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A Star Grazed Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago, Early Humans Likely Saw It (space.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Some distant objects in our solar system bear the gravitational imprint of a small star's close flyby 70,000 years ago, when modern humans were already walking the Earth, a new study suggests. In 2015, a team of researchers announced that a red dwarf called Scholzs star apparently grazed the solar system 70,000 years ago, coming closer than 1 light-year to the sun. For perspective, the suns nearest stellar neighbor these days, Proxima Centauri, lies about 4.2 light-years away. The astronomers came to this conclusion by measuring the motion and velocity of Scholzs star -- which zooms through space with a smaller companion, a brown dwarf or "failed star" -- and extrapolating backward in time. Scholz's star passed by the solar system at a time when early humans and Neanderthals shared the Earth. The star likely appeared as a faint reddish light to anyone looking up at the time, researchers with the new study said. The study has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
that everything in space is so far away.
Generations of slashditters wil tell the tale of AC's first post on this story.
Title should say "Grazed The Solar System" or "Grazed Our Planetary System". It's like writing "The Star Could Have Messed Up Our Earth".
One light year is still WAY beyond the bounds of our known solar system and lets nor forget that the oort cloud is still pretty theoretical and no one has actually seen one of these objects yet in situ (though the claim is this is where comets come from) unlike those in the kuiper belt. So saying it grazed out solar system is pushing it a bit. If it had strayed into the kuiper belt yes , otherwise, umm, not really.
1 light-year is 63,241 AU.
An AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
The solar system is about 40AU (depending on your definition of planet).
So "close" is really... well, testing things a bit. Astronomically, yes, very close.
Practically? It's 20,000 times the size of the entire solar system away and to my knowledge only two objects have ever left the solar system.
Chronologically? It happened 70,000 years ago which, again, is tiny in astronomical terms but it's already long gone. We could do nothing about it in a reasonable time, we'd barely be able to study it, and if it was slightly to the left we'd all be interstellar dust (again) by now.
Though interesting, it's hardly close or anything we can really utilise or study,
I'd be more worried along the lines of "chances are something else could come and go this and wipe us out and likely we'd never know it was going to happen". Not just stray asteriods (which obviously would be knocked for six by something like this straying close) but an entire damn star. That's solar-system-ending.
Let's be sensible here. We are talking about a very faint star, faint enough that we didn't bother to or even couldn't measure its path until now. Passing our solar system at the distance of a light year. Remember the "family portrait" Voyager took? Now, that's about 19 lightHOURS out. Or roughly 500 times closer.
Do you really think a human 70,000 years ago without any astronomic tools would have noticed? Or even cared?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... and check Sun's insurance coverage for interstellar collisions. Is a repair insurance included in its policy ? Does it allow full replacement of damaged planets, or is it just offering a mere fix of broken parts ? What about the insurance coverage offered to passengers traveling either on board of planets or space veichles ?
So... when you say "modern" next to "70k years ago"... How does that work?
Magnitude ~11, that's really dim.
It's magnetically active so could have flared enough to be visible.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Whoever authored the science news did not check their facts. Scholz's Star had an estimated absolute magnitude of 11.4 at closest approach, which is nowhere near visible enough to be seen with the naked eye. Unless telescopes were in use 70,000 years ago, it's clear that nobody would have had any clue what was going on.
More precisely, the 2015 space.com article says
Jupiter II's destination. Did it arrive yet?
... is older than measly 70k years.
There are huts of that age in Africa! (Yes, really. I'm not kidding.)
We haven't developed a lot in the last couple of 100k years. What's new is nearly only technology and experience.
But the headline is still wrong. The real situation is:
So the conclusion is that it is not completely impossible for it to be seen on rare occasions. This is in no way "likely".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
For perspective, the suns nearest stellar neighbor ...
It came so close that it dislodged nearly all of our apostrophes, leaving /. editors unable to use them for 70,000 years to come.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You Sir win!
Scholz's star is currently 18.3 magnitude, and these flares are supposed to subtract 9 magnitudes.
This should be visible by the The All Sky Automated Survey which monitors everything brighter than 14 magnitude.
So we probably already have the data to answer the question of likelihood. It's surprising that the Scholz's star researchers aren't doing it.
Recently an astrophysics professor announced the discovery of a fantastic new object he discovered on his long exposure images. He announced it to the world, but he had to send out a retraction when someone pointed out that it was the planet Mars. http://www.iflscience.com/spac...
I wonder if stories of flares from this as it passed by made their rounds over the thousands of years that eventually came to be known from Sumer legends.
Quite a way back, but we've got recordings of huge events in human history, including several supervolcanic eruptions of meteor impacts.
Might be the source.
This story is another perfect example for why the "settled science" academic approach absolutely fails to produce a rigorous result, in practice. We need to be systematically tracking controversial science claims on a social network which is dedicated to crowdsourcing this information.
It also demonstrates -- once again -- an overt bias against the Electric Universe amongst the scientific community and science journalists. This is really straightforward, guys. Let me explain.
Alongside the core scientific claim that cosmic plasmas should be modeled as laboratory plasmas, the Thunderbolts Group has also proposed that the earliest human stories are best interpreted through the lens of plasma physics. And although there is not actually a consensus on these interpretations, what some comparative mythologists in their group have concluded is that the best way to explain the earliest stories mankind told -- mainly the mythological archetypes -- is with the suggestion that a foreign star entered into our solar system in human-historical times.
Notice the remarkable similarity in the two claims. We really have to dig into the very fine details in order to discern the differences between this mainstream science claim and the Electric Universe claim.
But, also -- importantly -- notice that there was no immediate labeling of this mainstream version of the idea as "pseudoscience", even though the two claims are basically the same -- and -- more to the point, imo -- no demonstrable realization amongst the critics of the Electric Universe that this is what they are claiming. What I have observed is that people are against the Electric Universe brand -- not the idea itself -- for if a person can be convinced that some sort of foreign incursion has occurred in recent human-historical times, the suggestion that we can then interpret the earliest human stories through the lens of this idea is a very short leap of imagination.
Put another way, people are dead-set against an idea which they don't really know much about. This sort of behavior is not in the spirit of rigorous science, and it can actually lead to tremendous confusion in the sciences, for it institutionalizes a lack of rigor and biases into this process which is widely regarded as secure from such things. And, to be clear, this problem is far, far bigger than just the EU; this lack of rigor is occurring across all of the scientific disciplines. There are some controversial claims -- e.g., the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack on water and gels -- which is routinely coopted by the mainstream, for the simple reason that not even the mainstream researchers have tracked the controversial science claim. These mainstream researchers generally have no idea that they are vindicating or copying other peoples' work -- because we've yet to build out the tools which would track these claims. The information is all spread out, and lacks a system of organization which can facilitate crowdsourcing and discovery.
We really need to think more deeply about the implications of the "settled science" approach to science, for it really seems like a factory for mistakes which can, in theory, cause us to spin our wheels endlessly.
People will of course howl because I said the "EU" words, but if you really want to see substantial progress in the sciences over your lifetime, you'll think more deeply about the more general case, and you will favor the approach which results in a more rigorous scientific result. I invoke the Electric Universe to make my point, but this problem is truthfully much bigger than any individual disagreement in the sciences.
Just brace yourselves fellas. In just 200,000 years one of these comets will strike the earth and kill 99.9% of all known species. Projections are humans will be only species left at that time subsisting on eating each other. But why engage in idle speculation?
Since the Earth is going to be hit by a comet anyway in 200,000 years, why bother with conservation, environmentalism and organically grown tomatoes? Just enjoy life.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is one of the sites I used to regularly visit until it changed. And by change, I mean my computer's battery begins to drain much faster as this site does whatever it's doing loading the page. Without uBlock origin, I can't even go here as the page is so sluggish. By the time I finished reading through this article, uBlock origin had blocked more than 250 requests and counting.
that early man might have made a not of it in their paintings. What we should be looking for is a red/orange figure in the sky in their paintings.
Please, no. Science is not about consensus. Run the math, make your predictions and let your hypotesis live, or die.
You've changed the subject. This is a meta conversation about the reaction here when the words "Electric" and "Universe" are placed in proximity to one another. I am not discussing the science at this point -- just the collective reactions here.
I lived in a rural community that had no electric service. On moonless night we would sit on the steps to the veranda and look for satellites. The Milky Way was ablaze with stars. We could tell which were satellites by their movement against the background of stars.
If somebody was to ask you in the street -- without access to wikipedia or any other resources -- what the Electric Universe actually is, the nature of the problem would become immediately obvious. You would observably struggle to explain the idea's details.
The fact of the matter is that the most vocal critics here on Slashdot generally know the least about the idea. We need not perform such a survey, actually, because we can tell as much from the fact that none of the comments here exhibit the overt hostility to this nearly identical idea proposed by mainstream academics.
Except one is extrapolation from direct measurement and the other is, in your words, a 'short leap of imagination' which I think is being very generous about how long a leap it is.
The electric universe isn't a theory, it's a random hodge podge of assertions with no predictive powers. It's not science, it's barely mythology.
I think if you read up a bit more about Gerald Pollack you'll see that the folks who are co-opting his work are other crackpots extrapolating from his book and work to make bizarre claims about magic water which he never made.
The problem isn't a lack of rigor in dismissing bizarre claims, it's a lack of rigor in the claims themselves.
Lastly there is no such thing as 'settled science'. All science is in flux but some models have sufficiently precise predictive powers that attempts to replace it with some new approach will be met with skepticism. The areas you cite (with the exception of Pollack) don't even bother to make predictions, they're just folks jumping up and down yammering 'acknowledge my theory, acknowledge my theory'.
the best way to explain the earliest stories mankind told -- mainly the mythological archetypes -- is with the suggestion that a foreign star entered into our solar system in human-historical times.
What myths are you talking about here?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re: "Except one is extrapolation from direct measurement and the other is, in your words, a 'short leap of imagination' which I think is being very generous about how long a leap it is."
"Eighty-four distinct high-energy-density Z-pinch categories have been identified in petroglyphs, nearly all of which belong to the archaic [50] class. Only a small percentage of these petroglyphs, or petroglyph patterns, do not fall into any of these categories."
I've created a graphic here which I think reduces the confusion of this paper. It lays out the surprising correspondence between laboratory-generated plasma instabilities in high-intensity electric discharges and common abstract petroglyph forms.
"40% of petroglyph types can be accounted for."
Re: "I think if you read up a bit more about Gerald Pollack you'll see that the folks who are co-opting his work are other crackpots extrapolating from his book and work to make bizarre claims about magic water which he never made."
You made this up. I am talking about mainstream researchers. There is nothing at all bizarre about structured water. It has been extensively studied in the laboratory. It can be observed to accumulate at the top of a typical cup of water as a reaction to casting a very specific frequency of infrared light onto it. The experiment is not complicated. Since the structured and bulk water are actually two different molecular arrangements, they exhibit differing net charges. And if you actually hook up a resistor to these two different regions of your typical glass of water, you can actually measure an electric current. You might consider that you don't actually know what you are arguing against.
Re: "The problem isn't a lack of rigor in dismissing bizarre claims, it's a lack of rigor in the claims themselves."
This is a stunning display of irony -- for you've arrived at this conclusion without any actual process for learning or tracking the claims.
Re: "Lastly there is no such thing as 'settled science'."
By "settled science", I am referring to the idea that we can assume that some questions are settled, without any need to track them for vindications over time. It is clear from your own comments that settled science is very real.
Re: "The areas you cite (with the exception of Pollack) don't even bother to make predictions, they're just folks jumping up and down yammering 'acknowledge my theory, acknowledge my theory'."
Some of our most important ideas in the sciences today originated in just this manner, actually. And in fact, pet theories are actually quite common amongst even academics.
And, by the way, they actually do make predictions -- which is the first link that comes up if you type into Google "electric universe predictions".
David Talbott, Ev Cochrane and Dwardu Cardona refer specifically to the oldest mythological archetypes -- the "archaic" ones. For specific examples, you'd want to search for their talks on youtube.
Realize that Plato broadly cast all of the earliest stories as a recounting of a single event. This quote is very important, due not only to its specificity but also for the unrecognized fact that Plato would appear to be describing the action of gravity -- a concept which he did not understand -- drawing back to Earth a debris field. In fact, this is a very simple explanation for why civilizations like the Mayans created calendars which looked far beyond the prediction of simple seasonal cycles:
... then further on ...
Thx
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
and you will favor the approach which results in a more rigorous scientific result.
Scientists in favor of rigorous results is why the Electric Universe theory is viewed as meritless. It explains nothing better than other, more thorough theories. If this is incorrect, please provide a reference showing how (using science and logic), not another lengthy rant. Otherwise please stop wasting people's time with unsupported and discredited theories.
Well then you've hit the nail on the head. Your concern seems to be that as soon as someone sees a buzzword associated with unprovable claims, they dismiss the idea before even examining it. If you were to not use a loaded word and specifically state your hypothesis, critics would have to to directly refute the hypothesis (assuming it is disprovable).
To put it another way, if I start saying that black holes exist due to Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, people will ignore or dismiss me. And rightly so. I didn't say anything useful or disprovable. If enough other people do that within a particular forum, I'd better start stating testable hypotheses or expect to be dismissed out of hand as well.
tl;dr - I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science.
There is nothing at all rigorous about judging something to be "meritless", and then acting upon that judgment by ostracizing anybody who conveys the important message that you have missed some important details since your decision. That's human behavior at its worst, and in terms of process, it should be rid from our academic institutions.
Truthfully, there is no need at all to judge cosmological claims. What is this pressing need to identify a solution? Is something about to happen? There is only need to -- as a group -- track the ideas over time -- so that we can then base our eventual judgment upon their actual performance rather than a handful of mistake-ridden un-reviewed critiques (the "debunkers").
What is really so compelling anyways about suggesting that the universe sprang into existence from nothing? This is nothing more than the original creation story told by the Catholic church, dressed up in mathematical formulae -- which apparently is sufficient to greatly impress some people.
Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, The World & I, May 1988, p.190-197
You might consider what role this has played in the idea's popularity.
I have reported you for modding yourself up with a sockpuppet.
The reason "Electric Universe" gets you ignored by scientists is not necessarily due to controversial ideas about space, but just people that flat out lie about things here on Earth.
I've lost track of the number of times I've bumped into one of a few EU proponents, and any attempt to discuss the theory quickly turns into a discussion of how mainstream scientists ignore something, when they clearly don't. There are whole mainstream conferences for laboratory astrophysical plasmas, not to mention textbooks and courses that cover astrophysical plasmas for anyone going to grad school in astrophysics or plasma physics. I had one EU propent who runs one of the websites tell me how no one talks about plasma in astronomy a couple hours after I saw him in a popular tract for astrophysical plasmas at a plasma physics conference. I have had another tell me he got banned from a conference for being too controversial, when I was on the committee that sorted abstracts: his was accepted and he withdrew it after not registering for the conference (we have allowed much crazier stuff as long as it was vaguely on topic).
How do you take someone serious when they claim mainstream scientists ignore a topic, when roughly a third of those attending the major, annual conference are working on that very topic, and the EU proponent was at that conference and should know that? Either they are lying, or delusional. By volume, their theory ends up less about space, and more about what people on Earth are doing, and that part is horribly wrong and unfortunately factors into their claims about space too often. Some of their claims about space are actually correct, but also easily found in textbooks despite their additional claim that mainstream science disagrees when it doesn't.
(You may notice I refer to specific proponents, but not by name. That is because some will try taking things to court, I know from direct experience. Even when the case was easily in my favor, it got expensive when things were specifically done in such a way that my employer could not help, and things were dragged out so that it was easier to settle than spend years fighting. Now no one in my department wants to interact with certain EU people at all, but that doesn't stop the researchers in the dept from continuing to do the work on plasma in space that they've done for decades)
Can you let your spelling of "hypothesis" die?
It's just a conceptual label. The core claim of the Electric Universe -- the most important -- is simply that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas. Astrophysicists disagree, and instead model them as fluids subject to gravity. Yet, there is no fluid model which can ever accurately explain the behaviors of electricity and magnetism -- so where we see cosmic plasmas conducting, realize that the models in widespread use by astrophysicists today cannot explain this. By contrast, astrophysicists have rigidly stuck to claims that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality undermine the notion of electricity in space. The recent announcements that electric currents travel along AGN (black hole) jets is an unacknowledged admission that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality are meaningless conjectures. And those of us who have paid attention to concepts from the plasma laboratory understand that plasma double layers will make Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality meaningless (double layers are what allow the formation of complex macroscopic charge structures in plasmas). But, even though double layers have been definitively observed within both the plasma laboratory and even the Van Allen radiation belts, astrophysicists have refused to classify them as astrophysical entities. There have been a number of observations in recent years where scientists expressed surprise by some observation which was readily explainable with laboratory plasma physics concepts like double layers.
Those who are following the debate can see clearly how this is playing out; those who refuse to track it lack the context necessary to judge the debate's trajectory -- and these are the same people, imo, who have come to accept space as mysterious. Much of the mystery is actually introduced by the idea that gravity is dominating at the larger scales. The electrical cosmology approach generally treats gravity as a localized force which becomes irrelevant at the interstellar scale.
To go into more detail would take many more pages.
The EU arguments about cosmic plasmas can -- and actually have been -- put into mathematical terms by people who have no relation to the Electric Universe at all.
Re: "I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science."
Sort of. What I am actually arguing for is that people should track controversies over time. We need to crowdsource information about controversies, and what I promise is that if we do finally create such a system, it would boost the rate of innovation in the sciences across all disciplines.
The debate over electricity in space is merely a piece of a larger puzzle which speaks to our awkward interactions with scientific claims. That's at least how I view it. It is not the end of the story, and there is a lot of progress which can be made from merely studying the ways that people interact with scientific controversies. This is what I've been doing for 12 years now, and it's how I will design the social network which will eventually fix these problems.
It's important to stress that this is not an idea I came up with last night. My approach was to embed myself into the Thunderbolts Group, and then over the course of many years, I ran their claims directly against their biggest critics + the public. By observing the reactions to the same claims, many times over, you start to observe patterns. The point is not to say that this is all that is important; the point is that the social processes play an inordinate role in how people come to these conclusions. There is very little engagement with actual claims and technical details happening -- and this should to some extent alarm people -- because it should be clear that this is how groupthink can emerge.
They already know who I am because after I was maliciously attacked last week for my electricity in space post, they are the ones who restored my karma. When I complained that I was being down-voted by an angry mob, they agreed. So, it would seem that you've not fully tuned into the situation here.
The earth wasn't around 70,000 years ago. Science once again falters in the face of religion.
There is actually some merit to these claims that astrophysicists are not cultured in the observations of laboratory plasmas. When it comes to double layers, plasma pinches and the numerous forms of plasma instabilities, the very specific geometries of filamentation in plasmas (just last week observed at Jupiter's pole, and not a single astrophysicist acknowledged it!), the simple fact that microwaves are produced by electron beams (and hence a CMB can be explained with electricity in space just as easily as a creation event), the concept of quasi-neutrality (and what it really means for conduction in plasmas), the by-now handful of observable violations of Debye screening, the fact that the ionosphere behaves as a plasma with less than 1% ionization, an understanding of the history of the Birkeland current idea, the history of the empty vacuum of space mistake, the history of Alfven's rejection of MHD in his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech, the concept of Marklund convection, the observation of critical ionization velocities associated with HI hydrogen filaments, and a full appreciation of both sides of the magnetic reconnection event ...
... when it comes to each of these topics, it is easy to demonstrate that astrophysicists have not been trained sufficient to reason about these matters in the astrophysical context. They're struggling to identify the points of contention because they've been left with the impression that there is no real debate to be had here.
The argument is not that astrophysicists don't know anything about plasmas. What they know is MHD -- and what has been put forward is the fact that that should not be assumed to always be the proper tool for interpreting astronomical plasmas.
a) That's not a denial.
b) It's pretty obvious that a single moderator is up-voting all of your posts, since they all have the same score.
c) It's likely that *you* are that single moderator.
d) All of your posts here are off-topic.
e) All of your posts on the last astronomy-related article were off-topic.
f) It's especially ridiculous that the post I'm replying to has been modded up. It's literally just whining about the moderation process, something that's specifically discouraged in the moderator guidelines.
g) Go start your own blog already.
h) Try to have a few more posts on that blog about actual ideas, and fewer about how you think everyone is ignoring your ideas.
On the specific issue of magnetic reconnection, I was really referring to the fact that there are two separate sides to that debate -- and the astrophysicists, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining the opposing arguments.
In my opinion, a huge aspect to this problem is the institutional aversion to telling certain awkward stories that relate to these topics. The mistaken assumption of empty interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space is perhaps a prime example of a story which academics and science journalists seem to treat as sort of "rated X" insofar as they generally refuse to place any importance on it. Yet, it can be traced back to the selection of numerous theories in the early 1900's. For example,
Eddington explicitly refers to the assumption is his choice of models for powering the Sun:
Although I don't have an authoritative source on hand, it can also be shown that Sydney Chapman used the assumption to reject Kristian Birkeland's proposal that the aurora originated with the Sun.
These are remarkable historical observations insofar as we today know that this assumption was incorrect (And more than that, the mistaken assumption was hiding from Eddington an alternative potential power source.)
The thing about this is that it's rare to see anybody connecting the dots between this former mistaken assumption and the theories which "won out" as popular today -- yet, it is also remarkably easy to show that it did in fact play a part. And there can be little doubt that even Einstein's work could also be implicated as basing on it, for the first instrumented probes were not actually sent to space until 1958 -- 3 years after his death. So, can it be that Einstein was simply working with what he had available to him? The question would seem to be valid, for once plasma is introduced into the conversation, then we can without a doubt formulate alternative hypotheses for all sorts of cosmological observations.
The mainstream would be wise to start telling the story of this mistake, for it is extremely important. I try to explain why here.
What nobody thought to claim this was the red comet indicating change, or the Red Lady, or something?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
going from 1 ly to 17 - 23 ly in only 70,000 years is really moving quick though. That's 250,000 kph.
What is known or thought was the tobo event caused a near extinction event of all humans on planet with as few as 3000 of our race of humans left....
this star might have had some gravitational affects that i'd like ot see explored in regards to this time period
Sorry, that star would have been invisible except for brief flares, so it would indeed have been seen as something quite usual, if noticed. And the flares would have been brief and irregular, so someone reporting seeing them probably wouldn't have been believed. Only if a group of people say it at the same time would it have been believed. And then it would probably have been counted less remarkable than a meteor.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
makes one wonder what affects it may have actually had and it may have altered the orbit of earth and others even f a little
a new study suggests. In 2015
So quite an old new study, then.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Skepticism is not the same as hostility.
Also, it's not clear to me why this event/analysis should cause me to be dubious about conventional science. The step from the event to your conclusion needs considerable justification.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think you need a clearer idea about how bright a 10th magnitude star is. Even when flaring it would be barely visible. Or perhaps you should read one of the links.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How do you take someone serious when they claim mainstream scientists ignore a topic, when roughly a third of those attending the major, annual conference are working on that very topic, and the EU proponent was at that conference and should know that? Either they are lying, or delusional.
Pretty sure you're trying to make sense of a mental illness. I've met someone that believed in chemtrails... When you hear them on the Internet or radio you'd think they're trolling you, but when you run into them in person, it's sad. They have a hard time determining what's real, and their paranoia will show in other ways. It's an illness :\
Why do you believe it? I'm not asking for a quote from some authority.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
TL;DR:
The electric universe theory says "gravity isn't a real thing, because PLASMA!"
The scientific community says "gravity has to work pretty closely to how we think or satellites (among otehr things) wouldn't be possible and they clearly are. For your theory to be correct the theory of gravity has to be completely wrong and it clearly isn't. So you need to come back with proof that you theory is at least as good as gravity in all areas that gravity is useful and can therefore replace it entirely or reconcile the parts that contradict gravity before it can be considered a viable addition to scientific knowledge".
In detail:
More correctly the "Electric Universe Theory" is a form of mysticism trying to pass off the idea that ALL astronomical phenomenon can be modeled simply as electromagnetically active plasma as science. This is incorrect as many phenomena are better modeled by other theories (notably gravity). That some things can be accurately enough modeled as plasmas doesn't change that most things cannot.
The problem is that the underlying assumptions contradict the very useful theory of gravity. General relativity works very well and is empirically verified by things like GPS satellites. Thus in order to replace GR a new theory must either mathematically reduce to GR in the cases where GR has been empericly verified, or produce equally good predictions covering those case. In addition it must also eitehr make the math simper to perfom, or have the ability to predict things that are different from what GR predicts and have those predictions empirically verified.
Were EU theory science it would make the uninteresting claim that some things are plasma and can be modeled as plasmas, and maybe some things that aren't intuitively obviously plasmas are (surprisingly) also plasmas, but that most things still aren't plasma. Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell), point to the known limits of GR to claim GR must be wrong (whong as in totally wrong not merly incomplete), the known successes of modeling objects as plasma to prove that EU works all teh time (rather than sometimes if you cherry pick the conditions), and hand-wave the gap between those two points and the conclusion that "therefore everything is plasma, gravity is completely wrong, and you can be smarter than so called "scientists" is you just buy my book that explains it all".
Let's review each of the many problems and oversights in your logic.
First, realize that Einstein died 3 years before (1955) anybody definitively understood that the universe is dominated by plasma (1958). Do you know why? Because for 24 long years -- from 1920 to 1944 -- the American public ridiculed Robert Goddard, the first person to suggest that we could send a rocket to the Moon, for not understanding that a "rocket would have nothing in space to push against" (a common misconception back then). Do you know what stopped the ridicule? The Germans took Goddard's invention and attacked Europe with 3,000 V2 rockets. Those V2's had all of Goddard's key inventions within them, because as the American public was mocking Goddard, the Germans were intently listening to everything he said.
Apparently, the American public learned nothing at all from that event, because to this day, we continue to ridicule innovators in the sciences. Like Don Scott of the Thunderbolts Group, Goddard was an American professor.
Re: "The scientific community says "gravity has to work pretty closely to how we think or satellites (among otehr things) wouldn't be possible and they clearly are"
Einstein lifted the Lorentz transformation from the aether theorists of the day. He did not invent this math.
Re: "So you need to come back with proof that you theory is at least as good as gravity in all areas that gravity is useful and can therefore replace it entirely or reconcile the parts that contradict gravity before it can be considered a viable addition to scientific knowledge"
The Electric Universe does not begin in the same place as conventional astronomy and cosmology. It starts by recognizing that the cosmic plasma models widely applied by astrophysicists are wrong -- and once the models are corrected to reflect our laboratory observations, the dark matter problem goes away. From that vantage point, options open up for how to proceed to explain gravity. But, Anthony Peratt's galactic simulation with proper rotation curves explains what is happening at the largest scales without need for any dark matter -- meaning that it essentially meets your criteria above (just not in the way that you imagined).
The point is that we have "potential wins" on both sides of this debate. It is not a one-sided affair, for instruments designed to detect dark matter have grown a million times more sensitive over the past 15 years -- meaning that dark matter is starting to look like modern cosmology's dead end.
You could have reasoned your way to the same conclusion without having to build all of those instruments, actually, by simply considering the ridiculous scales we are talking about here: If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would be a stunning 4 miles away (!). Simple logic and some very simple algebra is screaming at you that gravity is a "localized" force, starting at the interstellar scale.
Re: "General relativity works very well and is empirically verified by things like GPS satellites"
There are plenty of rebuttals online to this thoughtless claim. I encourage you to look them up. They're not difficult to find.
Re: "Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell)"
All that I can say is: Welcome to the Space Age -- a revolution which is, apparently, still playing out.
Quantum Statistics of Nonideal Plasmas
The whole point is that this observation is a vindication for the approach proposed by David Talbott and Ev Cochrane, and yet none of the people here noticed because it was decided that the Electric Universe is "debunked". It should present us with an important lesson about process.
Personally, I believe it because I spent a few years running the Electric Universe claims against their critics. I observed the reactions, and came to realize that there is a widespread refusal to simply let the cards fall where they may. Everybody is trying to force-fit the data into their pre-existing narratives and conclusions.
I also noticed that vindications for electrical cosmology occur far more often than people realize. They convince themselves that they can ignore the idea, then they don't notice when these vindications occur. There was one just last week, with the infrared images of Jupiter's pole. The ring of vortices is a classic form from the plasma laboratory which has been observed for almost a full century now. In the early days, plasma physicists would etch electrical discharges into various media like paper, and a very common form was a ring of vortices. This is a typical shape that electricity takes when it travels through gas: The plasma filaments break up into a ring of smaller filaments (vortices in 2d cross-section). Anthony Peratt has written a couple of papers detailing these "instabilities". In fact, some people refer to them as "Peratt instabilities".
For people who refuse to track the Electric Universe debate, the infrared ring of vortices at Jupiter's two poles are a mystery. Not a single astrophysicist on Twitter or elsewhere seemed to recognize this classic laboratory plasma form. I was personally stunned -- but I'm not sure why, because it's happened many times before. For those of us who have taken the time to learn about laboratory plasmas from this debate, we immediately recognize this form -- because it is common.
Do you see what is happening here? It's very serious and very bad. Science has become so specialized that scientists cannot recognize valid critiques from neighboring domains. And since nobody is tracking controversies, there have been many other examples of such vindications which went completely unnoticed.
I 100% agree: People who rant about chemtrails are literally mentally ill. Joe Rogan had an excellent rebuttal to this nonsense on one of his shows; I want to create a transcript, it was so good.
You're not giving me any incentive to look into this.
In your first paragraph, you compare Einstein's death date and something about the estimated amount of plasma, without saying what relationship they have, or what the US public's attitude towards Goddard's rockets has to do with anything. (If you're trying to find an example where scientists were wrong, you can, but this isn't one of them.) You have a limited amount of words to entice people into looking into the theory, and you waste them with irrelevancies.
You quote something about gravity, and seem to think the Lorentz transformation has something to do with it. The Lorentz transformation is important to Special Relativity, and gravity is part of General Relativity. Nor does it matter where Einstein got the mathematics (one would have assumed that, if Einstein had created that transform, it'd be called the Einstein transform); what matters is what the math is and how it predicts physical reality.
You speak of "the dark matter problem" as if it were only a fudge for galactic rotation curves. We've also seen a lot of gravitational lensing where there's no normal matter to cause it. The Bullet Cluster was the first and biggest example.
There's no reason to believe that gravity is a short-ranged force. Your link applies the known laws of gravity and gets an apparently known result. Sure, it's weak over interstellar distances. However, it scales with mass, so a galaxy worth of mass does have significant gravity at a distance.
So, you come off as someone who can't explain stuff well, doesn't know the existing theory worth a darnn, and is unfamiliar with the observations made. This isn't promising.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Actually, the most important ideas in science came from people who clearly understood the field they were working on. Academic pet theories do not in general contradict what's generally accepted. You are showing no signs of understanding the theories you want to supplant, or of understanding the reasoning and observations behind those theories. We have good predictions from General Relativity. We have lots of observations confirming it. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to study at least the observations, and show how the EU handles them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Astronomers and astrophysicists know that interplanetary and interstellar space isn't a complete vacuum. That isn't controversial. There is a known galactic magnetic field, although it's very weak.
You also seem to be arguing from a theory of science as individual authorities. Eddington had a reputation for eccentricity, and his work is pretty old by now. There's been more work since. Einstein did die in 1955, but that doesn't mean General Relativity was finished at that point. Lots of physicists have worked on it since then. Scientifically, Einstein's death was not important, just his earlier contributions. The fact that a lot of observations postdate Einstein doesn't matter, since physicists have been hard at work on GR without him.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Trying to teach a pig to sing? GLWT.
It's also a vindication of the approach used to discover Neptune. The approach was not controversial in any community I know of (well, except the flat earthers).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Can you give me a link to a paper predicting the vorticies at Jupiter's poles before they were observed? I don't know enough to check the validity of the calculations vs. standard calculations, but a pre-existing prediction would be relatively convincing.
Calculations that I can't check don't mean much to me. Predictions of things that were later observed do, and are relatively unambiguous.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It wasn't just an uninformed public who made fun of Goddard. You're looking at the past through the lens of the present. Our cultural origins were more confused than this. We did not spring out of our intellectual womb, fully formed, like from the stork. Mistakes were made. Very, very big mistakes.
"'Space' was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there"
Re: "Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell)"
Each quote admits that plasma is 99% of what we can see, so realize that if there is no dark matter, plasma is next in line for being the explanation.
I keep a personal library of modern science critiques. I know how it works by now, probably more so than most specialists -- many of which never seek to actually become generalists. It doesn't happen without trying.
That's missing the point. Scientists have for years now struggled to explain how to get from gravitational accretion to the planetary system we see today. And observing other stellar systems has only served to elevate the mystery. So, what would we expect to see if a foreign star was to come close enough that it actually was very much visible? We'd expect that it should shuffle the planets around in a manner which leaves us as confused as we are.
We might also expect to see something very much like this:
This is a photograph of one of those imprints made by a plasma filament. See the article for more information.
It IS interesting!
Yes - this star passed about a light year away.
That is ~63,241 AU distant. Neptune is ~30 AU away. So, yes, it passed by far away. Yet, it is still close enough to matter.
Consider that there are LOTS of binary star systems in the galaxy; where those orbits are a light year or so in diameter.
Consider, also, that the theoretical Oort cloud is about a light year from the Sun, and remains in the Sun's gravity well.
So, yes, it seems quite plausible that a red dwarf star passing a light year away had an impact on our solar system 70,000 years ago.
If even just a pretty red light show and a perturbed comet or two or three...
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
So, what does Goddard have to do with this anyway? I'm not aware that he was a major theoretical physicist.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So what? We know it's plasma because of currently accepted astronomy and physics. (There's more dark matter, but we can't see it.) That doesn't mean that an alternative idea that relies on the Universe being mostly plasma is true, or even credible.'
And, no, plasma doesn't do anything similar to the observed anomalies of dark matter. We can see it. It interacts with itself other than gravitationally. It can't provide gravitational lensing without visible matter because it is visible matter.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm sorry, but your linked article causes me to feel the theory is less worthy of investigating that I did before I went to it. And a search of the text did not include the word "Jupiter" so it can't count as a pre-existing prediction.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.