Welcome to Space News from the Electric
Universe, brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project at Thunderbolts.info
In this series we have reported on many recent discoveries that call into
question the foundational theories about our Sun and all stars. For the better
part of a century, institutional science has told us that stars are powered by
nuclear fusion at their cores. However, on our own Sun many of the observable
features remain anomalous for the nuclear fusion model and the problems
only continue to grow with ever finer technological data. Today a new study, conducted
by a team of scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology
provides yet another blow to standard theories about the Sun. The problem is
the discovery of a surprising relationship between solar flares and
sunspots as reported on the official NJIT website. Solar physicists have long
viewed the rotation of sunspots as a primary generator of solar flares; the
sudden powerful blast of electromagnetic radiation and charged particles that
burst into space during explosions on the Sun's surface. Their turning motion
causes energy to build up that is released in the form of flares. But a
team of NJIT scientists now claims that flares in turn have a powerful impact on
sunspots, the visible concentrations of magnetic fields on the Sun's surface, or
photosphere. A co-author of the paper published in Nature of Communications
states, “We used to think that the surface’s magnetic evolution drives solar
eruptions. Our new observations suggest that disturbances created in the solar
outer atmosphere can also cause direct and significant perturbations on the
surface through magnetic fields, a phenomenon not envisioned by any major
contemporary solar eruption models.” In the first of this two-part episode Dr.
Michael Clarage, a scientist on the Safire project team, explores the
significance of this discovery for the Standard and Electric Universe theories
of the Sun, respectively. Thank you for having me on again; it's
always a pleasure. I want to talk about some recent observations that have
called into question our basic understanding of solar flares and sunspots.
Sunspots, viewed in visible light, are dark spots on the photosphere, which
is of course why they are called sunspots. They were first observed with
telescopes in the early 1600’s. They come and go in greater and lesser numbers
over the 11-year solar cycle. They are about as big as planets. 300 years after
the discovery, we were in for a big surprise, when we were able to send X-ray
and ultraviolet cameras up above the Earth's atmosphere and look at sunspots.
Above these cool, dark spots on the surface of the Sun are very high energy
loops and streamers. Here is a side view of a sunspot showing X-ray emissions
towering above the sunspot. The fact that we see X-rays above sunspots, means there
are extremely high energies above the sunspots. Here is an SDO (Solar Dynamics Observer) image in the
far ultraviolet wavelengths. You can see that above the surface these sunspots
are connected by towering loops of plasma; these are called coronal loops
and they are also very energetic. It is from these towering, energetic loops that
come solar flares. Solar flares are some of the highest energy events in the
solar system and they happen when these coronal loops very quickly let go, or
burst, and send out a large amount of energy. With this brief introduction to
sunspots and solar flares, we can now talk about the very surprising paper
published by Chang Liu on the 24th of October 2016. The paper
is surprising because it completely calls into question the existing
scientific understanding of the relationship between sunspots, coronal
loops, and solar flares. The commonly accepted view of the Sun, is that all the
energy comes from nuclear fusion happening deep in the center of the Sun,
which energy then slowly makes its way out to the surface. Looking at things
this way, it is then further assumed that all the energy in coronal loops and
solar flares ultimately comes from inside the Sun. Since the 1960s all
theories about solar flares have assumed that the energy for the flare comes from
inside the Sun. But up until quite recently we did not have telescopes
strong enough or fast enough to really prove or disprove that model of how
things work. This is why the results published in 2016 by Chang Liu's team,
are so revolutionary. The data used in this paper were obtained with the new
solar telescope at the Big Bear solar observatory which is operated by the New
Jersey Institute of Technology. The work is a joint effort by NASA, the Korean
Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Seoul National University and the
Chinese Academy of Sciences. The data clearly show that the flare in the
corona happens first; then there are large scale motions in the sunspot
beneath. That sequence of events is not possible with our current models. All the
flare models since the 1960's assume that the energy flow on the Sun only
goes from inside out; never from outside in. This led Chang Liu to make what is
now one of my favorite quotes in astronomy: he says, “It is analogous to the
tail wagging the dog.” I will give some further quotes from his discussion of
the results,“We used to think that the surface’s
magnetic evolution drives solar eruptions. Our new observations suggest
that disturbances created in the solar outer atmosphere can also cause direct
and significant perturbations on the surface, through magnetic fields, a
phenomenon not envisioned by any major contemporary solar eruption models. This
has immediate and far-reaching implications in understanding energy and
momentum transportation in eruptions on the Sun and other stars.” The Sun's outer
layer, or corona, where flares are released, has a plasma density about a
hundred million times smaller than that of the photosphere. It’s analogous to the
tail wagging the dog; the lower density regions are much less energetic and
forceful. By construction, these existing models cannot address flare induced
sunspot motions, which were considered implausible. We conclude that the
observed sunspot rotation on the photosphere is a result, not a cause of
the flare magnetic reconnection in the corona, which challenges the conventional
view of the photosphere corona coupling during flares. I think Chang Liu is being
both cautious and brave in these statements. Are the previous scientific
models wrong? Yes, we now see they are all wrong. But do the new observations
disprove the entire theory that stars are powered from the inside? No, not
necessarily. Chang is pointing out that here the data proves the existing models
wrong. The existing models do not allow that a solar flare in the atmosphere can
cause these large changes in the photosphere below, so at the very least
new models will have to be created. Chang is not saying that there's anything
fundamental wrong with our theories about how stars work. Since the new
data shows that the existing models are fundamentally incorrect, the observed behavior is
actually impossible under the existing models. To my eye this is yet another
indication that we might want to consider the larger theory that all
energy and influence in our solar system comes only from the center of the Sun.
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