Slashdot Mirror
Mystery of Sun's Outer Atmosphere Solved
xp65 writes "For decades, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million Kelvin (K) — much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' says astrophysicist James Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."
In other words, this is what took so long: "how can we come up with an explanation for an outer atmosphere that's much hotter than the surface, while ignoring the fact that the solar wind FITS THE VERY DEFINITION of an electric current, and more importantly, ignoring the fact that none of our ad hoc theories had any predictive power whatsoever?"
The solar wind is the flow of charged particles away from the Sun. A flow of charged particles is the definition of an electric current. If the Sun is electrically powered then of course its outer atmosphere is hotter than its surface, and of course it doesn't produce as many neutrinos as we would expect. By the way, "magnetic field lines" have about as much physical reality as lines of latitude and longitude, i.e. none. They don't "reconnect" to produce energetic events. Ask an electrical engineer.
The only legitimate scientific objection to the Electric Universe idea is that we don't know where all the energy came from, originally, to produce all of the charge separation. That's not a big problem though, because the Big Bang theory has a similar problem - we don't know where all the energy came from, originally, to produce the initial "Bang". Either theory requires an equal leap of faith, or an equal amount of uncertainty.
Is it a theory that explains all this or there are proven facts, too?
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
electric universe is a legitimate scientific theory, it's just not a mainstream theory. it's not automatically "flamebait" just to mention it. when i post something like this and it gets modded Flamebait, when it clearly is not Flamebait but is relevant to the discussion and highlights an alternative viewpoint, it makes me feel like I should have just posted a nigger joke instead. sorry, no offense intended at all towards black people or anything like that. it's just that there seems to be no point in actual discussion of certain subjects as they have become like religious themes with no dissent permitted. the proof is that an alternative theory is treated as heresy, instantly modded down as though it were a racist joke or a GNAA post. apparently the mods will only allow me to discuss the article in mechanical or gravitational terms, which would be nice except that MOST MATTER IN SPACE IS ELECTRICALLY CONDUCTIVE PLASMA. look it up if you don't believe me. anyway with such rigid censorship in effect, you sure as hell aren't going to have good conversation about these subjects so you might as well just be a disruptive jackass and have some fun. what's your incentive not to, exactly? the alternative is to wonder why you bothered to try and seriously discuss something that's supposed to be scientific but ends up being religious. when slashdot just becomes overrun with trolls, remember that there were people who tried to make serious non-trollish posts and you mods basically told them to fuck off, so you will get the low signal-to-noise ratio that you are asking for.
fuck off prick.
'zactly. If the past 1000 years has taught us anything it's that mainstream scientists like to shout down people with theories that challenge their dogma until those theories are proven correct. Then they pat the guy on the back and say "Oops, sorry, you were right, we were all wrong. Look how willing to learn we all are. You're now our new hero. But if anyone challenges this new dogma we're gonna kick his ass."