Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe brought to you by the
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Today, physicist Wal Thornhill is joining us to help us play catch up on a number
of highly significant space science stories from the last few months. We now
have a wellspring of a half-dozen or so extremely significant headlines relating
to stars. These are discoveries that confound or are irreconcilable with the
standard ideas about the very nature of stars, including how stars form, where
their energy comes from and why they sometimes explode as supernovae. Now of
course the purpose of this series is not merely to share space science headlines,
but rather we like to use some of the most significant discoveries today as an
opportunity to illuminate what the Electric Universe Theory (EUT) is; what it
actually proposes and how it explains space discovery. As you know, if you
followed the EU over the last couple of decades, in many instances some of the
most surprising space science ”discoveries,” (I use that word in quotes)
were actually explicitly predicted by the Electric Universe. In fact, the first
item we're going to discuss provides a beautiful contrast between the
predictions of Standard Theory versus those of the Electric Universe. On
February 20th of this year, the European Space Agency issued a press release
entitled ‘XMM-Newton reveals giant flare from a tiny star.’ It states “A star of
about eight percent the Sun's mass has been caught emitting an enormous ‘super flare’ of
X-rays - a dramatic high-energy eruption that poses a fundamental problem for
astronomers, who did not think it possible on stars that small. The culprit
is a kind of star called an L Dwarf. This is a star with so little mass that
it is only just above the boundary of actually being a star. If it had any less
mass, it would not possess the internal conditions necessary to generate its own
energy.” Well, that last sentence reveals an assumption that any star
”generates” its own energy, which astronomers probably don't even realize
is an assumption. However, the Electric
Universe has always stated that stars are formed along, and are ultimately
powered by, external Birkeland currents. The ESA press release goes on to state
”In a matter of minutes, the tiny star released more than ten times more energy
of even the most intense flares suffered by the Sun.” Concluding on the real nature
of the conundrum, the press release states that this type
of star “...has a low surface temperature for a star... Astronomers did
not think such a low temperature would be capable of generating enough charged
particles to feed so much energy into the magnetic field. So the conundrum is:
how a super flare is even possible on such a star.” and the lead author of a
paper on this finding says “That's a good question.
We just don't know - nobody knows.” So Wal, we've talked about this discovery over
the last couple of days and I think you'll agree it's not actually accurate
to say that “nobody knows how this type of star would produce such an
energetic flare.” That's right. For many years, astronomers have been astonished
by seemingly powerful outbursts from stars they have considered to be dying
or dead and just cooling off and that is, the infrared Red Dwarfs, the L Dwarfs
and M Dwarfs and those kinds of stars. And the fundamental problem for
astronomers is that they base their theoretical expectations on the
thermonuclear model, and the thermonuclear model has the energy
developed by the thermonuclear reactions in a core gradually percolating to the
surface over hundreds of thousands of years. And the reason for that slow
percolation of course is because they have to find some means of reducing the
radiation from the thermonuclear bomb at the center of the star, to something
which is merely shining in the visible spectrum and producing heat and light.
Now Red Dwarfs hardly produce any heat and light; they're more like an
old-fashioned bar-radiator, electric radiator. Of
course it's rather ironic that that's precisely the best model for the star,
that it is an electric star under low power. Anyway, the problem that this last
recorded one presented, is that its outburst was ten times stronger than the
most powerful outburst from our own Sun, which is a main-sequence star and is
supposed to be functioning at the peak of its performance. Once again, we have
this fundamental belief in the idea that a star is like a campfire in the sky, you
know. It has to fuel itself, it burns itself up in these thermonuclear
reactions in a hypothetical core. We don't know anything about what is inside
a star, because to begin with, there is no physical theory of gravity. And so, the
very idea of the accretion of stars gravitationally, to form something that
can even produce thermonuclear reactions in the first place, is merely a
complicated story that was invented at a time when nuclear power was first
discovered. And Eddington put forward a story which is based on a gravitating
ball of hydrogen gas and then assumed that, somehow or another, that could
initiate thermonuclear reactions in the core of the star. We are dealing with a
plasma, not a neutral gas. The Electric Universe looks at brown dwarf stars not
as failed stars at all. There is no such thing as a failed star.
In the case of the M Dwarfs, I wrote many years ago now, that they are not actually
dwarfs in size because all red stars are gigantic.
For instance, Jupiter could quite easily be a brown dwarf star, if it was taken
out of the solar system and existed independently. Its entire magnetosphere,
which is huge, in fact at opposition it would look the same size as the moon in
the sky, if we could actually see it. You can imagine that lit up and it glows red
in the case of these dwarf stars, the energy is therefore
being provided to the star from the galaxy itself. Now all red dwarf stars,
and all red stars for that matter, are unable to control the light output based
on a variable power input. It's only the bright stars that can do that. So, if the
power suddenly changes for any reason at all, the red star will change with it, and
this is being observed with the red giant Betelgeuse right now, which is
puzzling astronomers at the other end of the size scale in stars. That huge star
is so big that we are actually able to see the surface, not in great detail but
in recent years, the star has been changing in size, and even the redness or
the light output from the star varies over its surface, which is what we should
expect if it's being powered externally, but not if it's being powered internally.
The idea that the energy has to be stored by the star and generated by the
star, once again, this view of stars as isolated objects; whereas the Electric
Universe model points out the stars are lit. And all their characteristics are formed
by the electric current they're receiving from their environment; and if
there's any change in that environment, then the star will be variable in some
fashion. Our own Sun for instance, shines steadily both in the visible spectrum
and in the radiant heat part of the spectrum, while its power input is
changing, as can be seen in the X-rays. In X-rays our Sun is a variable star; it almost
winks out at some point in that solar cycle and is quite bright in the maximum
part of that cycle. A red star doesn't have that luxury; it doesn't have a
bright photosphere which acts like a transistor action on the current. And so
the red star, the only thing it can do is to suddenly eject material, charged
material, in order to try and establish equilibrium again with its environment.
In the case of a red star, since the power is low, that comes out in
the form of sudden outbursts. And those outbursts can be as powerful as a bright
star, simply by the change in the input power. It's like a supernova where the
circuit is suddenly broken and in that case it's like opening a circuit breaker
in an intercontinental transmission line. Energy stored in the magnetic field of
that long transmission line is suddenly released at the point where you've
opened the switch, in this case a star. Red dwarfs flare, supernovae explode.
They're both driven by the same process. Very good. In fact you just very nicely
laid the foundations for the next story we'll talk about, which I can tell you
has garnered a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes discussion in the
Electric Universe community. Late last year a team of scientists published a
paper on the “mysterious disappearance” of a hundred stars, which
they uncovered through a comparison of old data and new observations. A hundred
stars apparently have literally vanished from the sky. The lead author of a paper
on this finding stated, “Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole,
there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish. The
implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics
fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced
civilizations.” This item has generated some sensational headlines, which
speculate that alien technologies could be blocking the stars from view.
Now I'm certainly not someone who is on principle allergic to theoretical
discussions of the existence of alien civilizations. But for a number of years
my cynical observation has been that astronomers, and certainly popular
science media, are more willing to entertain speculations about aliens than
they are to give any meaningful attention to the principles of plasma
cosmology and the Electric Universe. Now Wal, it happens that in 2007 you
wrote your own peer-reviewed scientific paper on the electrical nature of stars
and of supernovas, which was published in the very prestigious IEEE
Transactions on Plasma Science. Why don't you explain, in your opinion, why alien
technologies are not necessary to explain the “disappearance” of these
stars. That's right. In the case of electric stars, they can be expected to
suddenly disappear if their power is switched off; just like any electric
light. As for the speculation about aliens
doing it with something called a Dyson Sphere, which is supposed to encompass
the star at some distance and pick up all of the energy that it's radiating,
shows that scientists making such a claim have no idea how stars work. Stars
pick up their power input, part of it at least, from their environment. So, if you
were to build a Dyson Sphere, even if that were possible, you would not have a
star any longer. Astronomers categorize stars by their brightness and color on
what's known as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram; but it's not an evolutionary
plot over billions of years of a star's progression from youth to old age; it's
simply a scatter diagram. But stars, in the standard theory, are supposed to
spend billions of years in more or less the same location on that chart. Yet some
have been seen to change their position on their diagram in a few days or weeks.
The fact that the overwhelming majority of stars shine so steadily, is
unexplained by the thermonuclear model of stars. That hypothetical model is
highly unstable, so the night sky should look like the 4th of July. After more
than 60 years and countless millions of dollars, scientists have not been able to
produce fusion power like the Sun, because their fusion model and
consequently their experiments, are highly unstable. The fact that stars
shine so steadily was one of the key features that convinced the engineer
Monty Childs that the electrical model of stars was one that made sense of the
steadily shining stars and could be tested by engineers, and it's based on
the transistor current control effect in the photospheric plasma,
that maintains steady radiant energy more than X-rays. The Sun is a variable
star. Monty's successful implementation of the SAFIRE experiment proved the
model: the experiment is very stable. Astrophysicists don't recognize clear
electrical engineering evidence that the Sun exhibits the features of an anode in
a low pressure gas discharge. If we find it the smartest way to produce a tiny
intense source of light in a searchlight, which is an electric arc equivalent, why
would nature do it in any less efficient way? Remembering that stars are
infinitesimal specks of dust in the vastness of space. While returning to the
subject of stars that go supernova, you have always argued against the belief
that type 1a supernovae can be used as ”standard candles” which have
supposedly affirmed the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. And so
along those lines, a recent report on phys.org is extremely telling. It states
”The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark
energy is provided by the distance measurements using type 1a supernovae
(SN 1a) for the galaxies at high redshift. This result is based on the assumption that
the corrected luminosity of SN 1a through the empirical
standardization would not evolve with redshift. New observations and analysis
made by a team of astronomers show however that this key assumption is most
likely in error.” Now the report goes on to say “Other cosmological probes, such as
the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) ,are also
known to provide some indirect and circumstantial evidence for dark energy,
but it was recently suggested that cosmic microwave background from the
Planck mission, no longer supports the concordance cosmological model which may
require new physics.” So Wal, very simply, in your opinion, why are astronomers
incorrect in their continued belief in the expanding Big Bang universe? The very
assumption they make, of course, is incorrect; that the standard or the
corrected luminosity of SN 1a, through the empirical standardization,
would not evolve with redshift. Because the research of Halton Arp showed that
the redshift does evolve, but not with distance but with age. As for proposing
new physics, this is the standard response every time fundamental ideas
are being challenged by observations. But the Electric Universe has shown that we
were closer to the truth in cosmology more than a hundred years
ago. What we need is not new physics but a revisit of old physics.
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