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SAFIRE as a astrophysical laboratory I've spoken several times about how we
might use the SAFIRE chamber to explore solar physics, planetary physics,
cometary physics. Here is a list of some of the areas that we are gearing up
for. I'm not going to describe all these, because that would take several hours.
Coronal mass ejections off the Sun, coronal streamers structures inside the
corona that have peculiar properties; the electrochemistry of comets; what kind
of substances might be created if electrical forces are brought into
cometary physics; temperatures in the corona of the Sun; double layers. The
exploration of double layers is just starting.
It's so exciting: they're showing up everywhere you look, so we're in a
beginning phase of double layer research\ now. Fast radio bursts - I haven't talked
here about those, but another aspect of radio astronomy that's not very well
explained; ionization potential of elements; Heliospheric boundary, etc.
etc. So, that's about 30 or 40 years of research for the
SAFIRE team, so hopefully we can get the ball rolling and then other people
will join in, into the fun. Now one of the main objections to our program is
suggestions that you can't really replicate these things in a box, right;
that Suns and planets are too big; the vacuum of space is too strong;
you're not going to be able to get meaningful results by setting this in a
laboratory, and that's a reasonable challenge. When faced with deciding if
something is possible or not, I don't usually look to equations first. I
usually look to experiments, or I find somebody that tried it, to ask that it’s
possible. So, you could say actually anything is theoretically impossible,
until someone actually does it. So, though things that other people have worked on
are highlighted in red that already have been worked on in laboratories outside
of SAFIRE, there's probably other work that's been done also. If anybody knows
any other labs that have done research in these other areas, by all means
contact me; we need all the input we can get.
So, SAFIRE is a tool that we have to use with lots
of other tools, to understand how electricity manifests in the solar system.
And to understand anything scientifically, there's usually a
back-and-forth process that starts. Sometimes you look out into nature, and
see what nature is doing and then you go back to your laboratory and you try to
do the same thing. So it's kind of like from the outside in.
But sometimes you do it the other way. You go to your laboratory; you observe
phenomena and then you go look for it outside, in nature. So, those are two very
different directions for how one does science and both directions are
absolutely essential. That's how new paradigms come into being:
with both of those directions. Now, so far, the last several years when
I've spoken, I really only talked about from the outside in; that long list of
phenomena that we are observing around us and trying to figure out how can we
replicate that in the lab. So, today I'm going to talk about the other direction:
How do we take what we see in the lab and then go look for things out in the
world around us. So, what you're looking at here, is a
proposed shape for the electrical potential between the Sun and the Earth,
actually between any star and any planet, between the Sun and the Earth.
You are not going to see this diagram in any astrophysical literature. The Earth over
here, the Sun over there, a lot of space in between here, leaving the Sun, covering
all the great reaches of space to the Earth, and
this blue line is a proposal, an idea, a sketch for how the electrical potential
looks between a star and a planet. As one moves away from the planet, a very
steep rise of a lot of voltage that's wavy, goes up in steps, then a little bit
of a drop-off and then a slow rise over great distance back up to the Sun/star.
Now the number I put on here (I realized I didn't take spherical
geometry into account), so this number is probably going to be more than 600,
probably 1200; who knows. This is a sketch, so why am I saying
this, that it should look this way? Well, it's an educated guess from the
SAFIRE data. It's also based on about a hundred years of plasma
discharge experiments in laboratories, and this is also from me thinking about,
and digesting the work of Anthony Peratt, Ralphs Juergens, Wall Thornhill, Don Scott etc.
And so, based upon all this data in the lab, I'm saying: let's go look for
this, let's go out and see if there's any data that supports this.
So,[the first on the curve leaving the planet, that quick rise off of the planet,
(we actually do see that, there's plenty of data for that), it's called the
Fairweather Potential. There are various explanations in the literature as to why
that is there. Almost all of those explanations say that that big increase
in voltage is caused by lightning on Earth, is the cause of that, and I am
starting to think, it's probably the other way around, that if anything,
lightning is trying to dissipate that voltage, because that voltage is
part of a larger picture of a planet's relationship to its star. So, the model is
doing pretty good so far. What about the squiggles, why did I put
those in there? I put those in there because in the laboratory a large
electrical potential change in plasmas almost always happens in steps; it
doesn't go smoothly, it doesn't go all at once;
it almost always goes in steps. So, I put steps in there, because that's what
one sees in the laboratory. To say a little bit more about that, to give you a flavor,
let's say I have two places in space: point A is at a high voltage, point B
is at a low-voltage. Okay and then there's going to be a connection between them;
we're going to fill it with plasma, or something, put something in between those
two.So, you might first guess that the
voltage would do something like that, but you hardly ever see that in nature. What
you see sometimes is something more like this. There often will be a really
quick change and then not much after that. But a lot of the time, what nature
does is something more like this, achieving that change in voltage in steps.
Here are some, you have seen some of these, some of the pictures from SAFIRE.
These are steps in voltage. The chamber is
accommodating the difference between the center and the edge, accommodating that
voltage change by putting it in steps. Okay.
prior to drawing the graph that you saw, that blue line graph, I knew very
little about the ionosphere; I still know hardly anything about the
ionosphere; it's a very complicated structure on Earth, but I thought, well if
I'm predictive, my model is predicting there should be steps of voltage change,
let's go look for it. Do I have any data that I can turn to that says, yes this
happens in steps? So, this is a picture that's often published in geophysical
texts. The surface of the Earth is down here; you're going up, leaving the Earth
like going up that way; everything we know is right down here basically. And I
want you to look at this red wavy line to the right here. That is a graph of the
free electron density as you go away from the Earth. And as you can see, it
doesn't increase smoothly, it increases in steps. I read plenty of
explanations for why the steps are there, almost all of the explanations talk,
again, about local causes, ignoring any kind of picture that would be placing the
Earth in a larger environment, where these would be expected. And one of the
main attributes of most of the papers that describe it, is how surprised
everyone is by the steps and then you have to go try to explain it, because
you're surprised by it. But you're only surprised when you have
the wrong model. If your model is right, then
you're not surprised by as many features. So, coming back to this diagram,
which I put in here for these steps, because of phenomena I know in the lab.
Look out at nature, the amount of free charge is going up in steps. Now is that
exactly the same as what I'm describing, the ionosphere in the chambers? This is
why we have to do the research, because no one's looking at this yet. So now we
can have it. We have a model, we have a question, we can go back to data and
explore it more. So, let's keep going right, we did here, now what about this?
why did I put that in there? Well I put that in there, again, because of
studying phenomena in the laboratory. Now let's go out and look at nature, and
see if around the Earth there is anything like that.
Well, there are really strange structures around the Earth, called the
Van Allen belts. I knew a little bit about them before
working with this model. In their simplest form they are a couple of
layers of charge, in close to the Earth, in a region that's dominated by positive
charges and then on the outside, regions that are dominated by negative charges.
So, on my blue drawing I had a high point there; that would be right about here,
where the Van Allen belt has the most positive charge, and then it dropped
off; that will be out here, where the Van Allen
belt with a negative charge starts to increase. So, what I just said is not
accepted by any astrophysical journal. If you call up the radiation belt storm
probe people at John Hopkins, like I did and you ask them about this, I was told
very calmly but insistently that, well there can't be any charge separations in
space, so no, you can't have positive and negative, just separate like
that in the Van Allen belts. Okay, thank you.
So I went back to the data. The data is all published, which is awesome,
all the data from these satellites, if you want to analyze data, it's great. And so, I
went back to the raw data from the satellites with my questions. I was like,
well, I still think the model might be right. And so, there are
satellites flying through these belts. They go out and then they come
in, they go out, going into the inner belt, back up to the outer belt. Here is some
data, sample data, that's about seven hours on the horizontal axis (about seven
hours of time passes by); the satellite is outside the Van Allen belt, and then
it comes inside, into the inner belt, and then leaves the outer belt. So
the interesting part here, is one is going from the outer belt into the inner
one and then back out. So, this is (an) electric field. Electric field is not the
same as electric potential. My plot has electric potential, but the two
are connected. If you know the field, you can determine the potential and vice
versa. An equation that connects them is this: it says that if you know
the electric field everywhere, or along a path, and then you multiply that electric
field by every point in your path as you're traveling, and you add all that up,
that'll give you the potential, the amount of potential change; which should
get back to the plot that I drew. So, I took the raw data of the electric field
measurements from the satellite, integrated it through the
orbit, and get a plot, kind of like this. So, as I'm coming into the van Allen
Belt from far away, there's this interesting structure,
but there's an enormous change, increase, in potential, as you go into the
inner belt and this change is thousands of volts.
So, that pretty much says to me that the inner belt is at a much higher
potential than the outer about belt, which means that you have to have separated
charges to maintain that. So, coming back to the diagram; again,
as you come towards the Earth from the outer belt going into the inner belt, there is
a rise up. That's going to be the highest point locally of the potential right
there. So, I want to recap, try to make this clear: what I just talked through is
pretty amazing. Okay, I sketched out a proposed graph for
what we would see if we went out and looked at any data available for us, and
I got this graph by looking at data in the laboratory.
Okay, and listening to people like Wal and Don and others. I didn't create this graph
initially by looking at any NASA data, I didn't create it by reading any
publications about the electrical environment or between planets and stars
And I took that graph and then I went
to the literature and said, well does the literature support my model? And I just talked
through the ways in which it does. So, we should keep going, right? What about
this slow rise here? Anything we can find out about that?
So, if you stay up late nights reading instead of resting, then you might come
across some amazing papers in the late 90's and early 2000's by
Mangeney and Salem, and they used data from the wind
satellites, which had a very high time resolution for measuring electric fields,
and they analyzed their data. So, the wind satellite sits on my diagram somewhere
about here; it's between the Earth and the Sun, I mean distance-wise, but it's
away from the Earth. It's away from the immediate environment of the Earth. It's
somewhere out in this area. And analyzing their data, they found that there is
a continuous stream of double layers, electric double layers, coming from the
Sun outward, all directions (well, the satellite is only here),
streaming past the satellite; traveling double layers. So, to give you an image of
what that might mean: these double layers are little changes of
electrical potential and they're streaming out from the Sun. So, you could
imagine maybe a stream out on the East coast; we have these mountain streams
that don't go down one big fall, like a Niagara, right. They go down
rock by rock by rock by rock, little changes in height of the water. So
picture something more like that if you're standing on the Earth, looking at
the Sun. There is this stream of little increases in potential, going all the way
back to the Sun and if you add all those up as Mangeney and Salem do, they get 600
volts difference between the Earth and the Sun. All those little increases:600.
I found out not too long ago they didn't take spherical geometry
into account for adding them up. So, there will be more of an increase as
you get closer to the Sun just for geometric reasons. So again, this is
pretty good stuff. Again, my picture here was
drawn from lab data; go find someone who's been measuring this stuff;
yeah they have very much the same scope. So of course, I put together data from a
lot of different groups; a lot of different people who consider
themselves geophysicists, who are studying this;
people who only know the Van Allen belts who are studying this etc. But they can be all
brought together if you have the right model.
Well, is there anything else we can predict? Well, something like this can
give directions for looking at connections between structures that we
know about. So, these layers in the ionosphere; remember that red wavy
line: quite variable. They're always changing, they’re never staying the same.
Okay, well we should start looking at how they're changing relative to what the
Van Allen belts are doing, because these changes have to be linked and we can
look and see what kind of changes are happening in this stream coming from the
Sun; how is that affecting things. That's one direction that we can go with this. And
then what about close to the Sun there, right?
So, thinking about all that; but Don answered all our questions the other day.
So, you can ask him about what's happening right there. That's really it.
That's my installment for this year. Thank you very much. I want to thank
everybody who supported the SAFIRE project. Very exciting stuff.
Thank you
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