Solar Hurricane Rips Off Comet's Tail

coondoggie writes to mention that NASA recently captured images of a solar hurricane ripping the tail off Encke's comet. "In a release, NASA said preliminary analysis suggests that the tail was ripped away when magnetic fields bumped together in an explosive process called "magnetic reconnection." Oppositely directed magnetic fields around the comet "bumped into each" by the magnetic fields in the hurricane. Suddenly, these fields linked together--they "reconnected"--releasing a burst of energy that tore off the comet's tail. A similar process takes place in Earth's magnetosphere during geomagnetic storms fueling, among other things, the Northern Lights, NASA said."

Comments

Magnetic Reconnection?

[IMarvinTPA]

What is this Magnetic Reconnection thing you speak of?
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060711magnetic.htm

IMarv

Re:Magnetic Reconnection?

[pln2bz]

Science is not a democracy, by the way. We do not vote on ideas based upon who is saying them, contrary to the increasing belief that this is how it works. Instead, we should attempt to understand the arguments that are being made and discuss the logic behind both sides in the argument.

There have been plenty of intelligent people who believed that space plasmas are electrical. You just have not read about them. Hannes Alfven, Ralph Juergens, Kristian Birkeland, Anthony Peratt, to name a few. Hannes Alfven received the Noble Physics Prize for his creation of magnetohydrodynamics, which is the mathematics used to model space plasmas. You may be surprised to learn that in his acceptance speech, he disagreed with the idea of modeling space plasmas with frozen-in-place magnetic fields -- a technique which he originated and that persists to this day. He was completely ignored.

If you have not read the story of Halton Arp, then you are limiting your exposure to observations to those which you agree with. In truth, there is no good reason for why Arp's observations are not correct. Arp has been obstructed from sharing his findings at every step of the way, oftentimes by the very people whose research is threatened by his observations.

There is a person on wikipedia called ScienceApologist, who has been censoring EU Theory from wikipedia on the basis that there are no published papers which support EU Theory. Well, Anthony Peratt, Wallace Thornhill and a handful of other EU theorists did in fact get published in September in an IEEE publication. ScienceApologist decided to actually send a letter to the IEEE editor, objecting that the papers were pseudo-scientific (and yet in the absence of any evidence supporting his statements). Apparently, his requirement that EU Theorists be published is in fact not sufficient at all. There appears to be no burden that can be met by the EU Theorists that would satisfy him, and the ethical problems associated with his being both a wikipedia referee and a player involved in influencing the publication of the theory appears to escape him.

Not being popular is not an excuse to avoid reading about something, especially when there are such over-zealous censors who believe it is their duty to prevent the public from understanding the debate about electricity in space. If a theory appears to be logically coherent and supported by observational evidence, then it stands a chance of being true regardless of how many adherents it possesses (nature does not care what people prefer to believe), and it deserves investigation and even attempts to quantify it. Evaluating theories purely on the basis of who looks or sounds the smartest is a downward spiral. I recommend that you think twice before suggesting that others follow your lead. You very well could be redirecting people away from fruitful lines of research and investigation. Despite your good intentions, you may in fact be causing harm. You can't possibly know until you *read* what the theory says and talk to people about it, right?

Re:Magnetic Reconnection?

[CorSci81]

Well, it goes like this.

That you just posted is a piece of pseudo-scientific dreck from all I can tell. I had a course on MHD in grad school, the theory of magnetic reconnection most certainly can account for the speed of energy release in solar events. It's also an important problem in plasma instability in tokamaks. Searching on google scholar didn't find any peer-reviewed papers by plasma physicists refuting magnetic reconnection.

Perhaps they were confused by Biskamp's 1986 paper on the Sweet-Parker model failing to achieve fast reconnection that was cleared up in a 1992 paper by Priest and they missed that Biskamp himself seems to accept fast reconnection as possible in his 1994 paper?

Re:Magnetic Reconnection?

[pln2bz]

I was pointing our the crackpottery of the first paragraph of your link, and saying that the rest of what he has to say should be ignored based on that

But magnetic reconnection is *extremely* important as it attempts to explain why the Sun's atmosphere is 100x hotter than its surface. We see a similar inverse temperature situation with the Earth's atmosphere, but it is generally agreed that this is a result of an external energy source. If Don Scott is right about magnetic reconnection, then the most popular theory for how the Sun's core can heat up its atmosphere without heating up its surface is bunk. It is an important issue that people should attempt to understand. If you just set it aside, then you are actually refusing to consider the meat of his argument. That's not very helpful for evaluating whether or not he's right. We might as well judge his theory on what his hair looks like or the fact that he's not in a wheelchair or hasn't been on TV.

Solar Hurricane???

[flajann]

What is a "Solar Hurricane"? This is a astronomical term to which I am unfamiliar.
I wonder if they are talking about coronal mass ejections? If so, I don't get the analogy. Hurricanes are basically large vortices's. Coronal Mass Ejections are not.

Re:Solar Hurricane???

[meowsqueak]

Silly terms from fluid mechanics. There's no such thing as a solar 'wind'. It's the movement of charged particles in an electric field - an electric current.

Or maybe they are just using the term 'hurricane' as an emotional allusion to a violent storm.

Re:Wonder what the RF signature of that was like

[Jane Q. Public]

The source of the solar wind anomaly -- the recent "bare" magnetic storm -- is a much higher source of RF and other energy than any distant magnetic effects. It might have made a blip but would probably be drowned out by the main phenomenon.

Re:Cometary Tails as Electron Sources

[Guppy06]

"For instance, there is still no aether theory that everybody can agree on."

Only because you insist on including yourselves in "everybody." Any hand-waving explanations for the lack of an aether wind belong in the same category as epicycles.

"There is legitimate disagreement amongst the theorists on how to replace quantum mechanics"

Replace quantum mechanics? Why? Have all of our semiconductors suddenly stopped working?

"gravitational lensing, for instance, appears to be quite bunk,"

Um...

"as does the 1919 eclipse"

And what of the 70 other total eclipses during the Twentieth Century?

"These are all legitimate questions that can only be resolved through additional observation."

How can these questions be resolved through "additional observation" when the only reason you still have such questions is that you are ignoring all the observations that indicate just how wrong-headed your questions are?

"but is there really any substance to your allegation that delicate egos are the cause of a lack of quantification? No, it appears that you just made this up."

Don't you mean that I need to make more observations?