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The Secret of the Sun's Heated Atmosphere
eldavojohn writes "There has long been speculation on why the Sun's surface is a mere ten thousand degrees while the atmosphere can reach millions. Space.com is reporting that the mystery has now been solved. Researchers looked for Alfven waves in the solar chromosphere and found them. Followup studies employing simulations demonstrated that the energetics work out to transfer energy from the Sun's surface to its overlying corona.. The magnetic waves may also be the power source behind the solar wind."
When I saw that article, I couldn't help but think "Damn that's a hot data center, glad I'm not running any of their servers :-) " then again if someone were truly able to get a computer running at that temperature, maybe they're worth considering...
...in bed
...but does it run solaris?
ALFVEN!!!
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas - a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is fused into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.
The confusion with the Sun's inverse temperature situation (the corona is around 100x hotter than the Sun's surface) follows naturally from the theory that the Sun has a thermonuclear core, which originated around the time that we discovered that it *could* be the mechanism responsible for the tremendous energies we observe. But beware because the issue is by no means completely settled. Any theory that attempts to explain the inverse temperature problem must also grapple with the fact that the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets! There is no satisfying explanation for that one to date without consideration of an electric field, and the standard solar model miserably fails in explaining it. And this is no minor matter either because the solar wind, taken as a whole, constitutes the largest structure in our solar system, the heliospheric current sheet. Contemplate the implications of that for a moment: astrophysicists do not understand what is causing the motions of the largest structure in our own immediate neighborhood!
...
Within that context, any certainty about what the Sun is or how it operates has absolutely no basis in the facts that we know to date. An honest assessment that strips out all of the *assumptions* about the Sun that we've accumulated over the years will result in a much wider range of possible theories. The unfortunate fact is that the field of astrophysics currently only studies one such possibility out of the entire set. They have essentially worked their way into a corner, and we get theories like magnetic reconnection to explain the inverse temperature problem. But in the process, they completely ignore the work of many great scientists like Nikola Tesla, Kristian Birkeland, Hannes Alfven and Ralph Juergens.
Mark my word: we will hear more about Nikola Tesla as the years move forward. It appears that Tesla's experiments with impulse currents led him to accidentally discover how to intentionally create either a z- or a theta-pinch (which is the fundamental force for creating planets and stars within plasma-based cosmologies). Tesla discovered that the pinch created a stinging pressure wave that could penetrate both glass and copper Faraday cages! He then discovered that he could pulse-width modulate these explosions at thousands of times per second to eradicate the harmful human effects associated with the electrical explosions. It appears that Tesla essentially discovered a mechanism for longitudinal EM waves. He correctly noticed that the force of these waves tends to outpace the compression wave (the electrons). He had no idea how dramatically true this is though, and the information is largely lost to this day. But it is being slowly rediscovered.
If you have doubts about any of this, then I urge you to read the very compelling materials offered on the Thunderbolts Forum by user junglelord
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=933&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15
Once fans of Nikola Tesla wake up to the fact that his findings make total sense within the Electric Universe framework, all hell is going to break loose!
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
The waves are called "Alfven waves", with good reason. The fact that this then results in his name being attached to the theory is amusing, perhaps ironic, and arguably unfortunate, but hardly criminal. Shit happens when names are attached to things in math and science, it's something one has to just get used to.
(The name name "big bang" was meant be disparaging, and yet here we are. Look up "Fuchsian groups" sometime, too.)
And while you're at it, give astrophysicists a little credit. We do know physics, including E&M, pretty damn well. What's you're qualification to arm-chair quarterback on this?
I'm not familiar with Alfven, but I offer the following:
Joseph Preistley is credited with discovering oxygen.
That's a wonderful honor and all except his opinion was that air gets clogged with "phlogiston" when material is burned, such that a fire within an enclosed environment gets extinguished because the air can no longer absorb this stuff.
Nowadays, chemists understand that free oxygen gets depleted during a fire - which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Preistley's strongly held belief.
What can I say, "misplaced honor happens".
This is not my sig
They have spent a decade or three researching magnetic reconnection - in the lab, via in situ space probes, and by remote sensing (a.k.a. using telescopes) - and have developed descriptions of the behaviours of plasmas, building on Alfvén's work and these discoveries, that match the observed phenomena nicely.
Take a look at the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (http://mrx.pppl.gov/), as an example of lab-based plasma physics work on magnetic reconnection.
But maybe you know something about the behaviour of plasmas that the thousands of researchers - experimentalists, theorists, 'observers', and those who simulate plasmas in computers - don't, or have missed?
Why not write a paper to Nature, or Science, giving chapter and verse of the holes in their work?
In which of his publications may one read more? I am not sure why no one is researching it Perhaps because there's no evidence of any net motion of matter in to the Sun? There is a solar wind, and it flows outward; the Sun is losing mass (matter), not gaining it (the occasional comet or asteroid it eats nowhere nearly makes up for what it loses in the solar wind).
When you see a magnetic field, your first question should always be, "Where's the current?"
Have you ever heard of permanent magnets?
There are two methods of producing magnetism: 1) by current and 2) by aligning particles with non-zero magnetic moments (quantum spin) within a substance.
Electromagnets use the first method while permanent magnets use the second.
What powers the Sun?
... but as he published it, in Russian, in a physics journal that had essentially no circulation outside the (then) USSR, in the 1950s, he missed getting the glory for it).
Here is a good overview, written in 1996, of the standard solar model (SSM) (http://www.ap.stmarys.ca/~guenther/Level01/solar/what_is_ssm.html).
In a nutshell, the SSM matches a wide range of relevant observables, from the Sun's mass, its 'sound spectrum' (helioseismology - the solar equivalent of seismology), its radius, its energy output, the constancy of that energy output (time periods of years to billions of years), its (estimated, inferred) composition, and so on*.
In 1996, there was one, very annoying, exception - the flux of neutrinos from the Sun seemed to be way too low!
This very nice article by John Bahcall^, on the Nobel website, tells the story of how 'the solar neutrino problem' was solved (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/bahcall/index.html; it turns out that the original author of the the 'MSW' neutrino oscillation theory was actually Bruno Pontecorvo
There is, as SD readers know from pln2bz's comments, an alternative view of what powers the Sun: giant electric currents throughout the galaxy. As far as I know, this 'Electric Universe' idea (EU) has no basis, either in terms of quantitatively matching any significant subset of the relevant observations, or in terms of the underlying theory (ask an EU proponent about how much experimental support there is for the EU idea of what supports the Sun against gravitational collapse, to take just one example; or to characterise the current which powers the Sun, in terms of charge carriers, flux, speeds, and so on, and how well this characterisation matches what inter-planetary probes such as Ulysses or Galileo or Cassini have detected).
* If any reader is interested in reading more on this, right up to the latest ApJ papers, just holler!
^ Bahcall was one of the greats of 20th century astronomy; although he didn't share the Nobel for discovering the solution, his decades-long work on the problem (including his encouragement of Davis, who did get the Nobel) was crucial to that solution.
there are in fact alternative possible explanations for our observations which astrophysicists tend to ignore
Or, more pertinently, these so-called alternatives fail several key tests, such as internal consistency, consistency with relevant theories whose domains of applicability overlap (quantum mechanics, in this case), and (above all) consistency with good, relevant observations.
They are complicit with ignoring these alternative explanations because math already exists for the conventional paradigms
And you know this because? Your objective evidence is ... what, exactly?
The public has this misconception that astrophysicists have *ruled out* alternative explanations in an honest manner by completing a comprehensive review of all of the theories out there, and what one discovers over time is that in fact, that has not occurred in the slightest
So, once again, if you please ... references to papers, published in relevant peer-reviewed journals, which lay out this/these 'alternative explanation(s)' and which show internal consistency, consistency with quantum mechanics (in the relevant domains of applicability), and (above all) consistency with good, relevant observations and experimental results.
I think I have asked for this nearly ten times now; not once (that I recall) have you answered.
We've seen stars erratically jump all over the HR diagram, including FG Sagittae, V605 Aquilae and V4334 Sagittarii and V838 Monocerotis ("The Electric Sky" by Don Scott points to a total of seven counter-examples to predicted stellar evolution)
Hmm ... not a bad track record then, for standard models of stars ... given that there are detailed records on what, about a billion stars?!
And if any SD reader is interested, a quick check on the relevant, peer-reviewed literature will show that pln2bz's assertion here is, shall we say, only coincidentally consistent with the truth.
In fact, we see unusual things with stars on a weekly basis, and this should rationally induce some self-doubt. And yet, it does not! Every enigmatic observation is just rolled into the standard model as quickly as it goes into the books, and at the expense of people actually proposing creative solutions that better explain *all* of our observations.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but science is a process of discovery ... only by testing, modifying, testing again, and so on, is progress made. After all, if the 'enigmatic observations' cannot be 'rolled up into the standard model', then it's time to change it!
As for 'people actually proposing creative solutions', let's have them roll up their sleeves, write up their solutions, and get them published, shall we? That way everyone can review them, critique them, test them, and so on.
And yet, there are laboratory plasma physicists who argue against things like magnetic reconnection as being redundant of exploding plasma double layers (Alfven included). It is wrong to completely ignore these people. We should foster a public debate on these issues and honestly assess who is right without preferences to either. Instead, what we get is millions of dollars pumped into magnetic reconnection with little to no consideration of exploding plasma double layers.
So, in the last few hours, you've gone from claiming magnetic reconnection cannot possibly be right (because Alfvén said so), to reading the hundreds (or thousands) of published papers on the topic (including the results of lab experiments), and concluded that they all fail because of something else that Alfvén said?
You sure are a fast reader.
So, yeah, parsing criticism until it no longer makes sense is all fun and games. But the big picture is not so funny at all.
Hmm ... are you s
Neither of your links says that the solar wind is accelerating as it passes Earth. Both say that it accelerates near the Sun (within a few solar radii), which *is* non-controversial and even predicted by Parker's original work. What Parker doesn't explain is the magnitude of the acceleration (see Kivelson and Russel's book, for example), but you're denying that, aren't you?
Can you please bother to read your own links closely enough to verify their relevance? Simply posting a random link and saying, "here's my evidence" may look good at first glance, but it's really a very poor way to make a case.
"the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets!"
No, it doesn't. I looked it up once before in an argument with an electric universe guy and I'm too lazy to do it again, but you can find the velocity of the solar wind as measured by SOHO and also by Voyager with a quick Google. I found an average value for Earth's neighborhood as well. Guess what? Fastest at SOHO, slower at Earth, slowest as measured by the Voyagers. That is, the solar wind slows down as it "passes the planets." The solar wind DOES accelerate within a few radii of the sun's surface but it certainly does not accelerate farther out.
The charged solar wind / accelerating solar wind idea isn't even the least bit logically consistent even if it didn't disagree with EVERY observation, both of the actual speed of the solar wind and its composition.
Another strike for the electric universe.