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Supernova 1987A Decoded
bluevector writes "Electric Universe News is reporting that scientists claim to have proof that 'supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star' and not the result of giant stars undergoing gravitational collapse and subsequent explosion after having spent all of their nuclear fuel as previously thought."
Come on this is big news and I'm an astronomy student help me out here.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Supernova 1987A Decoded
Electric Universe is a well-known crackpot site, built on the most absurd pseudoscience. They're the same outfit that predicted a large explosion when Deep Impact hit Tempel 1.
As usual, the /. editors display their utter inability to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Idiots.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Since the submitter didn't bother including one, and the editor didn't do any better, here's one:
n z1
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=re6qx
It's already running so slow it's useless. What I managed to get screams crackpot:
24 August 2005
Supernova 1987A Decoded
13 July 2005
Comet Tempel 1's Electrifying Impact
03 July 2005
The Deep Impact of Comet Theory
26 March 2005
The Dragon Storm
08 February 2005
Columbia downed by Megalightning
05 February 2005
Saturn's Strange Hot Spot Explained
30 January 2005
Titan - A Rosetta Stone for early Earth?
25 December 2004
Megalightning at Saturn
25 November 2004
Titan puzzles scientists
27 October 2004
The True State of the Universe
24 August 2005 Supernova 1987A Decoded
Supernova 1987A is the closest supernova event since the invention of the telescope. It was first seen in February 1987 in the nearby Magellanic cloud, a dwarf companion galaxy of the Milky Way, and only 169,000 light years from Earth. Close observation since 1987 has now provided proof that supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star.
>> IMAGE CAPTION: The enigmatic and beautiful structure of SN1987A with its three axial rings. The brightening of the equatorial ring is obvious. The two bright stars are just in the field of view and are not associated with the supernova.
A supernova is one of the most energetic events witnessed in the universe. The accepted explanation is that it occurs at the end of a star's lifetime, or red giant stage, when the star's nuclear fuel is exhausted. There is no more release of nuclear energy in the core so the huge star collapses in on itself. If sufficiently massive, the imploding layers of the star are thought to rebound when they hit the core, resulting in an explosion, and the blast wave ejects the star's envelope into interstellar space. The bright equatorial ring is caused by the collision of exploded matter from the star with the remnants of an earlier stellar "wind." The two faint rings are a problem. The best that theorists have been able to manage is to postulate some kind of rotating beam from an assumed supernova remnant, sweeping and lighting up a shell of gas expelled at an earlier epoch. The ad hoc nature of these explanations is obvious.
The detection of a pulsar remnant after some supernovae is explained by the implosion of the stellar core to produce a neutron star. Pulsars emit bursts of radiation up to thousands of times a second. It is believed that a pulsar must be a super-collapsed stellar object that can spin up to thousands of times a second and emit a rotating beam of X-rays (like a lighthouse). Commonsense suggests that this mechanical model is wrong when some pulsars rev beyond the redline, even for such a bizarre object.
A recent example of conventional thinking can be seen on the Chandra website. On August 17, a news story was posted: Supernova 1987A: Fast Forward to the Past.
Recent Chandra observations have revealed new details about the fiery ring surrounding the stellar explosion that produced Supernova 1987A. The data give insight into the behavior of the doomed star in the years before it exploded, and indicate that the predicted spectacular brightening of the circumstellar ring has begun.. The site of the explosion was traced to the location of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69Â 202 (SK -69 for short) that had a mass estimated at approximately 20 Suns.
Subsequent optical, ultraviolet and X-ray observations have enabled astronomers to piece together the following scenario for SK -69: about ten million years ago the star formed out of a dark, dense, cloud of dust and gas; roughly a million years ago, the star lost most of its outer layers in a slowly moving stellar wind that formed a vast cloud of gas around it; before the star exploded, a high-speed wind blowing off its hot surface carved out a cavity in the cool gas cloud.
The intense flash of ultraviolet light from the supernova illuminated the edge of this cavity to produce the bright ring seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the meantime the supernova explosion sent a shock wave rumbling through the cavity. In 1999, Chandra imaged this shock wave, and astronomers have waited expectantly for the shock wave to hit the edge of the cavity, where it would encounter the much denser gas deposited by the red supergiant wind, and produce a dramatic increase in X-radiation.
The latest data from Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that this much-anticipated event has begun. Optical hot-spots now encircle the ring like a necklace of incandescent diamonds. The Chandra image reveals multimillion-degree gas at the location
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/0 3/1246254&tid=160
Summary of the previous discussion: the electric universe theory has as much scientific support as geocentrism.
This should not be news on slashdot I suppose, but since it is, I guess we're going to spend some time bash.. I mean challenging the electric universe theory once more...
The proper link is here. While checking on this, I took the opportunity to have another look around the website. These guys really are chewing the carpet; for instance, their page on the CHANDRA X-ray observatory shows a failure to grasp even the most basic aspects of X-ray emission in astrophysical plasmas.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
FTFA:
The crucial evidence for the electrical nature of supernovae must come from experiment and observation. Anthony L. Peratt, Fellow, IEEE, published a seminal paper in the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 31, No. 6, December 2003. It was titled Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity. In it he explained the unusual characteristics of a high-energy plasma discharge. He discussed mega-ampere particle beams and showed their characteristic 56- and 28-fold symmetry. He wrote: "A solid beam of charged particles tends to form hollow cylinders that may then filament into individual currents. When observed from below, the pattern consists of circles, circular rings of bright spots, and intense electrical discharge streamers connecting the inner structure to the outer structure."
*sigh* I seriously doubt that 'supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star', and think that this is instead more unsubstantiated guesswork on the part of the Electronic Universe Theorists.
http://www.fixedearth.com/electric.html
e x.html
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/mccanney/ind
Yeah, these people are total crackpots
This is crazy talk. I studied gravitational collapse TypeII supernova explosions in grad school. It's not an electrical phenomenon: it's a gravitational bounce outward from the solid (neutron) core after fusion peters out at Iron burning. From there, for sufficiently massive stars, you either get a neutron star or a black hole. Hans Bethe got the Nobel for explaining process the energy release(~10^51 erg). Aside from some of the 3d fluid dynamics of collapse and ejecta composition, the important parts of the process are fairly well understood.
After you RTFA and think to yourself "I haven't heard that much non-sensical technobabble since Star Trek!" head over to Wiki's Plasma Cosmology page. Or this more detailed page. Its contested, mainly because this is a contested field and the article is overly broad, but I think it fills in some of the holes.
Honestly if their predictions are true it will change everything in cosmology. And if my predictions are true I'll win the Lotto. I'm not sure who has better odds....
If they did not manage to publish in a reputable physics journal, it is not physics, not even science fiction!
How are these "catastrophic electrical discharges" occur and funciton?
As I understand the gibbering drivel that poses for the hypothesis of the electric universe, the claim is that the stars become positively charged due to the loss of electrons in a stellar wind. There is then some huge discharge episode that causes the supernove.
Of course, this flies in the fact of everything that is known about stellar winds. In the case of the sun, we know that the wind is electrically neutral, from in situ measurements by space missions such as ACE. In the case of massive stars, that undergo supernovae at the end of their lives, the winds cannot possibly be negatively charged, for a simple reason: these winds are driven by photons scattering off positively-charged ions. In fact, the wind plasma of massive stars is neutral, being an equal mixture of positive ions and negative electrons.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
it's a gravitational bounce outward from the solid (neutron) core after fusion peters out at Iron burning.
Actually, recent models show that the bounce doesn't cause the explosion, since the outward-propagating shockwave stalls at some point within the stellar envelope. The current idea is that the explosion is caused by the neutrinos from the core, that get absorbed by the outer envelope and heat it up to crazy temperatures. Sure, the cross section for an individual neutrino to interact is miniscule; but with so many neutrinos being produced, enough of them interact to cause the explosion.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I sent an email on this subject to Phil Plait at www.badastronomy.com, someone I consider an authority on astronomy and in particular supernova 1987a (it was the subject of his PhD).
Hopefully Phil will have the time to examine the claims and comment on their truth or falsity on his web site.
If you ever have a few hours to kill and want to read about some fascinating astronomy topics check out his web site. He spends a lot of time debunking claims made by "scientists" regarding such things as the face on Mars, the moon landing "hoax" and many other hugely engrossing topics.
"Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD."
Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick. That neocon bollocks is really sinking in, isn't it?
THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE US WERE NOT CHRISTIANS!
Read some history! The US was not founded on christian principles! The signers of the declaration of independance where mostly freemasons, and it is not a coincidence that there is only one reference to god in the constitution, one which is best attributed to 'habit' and 'the way things were done at the time' than any religious thought.
Shit, even a cursory knowledge of history will show that the US was inhabited by people fleeing religious persicution in Europe and that they really, REALLY did NOT want a country founded on religious principles, but one where there was a seperation of church and state and where no religion could gain so much power that it could encroach upon any other religion.
The rest of your post is fine, but thgis one point has been spouted by the neo-con movemenet so often that now it looks like a lot of americanss actually are starting to really beleive it.
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
*grumble*historicalaccuracy*grumble*
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
This is the same Mother Theresa who refused to administer painkillers to those dying in her hospices, even though her organization had millions of dollars in unspent donations? The one who only cared about converting more people to Christ? I hope that bitch rots in hell.
I agree with your sentiment but not on those points. Mother Theresa often said that AIDS was just punishment for sex before marriage.
Religion is no excuse for wickedness.
pInteresting. Wikipedia has this to say about her:
Many of Teresa's donors were evidently under the impression that their money was being used to build hospitals. In 1991, Dr. Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard". He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors in the hospice. Dr. Fox specifically held Teresa responsible for conditions in this home, and observed that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment.
Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and kindness, but he noted that the sisters' approach to managing pain was "disturbingly lacking". The formulary at the facility Fox visited lacked strong analgesics which he felt clearly separated Mother Teresa's approach from the hospice movement. There have been a series of other reports documenting inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Similar points of view have also been expressed by some former volunteers who worked for Teresa's order. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities as "Houses of the Dying".
In contrast to the conditions at her homes, Mother Teresa sought medical treatment for herself at renowned medical clinics in the United States, Europe, and India, drawing charges of hypocrisy from critics such as Hitchens.
Worthy of sainthood? Doesn't quite sound like it. But it doesn't really matter, since the ceremony doesn't mean anything.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some of them were Christians. Some were deists. Some were out right atheists. Just as the grandparent shouldn't make vast generalizations neither should you. How do you classify someone such as Jefferson? Jefferson was by most accounts a deist. Is he Christian? He published a red letter edition of the new testament in which all of Jesus's moral teachings were well--highlighted in red. Yet he ignored the "mystical" elements. So was he religious or not? depends on your definition of religion mroe than anything.
Ever read the Declaration of Independence?
You are basically right--the Constitution and future government of the US was meant to be free of religion, and to protect freedom of religion. This does not mean that many of the founding fathers were not deeply religious men, nor that religion was universally reviled.
I'm also curious about your point about "no religion could gain so much power that it could encroach upon any other religion." What about anti-semitic laws, catholic/protestant anti-miscegenation laws, and more, that we've had for years? Until relatively recently even.
One must remember that the early American context was largely white (of Western European extraction), male, protestant. Other groups come into prominence later--be they black slaves, women, Irish, Catholics, Italians, Jews, etc.
This is not to disagree with your basic point, but I would take issue with many of your assumptions (and incidentally, you've been reading too much Davinci Code with regards to masons--my grandfather was a mason, and the man attended church every week of his life--what's the correlation? none..read about freemasonry and you'll see what I mean)
Not when you recall that Lot offered these same daughters to a rape mob, to avoid inconveniencing a couple of angels. Truly a man of God!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
"Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same."
Congratulations! You're one step closer to rational thought!
Unlike religion, science doesn't claim it's explanations to be correct. It claims them to be the best explanation we can find given the current evidence.
Science is a method for trying to explain why something is the way it is best on testing a hypothesis.in a repeatable way.
Unlike religion it does not say "this is the way it is", it says "this is the best explanation we have for why this happens".
The difference is that there's actually evidence involved in science. Religion just has books of mostly unverifiable claims by people long dead with no supporting evidence except... more mostly unverifiable claims by other people long dead!
On the other hand there are many good moral teachings in religion that virtually anyone can agree on. It's just a shame they're mixed in with so much crap.
There's serious work going on detecting and characterizing solar-, nebular-, galactic-, and galactic-supercluster- scale current flow that the Electric Universe people are happy to co-opt. Regardless of how supernovas happen, what you end up with really are huge clouds of electrically-conductive plasma at widely-varying densities, compositions, and degrees of ionization, that spontaneously organize. Forms routinely observed in laboratory plasma experiments, scaled up many orders of magnitude, are unmistakable in such nebulae, just as is also seen on a smaller scale in our own solar system (e.g. the aurora), and on an immensely larger scale in the galactic core.
The people who formed the US as it is today were primarily George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, Gouvernor Morris, and John Jay. All of them quite well educated, and many of them (Franklin and Jefferson certainly, as well as Paine) Deists, not Christians.
I remember reading that the flux of neutrinos is enough to kill a human out past the range of Jupiter's orbit. (And heavy lead jammies aren't going to help.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This appears to be the Birkeland in question. Nobel Prize nominee seven times, figured out how the polar aurorae worked, invented the gadget we use to manufacture nitrate fertiliser, and so ons.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that article links to a description of Birkeland currents, which might give you a big tip about what the relatively coherent parts of the article are on alluding to. If Earth's Birkeland currents routinely hit a million amperes, can you imagine what the Sun's must be like? Nice shot of Jovian aurorae, too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
wow...this is a dooooooozy of an uninformed post.
Compare older versions of the Torah in Hebrew to the old testament.
you are, of course, aware that modern Old Testament translations are translated from the oldest extant Torah/Hebrew texts, but that Jewish copyists were so meticulous that it doesn't much matter? that the corruptions that snuck in were single words and minor misspellings, and that even over the 2,800 year spread between current press runs and the earliest manuscripts and pottery shards, there are stunningly few differences, especially when compared to parallel texts (Homer and the presocratics, for instance)
It has been shown that the Jewish faith as early as 800BC was perhaps not monotheistic.
Somewhat true - but it was also not what we would call polytheistic - what many scholars now believe is that the pre-literary (1000bc+) Jewish believers may have lent credence to the existence of other supernatural beings, but believed theirs was the highest God - the creator and ruler; their understanding of other 'gods' was closer to what modern fundamentalists would call demons - things other people worship that have powers, but not what we would refer to today as an omnipotent God. of course, oddly enough, much of that understanding comes from texts in the scriptures which were not erased by subsequent believers, which seem to indicate a diversity of opinion.
In essence the bible has been rewritten so many times....the amount of rewrites due to political slanting and posturing , making bits fit the ideas of the current church and plain old translation errors have made the thing a total mess.
that's just plan wrong. the bible has certainly been reinterpreted, but all mainline groups (eg, excluding Marcionites, certain Gnostic sects and the like) have faithfully transmitted the text, even if they chose to ignore inconvenient sections. which is why fundamentalist Catholics using circa-16th century Latin/Vulgate texts which where recopied zillions of times until the invention of the printing press, and Jewish scholars poring over scraps of the Torah dug up in 5th century BC tombs argue about interpretation and not content. there are, in fact, probably only about half a dozen passages in the Old Testament where the Hebrew and Greek/Latin traditions vary by enough to affect the understanding of the passage...and none of them affect the message of the passage, just its nuance.
the rest of your post is presented as opinion, so i don't see the need to correct it - as you're entitled to your opinions. but please don't present completely erroneous nonsense as historical fact.
Many of the most important founding fathers were Deists, Atheists and Agnostics. Furthermore even the religious members of the founding fathers all agreed on the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Ammendment to the US Constitution - which Thomas Jefferson described as "erecting a wall of Seperation between Church and State" to preserve the rights of the citizens and the dignity of both organizations
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Parent bases his entire argument off presumption, bigotry and blatant falsehood.
You can stop reading the post right here "America is a christian nation founded upon christian principles." as that statement is 100% FICTION.
The Constitution of the United States was written upon ENLIGHTMENT Principles by people that were christian, deist, agnostic and atheist - and the "Seperation of Church and State" [Thomas Jefferson] was universally agreed upon.
So before Parent opens their mouth EVER again I suggest they LEARN HISTORY.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Actually, the Republican Party that Lincoln formed, and he did "form" the Republican Party, was very conservative. Only after his second term in office and the death of his child did Lincoln begin to move towards the middle on many of his policies. This is all in the history books for you idiots to read. Every member of the republican party during that era was very conservative and their policies were conservative. Lincoln fired one of his Generals early on in the war for emancipating slaves in an area of the country in which he defeated the southern army. Only after much bloodshed and the realization that he could not keep most of the border states, i.e. Virginia, from leaving the Union did he decide to move away from his party. The Republican that ran against him for the second term election wanted to make a compromise with the South. If Sherman hadn't started his march, Lincoln would have lost his own party's nomination.
Nothing like geeks spewing disinformation on a history they do not fully understand.
Lot's daughters grew up in Sodom, and it seems to have had an effect. Lot took his family and fled Sodom before it was destroyed, as he was warned to do. After it was destroyed, his his daughters got him drunk and slept with him. If they were spared as the only "good" people in Sodom, maybe there was something to its destruction?
Genesis 19: 30-36
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Lets get real people! When people start using Stonehenge as evidence in their modern astronomy papers they you have a real crackpot. I mean this guy uses a preface from H.P. Lovecraft in his preface!
Next think you know this guy is going to be claiming that the moon landing never happened. Oh, wait.... Perhaps calling his website hollow-science would be more appropriate.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Actually, you remeber MOSTLY correctly. But only Mostly. God decided to Destroy all of Sodom And Gemorah. Cause they were EVIL. And he Came to His man Abraham. And said "Abe, I gonna blow this Joint". And Abe says, what you gonna kill everyone, surely there are good people there. How you gonna kill the good with the bad?"
And God and abe argue for a bit, and the bottom line is that there arent even 10 decent people in Sodom. At best, 8 passable ones.
Lot and his family are the 8. So as a favor to Abraham, God Pulls them out. And even they arent so good. It is sort of, in comparison to the rest of Sodom and Gemorah, these 8 are ok. But look how bad THEY are. THEN you will get an idea about how TRULY evil Sodom and Gemorra were.
That is mostly the Gist of that portion of the bible (there are other things too. If you feel so inclined, go read it. But yea. Lot&co. arent held out as really good people. Just good in Comparison to the TRUE evil of sodom and gemorrah)