it. The stars, the sun, and the planets visibly move across the sky and the Earth obviously feels very solid and fixed.

According to the best thinkers at the time, the heavenly bodies were positioned on invisible spheres with as many as five spheres per planet. By allowing for spheres within spheres, one could explain the retrograde movement of the planets. To its credit, much was explained with this world-view. With Ptolemy’s sophisticated use of epicycles, deferents, and the innovative introduction of the equant, the Ptolemaic system was very successful at predicting such things as the precession of equinoxes as well as planetary motion (more so than the Copernican system when it was first developed).

However, by the sixteenth century, Galileo’s observations of the phases of Venus were completely incompatible with the Ptolemaic system. Subsequently, Kepler’s prediction of the transit of Venus in 1631 was a great success for the heliocentric, Copernican view of the solar system.

Not to be unnecessarily provocative, but there are interesting similarities between the Ptolemaic paradigm and the current theories surrounding Dark Matter and galaxies. Just as there were good reasons to believe in invisible celestial spheres driving a Geocentric Model, there are reasons to believe in invisible spheres (called “haloes”) of dark matter surrounding galaxies.

It all has to do with how the mass of a galaxy is measured. One popular approach to compute galactic mass is the orbital method. In the orbital method, the rotational velocity of stars (the red shift of radio waves from hydrogen gas around the stars) is used to infer the mass of the galaxy. The math is relatively straightforward: once the stellar orbital velocity (or “velocity dispersion” for the galaxy) and the distance from the center of the galaxy that contains the mass in question are measured, then it is easy to solve for mass. However, the math only includes gravity as the potential energy source for the system.

The problem that begets dark matter is as follows. When the mass of a galaxy with this gravity-only approach is derived, there is more computed mass than visible matter. That is, the sum of the mass of all the stars and visible dust in the galaxy is far less than the mass derived with the Orbital Method. If gravity drives the rotational velocity of the stars in the galaxy, then there must be hidden mass in the form of invisible dark matter. What if gravity is not the dominant force driving the rotational velocity of galaxies?

Today, asking this question is like asking a learned astronomer in 1550, “What if the Earth is not at the center of the cosmos?” Asserting that gravity is not a dominant dynamical force in the motion of galaxies is just as shocking to astronomers of our current time. However, there is good evidence that supports the notion that electromagnetic forces in plasma act on the cosmological scale.

Hannes Alfven (Nobel Laureate for his work in plasma physics), proposed that galaxies reside in immense, gyrating, Birkeland currents that convert large-scale electromagnetic forces into rotational energy in a galactic system. In turn, leakage currents in the galaxy are converted into rotational energy in star systems. Seminal work by Anthony Peratt (e.g. see Snell and Peratt, 1995) has shown that the flat rotational curve of galaxies is well modeled by plasma simulations without the need for dark matter. All the observations of the galactic core, the intense X-rays, gamma rays and rotational energies could be explained with sufficient current densities driving the galactic system (Peratt, 1986).

The typical flat rotational velocity curve of a galaxy does not indicate hidden dark matter mass, it indicates that another force is at work. This is why deriving the mass of a galaxy using equations that only include gravity as the source of potential energy leads to problems. Additional electromagnetic forces are at work that drive the galaxy like an electric homopolar motor (see a summary in Donald Scott’s book “The Electric Sky”).

Twisted Comet Tails and Spiral Sunspots

Birkeland currents and plasma pinches to think about.

Via Universe Today and Louis Hissink's Crazy World.

New Planets Defy Gravity

Cosmology Quest: New Planets Defy Gravity.

It looks like Hubble just keeps bringing the pain. Standard cosmologists, astronomers, and planetary theorists must be pulling their hair out by now.

In this article from New Scientist it is reported that scientists have discovered three massive exoplanets, theoretically estimated to be 10 times the size of Jupiter, closely orbiting their parent star. The catch is that according to gravitational theory, they are in a supposedly unstable orbit.

From the paper the article is based on (arXiv:0812.0011v1 [astro-ph])

“We point out that the nominal circular, face-on orbits of the planets lead to a dynamical instability in ~1e5 yr, a factor of at least 100 shorter than the estimated age of the star.”

To put that in English, according to standard theory, the orbits they are in should have fallen apart in less than 100 times the estimated age of the star. That leaves them with some pretty big problems.

This means that at least one or more of these statements are true:

The way a stars age is calculated is wrong (it is)
The way planetary mass is calculated is wrong (it is)
The accretion model of planet formation from a dusty proto-disk is wrong (it is)
The gravitational model governing planetary orbits is wrong (it is)

The article states:

“Aspects of the HR 8799 solar system promise more riches. Daniel Fabrycky and Ruth Murray-Clay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston studied the dynamics of the three-planet system and found that the mutual gravitational pull of the massive planets should be enough to make the solar system unstable. They conclude that the planets have survived until now because they have slotted themselves into so-called resonance orbits: each time the outermost planet orbits the star once, they argue, the next one in must orbit twice and the innermost planet four times.”

“Resonance orbits” hey? It’s quite the coincidence that out of the handful of exoplanets discovered, that have been directly imaged, we just happened to spot a solar system with a configuration of such low probability as to be nearly mythical.

Of course the electric universe theory easily explains all the problems with these findings. As I have detailed in my previous articles, EU theory states gas giant planets are born by electrical separation from their parent star. As the stars electrical load increases to the point where it can no longer cope with the stress, it will electrically "split" in order to distribute the electrical load over a wider surface area. This means the most common configuration of planets and stars that we see in space should be tightly orbiting gas giant planets around their parent stars or stars in binary/multiple star systems – which is exactly what we see. The planets will interact electrically with each other and their star until an electrically stable configuration is reached.

The Arctic Was Tropical

"And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to cultivate corals on the North Pole." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

Velikovsky was right (again): Ancient Turtle Migrated From Asia To America Over Tropical Arctic.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — In Arctic Canada, a team of geologists from the University of Rochester has discovered a surprise fossil: a tropical, freshwater, Asian turtle.

The find strongly suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean. ...

"We've known there's been an interchange of animals between Asia and North America in the late Cretaceous period, but this is the first example we have of a fossil in the High Arctic region showing how this migration may have taken place," says John Tarduno, professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester and leader of the Arctic expedition. "We're talking about extremely warm, ice-free conditions in the Arctic region, allowing migrations across the pole."

In 2006, Tarduno led an expedition to the Arctic to study paleomagnetism—the Earth's magnetic field in the distant past. Knowing from previous expeditions to the area that the rocks were rich with fossils, Tarduno kept an eye out for them and was rewarded when one of his undergraduate students uncovered the amazingly well preserved shell of a turtle. Together with collaborator Donald Brinkman of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Canada, they later named the fossil Aurorachelys, or aurora turtle. The turtle strongly resembles a freshwater Mongolian species, which raised obvious questions about how it came to be in the marine waters of the North American Arctic.

Tarduno's paleomagnetic expertise, which allows him to ascertain when points on Earth's crust were at specific locations, allows him to rule out the possibility that millions of years of tectonic activity had brought the fossil from southern climes. The turtle was clearly a native of the area.

Leibniz

In The World As Will And Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer says Immanuel Kant's idea that space is not a material object can first be found in Pierre Maupertuis.

In Volume II, Chapter IV, Schopenhauer writes:

But what are we to say when we find Kant's most important and brilliant doctrine, that of the ideality of space and of the merely phenomenal existence of the corporeal world, expressed already thirty years previously by Maupertuis? ... Maupertuis expresses this paradoxical doctrine so decidedly, and yet without the addition of proof, that it must be supposed that he also obtained it from somewhere else. It is very desirable that the matter should be further investigated, and as this would demand tiresome and extensive researches, some German Academy might very well make the question the subject of a prize essay.

Well it turns out Schopenhauer was right. It wasn't Kant or Maupertuis's original idea. It was Leibniz's and he may have gotten it from Descartes and Aristotle.

"Space without matter is something imaginary." -- Gottfried W. Leibniz, polymath, 1689

"There is no vacuum." -- Gottfried W. Leibniz, polymath, 1689

Leibniz has always been the antidote to Newton as Leibniz thought Newton's gravity hypothesis was utterly absurd (probably because it is).

"Like Huygens, Leibniz never accepted Newtonian gravitation." -- Ezio Vailati, philosopher, 1997

And Leibniz stated General Relativity in 1689 with no need for gravity:

"Since we have already proved through geometrical considerations the equivalence of all hypotheses with respect to the motions of any bodies whatsoever, however numerous, moved only by the collision with other bodies, it follows that not even an angel could determine with mathematical rigor which of the many bodies of that sort is at rest, and which is the center of motion for the others." -- Gottfried W. Leibniz, polymath, 1689

"To summarize my point, since space without matter is something imaginary, motion, in all mathematical rigor, is nothing but a change in the position [situs] of bodies with respect to one another, and so, motion is not something absolute, but consists in relation. This already follows from the Aristotelian definition of place, for motion is the change of place, and place is the surface of the surrounding body, so when this changes, motion occurs, and either the surrounding body or the thing in the place can be assumed to have moved away, leaving the other at rest." -- Gottfried W. Leibniz, polymath, 1689

"When formerly I regarded space as an immovable real place, possessing extension alone, I had been able to define absolute motion as change of this real space. But gradually I began to doubt whether there is in nature such an entity as is called space; whence it followed that a doubt might arise about absolute motion." -- Gottfried W. Leibniz, polymath, 1695 (quoted by Russell 1900)

"...to establish it [gravity] as original or primitive in certain parts of matter is to resort either to miracle or an imaginary occult quality." -- Gottfreid W. Leibniz, polymath, July 1710

Leibniz, G.W., On Copernicanism and the Relativity of Motion, 1689

Leibniz, G.W., First Letter To Hartsoeker, 1710

Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Idea, Volume II, 1819

Russell, B., A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, 1900

Jolley, N., The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, 1995

Vailati, E., Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence, 1997

Schönfeld, M., The Philosophy of the Young Kant, 2000