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This is a short talk about yet another ”here we go again” moment, when I came
across an article in Scientific American from March 2018, entitled, The Sun is Spitting Out Strange
Patterns of Gamma Rays - and No One Knows Why. I did not know much about the subject,
but I silently made a bet with myself that 1) The existing theory of gamma
rays from the Sun would be based upon gravity and random motions, 2) The new improved data would
completely contradict the predictions of that gravity model, 3) The article would bring in dark matter
and a few quotes to the effect of “we are completely surprised by what we are
seeing, maybe there's new physics here,” and 4) Of course nothing would be said
about a possible electrical explanation. This was admittedly a somewhat cynical wager,
yet I did win the bet on all four accounts. I reviewed Don Scott and Hannes
Alfven models of the Sun's electrical connections to its larger environment
and I had some discussions with Wal Thornhill about the gamma-ray data.
The Sun puts out very few gamma rays. It seems there are very few gamma rays in the entire universe,
at least in comparison to the number of photons that we see with our eyes.
Gamma rays are a type of light which is very, very energetic, billions of times
more energetic than the photons of light that power photosynthesis
and average biological processes. The recent papers from 2018 and 2019
summarize ten years of gamma ray data from the Sun taken by the Fermi
Telescope. Let's see how well the Standard Model prediction stacks up
against the published data. I made a little chart - on the left are the basic questions and then the
Standard Model and the data. How many gamma rays would we expect to
see from the Sun? The Standard Model predicts a certain number that would be
observed, the data shows we see anywhere from 10 to 100 times more than was
predicted, based upon the energies. Where should we see the gamma rays come
from? The Standard Model says that the rays should come from the Sunspot
regions. What do we see? Well, the rays come from the entire disk, and also from
around the Sun and also from above the poles of the Sun. What distribution of energies would we
expect? The Standard Model says that the spectrum should be smooth, and weighted
with very few high energy gamma rays. The data shows far too many high energy rays,
and a clear gap in the 40 to 50 giga electron volt range. When during the solar cycle would we
expect to see the gamma rays? Standard Model says there should be more
gamma rays during solar maximum when there's more sunspots. The data shows just the opposite.
And would we see gamma rays from solar flares? The Standard Model says no, and the data says yes.
To quote a few of the authors and reviewers, Brian Fields, a particle astrophysicist from
University of Illinois says, “It's amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong
about something we should understand really well: the Sun.” Tim Linden a particle astrophysicist at
Ohio State who helped analyze the data said, ”The forty to fifty giga electron volt
dip just defies all logic.” And Mehr Un Nisa at Michigan State University said,
”Analysis of nine years of data collected by Fermi-LAT from the Sun revealed a very bright steady emission
of gamma rays at energies above 100 GeV that contradicted all theoretical expectations.”
What is this standard cosmology model that is so spectacularly incorrect?
It is a model built upon isolation and random destruction. This model says that our Sun, like every
star, is energetically isolated from all other stars. It says that stars like ours cannot produce
any gamma rays of their own from their surface, and hence any observed gamma rays coming
from the Sun must be coming from somewhere else. In this model, if the Sun cannot make its
own gamma rays then where can we look? The phenomenon to the rescue are cosmic
rays. Cosmic rays are a bit of a mystery. We observe very high energy particles
impacting the earth from all directions and we call these cosmic rays. They are
known to come from pulsars, like the Crab Nebula, but that one clear observational
fact is usually greatly downplayed in favor of the Standard Model
description of cosmic rays, which says that they come from the most cataclysmic
events imaginable, like dying exploding superstars and colliding black holes, and
colliding and exploding magnetars and colliding, exploding galaxies. You get the picture.
The Standard Model paints a picture of our isolated Sun in a sea of debris
generated from random destruction. Occasionally a stray bullet from this mayhem
will ricochet through a sunspot magnetic field and be flung towards the earth. As
already said, every prediction of this model was incorrect. The data is fascinating. The solid circle
in the middle is the disc of the photosphere; the outer dashed circle is
the outer limit of where they collected the data. Each dot is a gamma ray detected.
The left two panels are from solar maximum when there's many sunspots
and during which the previous model predicted there'd be more gamma rays.
The right two panels are from solar minimum, where there are few sunspots and the
previous model predicted there will be fewer counts. I am struck by how little data there is.
Over 10 years and we have only a few hundred data points? These solar gamma-ray events are very
rare. I admit the telescope is very small and very far away from the Sun but still,
compared to the gazillions of visible light photons coming off the Sun every second,
gamma rays are rare events. How might this data make more sense if
we include electricity in our cosmology. If we pull back and look at the
filaments of the interstellar medium, all stars and planets are very, very
small specks on much larger filaments. The distance scales here are difficult
to comprehend. Do you remember those comparisons, if the entire atom were the
size of a football stadium, then the nucleus would be a golf ball in the center.
Those are the sort of sizes we need to imagine for stars in galactic filaments.
I will try a metaphor, using cities here on Earth to understand the sizes
involved with the filament model. Imagine the galactic filament is the
high tension power lines connecting entire cities on Earth. If we zoom into one city,
that is the region of the filament where our Sun lives. Zoom in further to a football stadium in
that city, that is the full body of our solar system and then all the planets and the
bright disk of the Sun what we usually think of as our solar system are all
contained in that little golf ball in the center of the stadium.
From this, how then do we get 10 billion electron volt gamma-ray bursts?
Does this mean that the galactic currents have this kind of voltage? No, not at all.
Think about lightning on Earth and about the upward shooting sprites and elves.
The Earth's global electric circuit only sustains a few hundred thousand volts
between the ground and the upper cloud layers. Yet, in a strong thunderstorm, we see
gamma rays corresponding to many millions of volts. How do we explain this apparent
contradiction? Where did the energy come from, since locally there is only a hundred thousand
volts between the cloud and the ground. As Alfven pointed out, in a distributed
electrical circuit, such as the electrical grid for a town,
the energy from the entire grid can be released at one small point during an explosive breakdown.
The transformer might only have a thousand volts across it, yet when it
explodes, it releases electrons with millions of volts. How?
Because the transformer is just a small piece of a much larger circuit.
The same explains how sprites and elves above storm clouds can send gamma rays
out into space packed with billions of volts. If you read the existing literature
about elves and sprites, the explanations are stuck on exactly this point. They are
not including that the burst is part of the entire electrical circuit of the Earth.
The same applies to the Sun. The surface of the Sun and the corona of the Sun are
all connected to a much larger circuit that includes and reaches beyond our visible Sun.
Explosive releases in the form of gamma rays can happen inside of that photosphere surface.
They can happen above the surface, or even several radii away from the Sun,
because the electrical body of the Sun extends out to the heliopause and is
connected to a circuit that reaches to the neighboring stars. The filament model
predicts that we should see at least some high energy events analogous to the
strongest lightning on Earth. Studying the Earth gamma rays will teach
us how to better understand the Sun's electrical environment. What about the polar component? The
authors say that there is a steady source of gamma rays coming from the
polar regions of the Sun. In the Standard Model this is unexplainable, because the
Standard Model says that above the poles are weak magnetic fields that are
relatively straight. Hence, they would be unable to bend cosmic rays.
But in the electrical model, stars are connected through their poles to larger
filaments that stretch for many light years, connecting multiple stars into one
larger circuit. Charged particles flowing towards stars, would have a very long running distance
along these smooth magnetic field lines and be capable of picking up very large energies.
In the electrical model, we would expect to see a relatively constant source of
high energy emissions coming from the polar regions, which is exactly what the data shows.
The authors further describe an equatorial component of the data.
I do not see that so clearly and I think maybe they are holding on to the
Standard Model which says that there should be something special about the Sunspot region.
It looks to me that the rays are coming from a sheath that surrounds the photosphere.
It looks to me that the gamma rays are not at all limited to what we would call
the surface of the Sun. The data is spread out around the Sun.
This region around the photosphere is where atoms become stripped of their
outer electrons, which is usually interpreted as thermal heat. Contemporary
astronomers look at the ions around the Sun and say that the corona must have an
enormous heat and temperature of millions of degrees. But this stripping of electrons could
have an electrical, or even a chemical cause and not be related to anything,
like temperature as we have defined it on our cold, wet planet. Remember, you can strip electrons off of
water with a 5,000 degree oven or with a 9 Volt battery at room temperature.
According to Don Scott's model which builds upon the model of Hannes Alfven,
our star is powered primarily by a DC current that flows into both poles of the Sun.
This DC current also has a ripple, where the current rises and falls slightly over a 22-year cycle.
This 22-year ripple in current is connected to the 22-year solar cycle
where sunspots come and go and the polarity of the Sun's magnetic
field flips. The 22-year cycle is not necessarily coming from the outside, nor coming only
from the Sun, but is more likely a result of the interaction between the Sun and the
larger filament. We can draw a simple graph of the electrical current powering the Sun. The
blue wavy line represents this current feeding the Sun. The current does not go
positive and negative like an AC current in your house. The current is one-directional but has a
strengthening and a weakening. In other words an AC ripple on top of a
predominant DC current. For example, the Sun might have a current oscillating between 10 billion and 11
billion Amps. On the diagram I have circled in red the maximum and minimum of the wave. Here the
current to the Sun is steady - it does not change much. We are in solar minimum.
The magnetic field of the Sun is smoother. Now there is longer running room for
particles to be accelerated towards and away from the Sun. We would expect higher gamma ray output.
I have boxed in green the places where the current of the Sun is changing
rapidly. Here we are in solar maximum. The magnetic field of the Sun is
agitated by the quickly changing current. Electrons flowing towards the Sun at
this time are caught up in the smaller circuits and cannot so easily reach gamma-ray energies.
The electrical model agrees with the Fermi Telescope data. What about solar flares?
according to the Standard Model, solar flares cannot reach the 100 GeV energies that are seen by
the Fermi Telescope. Yet, several of the data points happened exactly during large solar flares. The
authors are perplexed by this coincidence. I would again point to what we know
about lightning on Earth. If the earth can produce gamma rays in electrical discharges,
solar flares can easily reach hundreds of times those energies.
What about the number of gamma rays we see? The Standard Model is short by a factor
of about a hundred. Remember, the Standard Model says that
the gamma rays are only produced when a background flux of cosmic rays randomly
interacts with the surface of the Sun. For this model to so clearly get the
numbers wrong means to me that the gamma rays are simply not being produced in this way.
This again is clearly better described by the filament model, where stars are
fed by concentrated rivers of energy and not some random background.
We will have to build out different solar electrical circuit models and see
which circuits give the observed number of gamma rays. Lastly, we can ask about the dramatic
absence of gamma rays in the 40 to 50 GeV range. I do not have much to say about this one.
Usually, when we see a missing energy range in an emission spectrum, we look
for some specific process that would absorb just that energy. This energy is
tantalizingly close to the mass of an iron atom which we know has a special
place in nuclear transmutations. But I really think that this gap will
point us to something that no one has yet imagined about basic solar physics.
I can understand if you did not closely follow all my explanations. Like me, you
probably had never before looked at gamma ray data from the Sun. So, you are
still wrestling with the vocabulary and how pieces fit together.
The existing model used by astrophysicists predicts everything incorrectly.
But the journals and the reviewers cannot come out and say such a simple fact
and instead must contort themselves around dark matter and possible new physics.
I think some old physics, called electricity, can help us think through this gamma-ray mystery.
It seems to me that the electrical filament model of stars does a particularly good job
of explaining why we see a hundred times more gamma rays than the random model
and why there is a steady polar component. I also think the filament model
explains the distribution of gamma rays in a sheath surrounding the photosphere.
There's plenty of quantitative work to be flushed out in all this.
I'd be happy to help someone tackle that.
Thanks again to Wal and Don for helping me think through these ideas.
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