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It's one of the great enduring mysteries of solar physics --
why is the Sun's lower corona hundreds of times hotter than the Sun's photosphere?
For many decades, scientists on Earth have sought an answer to the puzzle,
doing so exclusively within the confines of the standard model of the Sun.
Recently, a team of scientists reported observational evidence that the mysterious
rise in temperature could be driven by so-called “magnetic plasma pulses."
As reported by Phys.org, an international team of
scientists, led by the University of Sheffield,
have discovered previously undetected observational evidence of
frequent energetic wave pulses the size of the UK,
transporting energy from the solar surface to the higher solar atmosphere.
Of course, like all scientific data, both what the scientists
are looking for and how they interpret what they see,
is governed by their theoretical premises.
In this episode, we asked Dr. Donald Scott for a comprehensive overview
of the Electric Sun model’s explanation for the mystery of coronal heating.
For many years, the mainstream astrophysical
community has been seeking an explanation for the tremendously
hot temperatures of the Sun's lower corona.
It's a classic problem, they've been doing it for
decades, they've been worried about it for decades,
but that Sun's lower corona is more than 300
times hotter than the 6,000 Kelvin photosphere,
which is below it, if you can imagine 300 x 6,000, it's in the millions of Kelvin.
And so, it's outrageous that the Sun's outer layer should be hotter than its inner
layer, close to where they presume the source of the heat is.
This search has been punctuated by a series of press releases, especially in Phys.org
which is the source of all these press releases, NASA press releases
and stories about these sorts of things.
So for example, I'll just go through a bunch of them.
In December 2007, one of these things came out and said what they included
in their words were, "Powerful magnetic Alfvén waves in the electrically charged gas
near the Sun have always been a leading candidate for why this happens.
Alfvén waves are created by convective motions, get this,
when convective motions and sound waves push magnetic fields around."
I didn't know you could move magnetic fields by playing rock music
and push them around.
But that's the kind of level of under- standing or misunderstanding that these
things are full of, they always refer to magnetic
reconnection which Hannes Alfvén essentially
demolished as a non-process, but they always prefer the magnetic reconnection.
Also, like in June 2012, there
was an article 'Space tornadoes power the atmosphere of the Sun',
where they make a great emphasis on
"Applied mathematicians from the University of
Sheffield...say that the solar tornadoes carry
the energy from below the Sun's surface up to the lower corona” and
they are of course in the form of magnetic waves.
These are applied mathematicians who never got
close to an observatory, but they're explaining
how all of this stuff works, supposedly.
In July of 2018, there was one press release that I
will spend some time talking about, if you don't mind.
The story is this, it says,
"...coronal heating problem begins
with a green spectral line observed during an 1869 total eclipse.
Because different elements emit light at characteristic wavelengths, scientists
can use spectrometers to analyze light from the Sun
and identify its composition," that's quite right.
"But the green line observed in 1869 didn't correspond
to any known elements on Earth.
So scientists thought perhaps they'd discovered a new element
that didn't exist on Earth and they called it coronium."
Because it was observed in the corona.
Anyway, that was one of the first fictions that these
people have invented along with black holes and
neutron stars and...
Anyway, "Not until 70 years later, a Swedish physicist
discovered that the element responsible for the emission is
of all things, iron,
superheated to the point that it's ionized 13 times, that is to say it is
so hot that it has released 13 of its outer electrons,
leaving it with just about half the electrons of a normal atom of iron.
And therein lies the problem:
Scientists have calculated that such high levels of ionization would
require coronal temperatures of around 2 million Kelvin, actually.
So anyway, that's where the whole problem was discovered.
But, these press releases continue, year after year, and they talk about
heating of different elements that are heated at different rates,
they're right at the doorstep, it seems to me, of when
they start talking about ionization, of recognizing
what the source of the whole phenomenon is, that it is electrical.
Those ions are ripped out of there by electric fields.
But anyway, those ions that do escape the Sun, are those
ions form what's called the solar wind. All of these press releases in my mind
tend to use what I call ‘purple prose.’
A perfect example of this is on August 2018, it says, "For the first time, a
NASA spacecraft will swoop in and touch the Sun."
’Purple prose’ is text that's so extravagant or ornate, or flowery
as to break the flow of a person's text
and draw excessive attention to itself; I am reading
from the dictionary, that's what purple prose is defined as being.
Well if that isn't the purple prose, "It's going to
swoop in and touch the surface of the Sun."
The Sun doesn't have any surface, first part, but
anyway, that's the level, I'm trying to get across
to you, that of the PR, of purpleness of the prose,
based on a really fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually
going on up there.
The last press release: so let me talk a little bit about my reaction to it.
It does mention the four suites of scientific
instruments that are on the Parker Solar Probe.
First of all, that Parker Solar Probe is an absolutely astounding marvel of engineering.
To get that probe as close to the Sun as they’re
going to get it (and it has actually made one close
approach already), is just marvelous.
And the instrumentation that's on board is apparently exactly what they need.
Here are some important numbers
that I get from that release, in fact, they emphasize that. The Parker Solar Probe's
closest approach to the Sun is going to be around 4 million miles, that's
six million four hundred thousand kilometers.
Now, the Sun's radius is about 695,000 kilometers and therefore
the Parker Solar Probe's closest approach to the Sun is going
to be 9.25 solar radii.
That's the closest that the probe is going to get to.
In 2016, I gave a talk, at the EU Conference, that extends the Juergens model
and I mean the motive for talking to you this morning
is that I'd like people to be familiar with what Juergens,
and to what extent I've been able to extend his model,
explain the very things that these folks are looking for, except
I submit, we've got the real reason that these phenomena occur,
and it isn't going to be discovered or harvested by fancy
mathematical analysis or computer
simulations, especially when you don't understand at the beginning, what is going on.
So anyway, in that talk, if you take a look at
slide five just for example, shows the three major layers
of the Sun's outer edge, the Sun is positively charged and
it's full of positive ions that are ready to escape, and the photosphere,
that you see here, consists of charges, clumped into anode tufts.
These serve as a barrier to other
positive charges within the Sun. It's like a dam at the end of a reservoir.
That's really the Juergens model of the Sun.
And this is really the basis for everything that the Electric Universe thinks about the Sun.
Anyway, slide twelve shows the 3 plots there, which I've shown many times.
The top curve is a plot of the voltage, with points on the line.
It starts at the surface of the Sun on the left, and goes out
through the top of one of those tufts, those photospheric tufts,
out toward the corona.
It's like the cross section of a dam, at the end of
the reservoir, we'll come back to that in a minute.
The middle plot is a plot of the electric field, and the electric field
is simply a force, a force directed toward the right on any
positive ion in that area and while the chromosphere, that is from points B to D, while
in there, the flow is laminar.
That is to say that's a ski-jump that goes down there and any flow,
whether it's electrons, or protons, in an electric field,
that laminar flow is a dethermalized flow.
Laminar flow is the opposite of turbulent, it's slick.
Turbulence is measured, at least in a plasma, by its temperature,
so when you say a plasma is hot, it means the elements in
that plasma are really in random, violent random motion.
But anyway, the bottom plot there, it shows that the ions are moving,
it's just a plot of the velocity.
They're moving very fast after point D and they become
turbulent, and so that red region at the bottom there
shows high temperature.
This is the reason for the Sun's hot chromosphere; those ions are coming out of there and colliding in the
lower corona with other neutral atoms and other ions that
are there to start with and they go out toward the
right hand side and after they get past that area, there are no collisions.
So anyway, slide 16, to jump ahead.
These are the properties of the fast solar wind.
Essentially, what is a fancy name for the flow of those ions
that we’ve just seen coming over the tops of those tufts in the photosphere.
Then it emanates from regions of the Sun's surface where there are no sunspots.
A sunspot is a place where there are no photospheric tufts and that's why it looks
black and when you look at the regular surface of the Sun through a telescope,
hopefully it's a solar telescope for otherwise you'll go blind
instantly, but you can see these photospheric
tufts, so they move around and they disappear.
That solar wind approaches 800 km/s, at approximately
9 solar radii away from the Sun, remember that.
The Parker Probe is going to go in there, get in there, to about 9 solar radii.
So at that point, this fast solar wind is going about 800 km/s.
So, they should be able to measure a very intense solar wind flow of
ions, at that closest approach.
Go to slide 17 and you'll see that only a few ions are
energetic enough to get over the top of the dam.
You can see in purple there, they constitute a, this is important,
they constitute a low density -- high velocity flow.
That is to say, they're falling from a great height, a great voltage,
which is the same thing, and therefore they get very, very fast at the bottom.
But not too many of them make it over the top of the dam, so it's a low
density, it's not very much water in that flow, not very many ions.
Slide 18 shows a hydraulic analogy of the fast solar wind and it shows what that water
would look like when coming over that sluice gate.
Slide 19 talks about the slow solar wind.
Now, that's a different animal.
The slow solar wind emanates from the equatorial region of the Sun,
mainly from sunspots, and its maximum velocity is only about half the fast
solar wind velocity, but its ion density is more
than 3 times denser than the fast solar wind.
But it's much slower than the fast solar wind.
Now why, what happens?
Well, in a sunspot, there are no photospheric
tufts, the dam has been broken or removed and so
it's the, water it’s just,
or in this case the ions, they're just free to flow outward.
And slide 24 shows a low velocity -- high density flow.
The difference between the two water levels in that picture is not very much.
The river is only a few feet higher than the level
of the land onto which the water is flowing.
But, it's a lot of water, therefore it's a high density flow.
The next slide, slide 25, just shows the bottom of a sluice and
both the fast and the slow solar winds; where the fast wind comes out
of the tops of the tufts, and the slow solar wind comes out of a sunspot.
Both of them can create very strong turbulence when they collide
with ions farther out, at the bottom of the corona, just like the water here at the
bottom of the sluice gate.
It is just colliding with the
motionless water and perhaps some rocks at the bottom
on this slide and it becomes quite turbulent, and as I
said before, temperature is a measure of this turbulence.
So that's the explanation for this hot, solar temperature at the bottom of the corona.
The next slide, slide 27 is a statement made by
a well-known helio- astronomer, Dr. Grail.
He said, "Our results indicate that the acceleration of the solar wind is almost
complete by 10 Solar Radii, much closer to the Sun than had been expected.
This is about where the Parker Probe is going to get to
and the acceleration is almost complete at that point.
He said, this is important, "this suggests that the acceleration
of the solar wind and the heating of the solar
corona occur in essentially the same region,
and thus that the underlying mechanisms may be strongly linked.
And I remember to this day, when I presented that I said,
strongly linked, you got to be kidding, they're the same mechanism!
They are the electric mechanism described by Juergens' model
and it's obvious what's going on if you just
realize what the cause is, it's really pretty simple.
And anyway, therefore, given the fact that the
Parker Probe isn't going to approach the Sun closely
enough to even get into the corona, even the outer edges of the corona,
they only extend out about four, or maybe at most five solar radii.
Now, the corona itself exists way out but it becomes
dark mode plasma, you can't see it.
I think what does happen is that the corona
forms in its outer regions these, what are called coronal caps.
And those coronal caps are the basis for
Birkeland currents that go out farther, but
it's a filamentary kind of a flow out farther.
We'll see, perhaps they can measure, if they're out that far, how these Birkeland
currents do flow farther than coronal caps, we'll see.
Anyway, slide 31 just lays it out, it says that Juergens' model explains why the plasma
corona exists in the first place and it explains the inverted temperature profile
and it explains how the strong electric field above the photospheric tufts
accelarates the ions of the fast solar wind.
Slide 32 is my contribution to this.
I submit that that extension of Juergens'
work, explains that the solar photospheric tufts are variable electrical
barriers for the positive ions attempting to escape from the Sun.
They're also traps for incoming electrons, we
haven't mentioned that this morning, but they are.
Why there are two very different solar winds, one fast, one slow?
Because they come from two different places and are formed by
two different electrical, I emphasize that, electrical mechanisms.
Why the fast wind is faster than the slow wind, why it has a lower density?
That's because of where it comes from.
Why the electron temperature is the same in both winds -- that's simply
because the electrons don't go through the same mix master that the ions do.
Why do the tufts go away and collapse in a short time -- yeah because
those photospheric tufts fill up with electrons and they neutralize
and they disappear, relegated out of existence
by recombination between electrons and ions.
And last but not least, why is the fast solar wind
why does it come out of the coronal holes? Well, a coronal hole is simply
a place where there are no sunspots, so they
come out of the typical photospheric tufts.
Here's the important point -- none of these mechanisms occur at
locations accessible to the Parker Probe.
None of them.
All of these mechanisms occur way down at the base of the
corona in or just above the photosphere and the chromosphere,
and so the Parker Probe hasn't got a ghost of a
chance of getting into where these mechanisms occur.
And it will be impossible for the probe to prove anything
about magnetic Alfvén waves, I'm sure that they're dying to do that,
but it will be impossible, because the probe can't possibly get in close enough,
that is to say below the corona and observe what's really happening.
No matter how complicated the mathematical analysis or
advanced computer simulations are, it's not
going to be of any help if you don't understand
the electrical nature of what's going on in the first place.
Stay tuned for Don Scott's and Wal Thornhill's
analysis of SAFIRE Project's latest update.