Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
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In the first four installments of this series,
we illustrated that the most powerful electrical phenomenon on our own world,
lightning, may be the ideal analog
for many stupendous electromagnetic phenomena throughout the cosmos.
The tell-tale signatures of lightning are seen in stellar and galactic jets,
in filamentary star-forming networks and in mysterious magnetic structures.
Yet, space scientists still imagine that gravity is king
and thus, with ever finer technological data,
the standard explanations for unexpected discoveries have grown increasingly bizarre.
In this episode,
we will explain why the discovery of pulsing electrical oscillations in space
is the fifth of ten reasons why the universe is electric.
Pulsars
Modern astrophysics is a wonderland of strange and often physics-defying oddities.
One of the most bizarre astrophysical objects ever proposed is a so-called neutron star.
Scientists tell us that the material, left over from a supernova explosion
of a massive star, collapses gravitationally
forming an incredibly small yet massively dense star,
mostly composed of tightly packed neutrons.
The average neutron star is thought to be around 10 to 20 kilometers in radius
yet supposedly has about one and a half times the mass of our Sun.
In fact, as described on an official NASA webpage, a neutron star is so dense
that, on Earth, one teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons.
A rotating neutron star is said to emit narrow beams of radiation
which sweep toward the Earth, causing pulses of radiation to be received.
If the source of such a signal is a mechanically spinning lighthouse
then it must spin incredibly rapidly,
sometimes considerably faster than a dentist drill.
In fact, in September of this year,
scientists, using a network of linked radio antennas, reported their observation
of a pulsar that spins up to 707 rotations per second or 42,000 RPM.
In comparison, the blade of a typical light helicopter only spins at about 450 RPM.
The equators of the fastest spinning neutron stars
appear to travel at a fraction of light speed.
In order to avoid flying apart, a star would have to shrink gravitationally
to a tiny fraction of its former diameter to avoid that fate.
With little regard for particle physics,
the electrical nature of matter and the profound weakness of gravity,
it was found that the star would have to be composed of neutrons.
Retired professor of electrical engineering, Dr. Donald Scott,
outlines a fatal objection to this notion,
"A proton-free nucleus or 'charge free' atom made up of only neutrons
has never been synthesized in any laboratory nor can it ever be...
Lone neutrons decay into proton - electron pairs in less than 14 minutes;
atom-like collections of two or more neutrons will fly apart almost instantaneously."
Nevertheless, in astrophysics today
the existence of neutron stars is treated as settled science.
Recently, scientists have claimed that they've witnessed a so-called
"cosmic smash up" between two neutron stars 130 million light years away.
Like the recent pronouncements of the so- called detection of gravitational waves,
which was produced by two black holes that supposedly collided a billion years ago
creating "ripples" in the fabric of space-time,
the supposed observation of a "neutron star collision"
has been met with zero skepticism by science media.
Before addressing such a claim,
let us further examine the theoretical foundations for the neutron star hypothesis
and the numerous discoveries that severely challenge
whether such an object could possibly exist.
It is critical to remember that, the incredibly exotic, neutron star hypothesis
was not a predictive theory which was composed and then verified through observation.
Rather, the hypothesis was invented in the 1960s
after the completely unexpected discovery of radio pulses from the constellation Vulpecula.
In 1968, the world renowned astrophysicist Thomas Gold
proposed that the source of the pulses was a rapidly rotating star.
In recent years, with improved data, scientists have observed multiple "pulsars"
that would falsify the neutron stars existence
if astrophysicists were actually willing to entertain its falsification.
In several Space News episodes, we reported on pulsars
whose apparent brightness exponentially exceeds their absolute theoretical limits.
In 2014, we reported on the discovery of a so-called neutron star
that appeared to shine with the brightness of 10 million suns.
This fatal discovery was characterized as follows in a Tech Times article,
"A dead star over 12 million light-years away is giving off enough light in pulses
that it breaks the Eddington limit, a law of physics
that outlines the maximum brightness an object can give off based on its mass."
More recently, scientists using data from the ESA's XMM-Newton satellite,
reported their observation of the so-called
brightest and farthest pulsar ever observed from Earth.
The Pulsar NGC 5907 X-1 reportedly exceeds, by 1,000 times,
the theoretical limit for such an object's brightness.
Earlier this year, phys.org reported of this pulsar,
"In one second, it emits the same amount of energy
released by our Sun in three-and-a-half years."
The lead author of the paper on the findings stated,
"This object is really challenging our current understanding
of the 'accretion' process for high luminosity stars...
It is 1,000 times more luminous
than the maximum thought possible for an accreting neutron star,
so something else is needed in our models in order to account
for the enormous amount of energy released by the object."
As we've pointed out in many previous episodes,
impossibly huge or bright objects in space
usually appear to astronomers due to a misinterpretation of a redshift
which the late astronomer Halton Arp documented in his
Catalogue of Discordant Associations of high-redshift quasars and low-redshift galaxies.
Others, so-called, neutron stars defy all the standard explanations
of (a) pulsar's energetic emissions.
In 2013 scientists working with the ESA's XMM-Newton satellite,
reported their observations of a pulsar's shocking X-ray variations
which are anti-correlated in flux with radio emissions.
A lead investigator said of the findings,
"...to our surprise, the correlation between these two emissions appears to be inverse;
when the source is at its brightest in radio waves,
it reaches its faintest in X-rays, and vice versa."
The team is also surprised because the so-called neutron star
is thought to be five million years old,
yet hypothetical objects of that age should not emit powerful X-rays.
The lead author of a paper on that discovery stated at the time,
"The people creating models will have to rethink what we are discovering here.
When we look now to what is so far published in papers,
nothing at this moment can explain what is happening."
But such an unresolved, intractable problem is immediately forgotten
in the aftermath of media fire-storms,
or what the late astronomer Halton Arp described as, "Science by press release".
As we've outlined in the previous installments of this series,
such theoretical crises are inevitable in the cosmos where colossal gravity
is the only explanation for stupendous electromagnetic phenomena.
Despite tremendous logical and evidential objections,
institutional science has shown no attempt to develop theoretical alternatives
to the mechanically spinning lighthouse interpretation of pulsars.
The disciplines of plasma physics and electrical engineering
do offer such promising alternatives.
It has been suggested that a more useful analogy to pulsar flashes
is the complex radio signals induced in Earth's ionosphere by powerful lightning.
A pulsar, switching from X-ray to radio emissions,
is neither predicted nor explained in standard theory.
Yet it is not mysterious if the source is a lightning-like electrical discharge
which can produce both.
In fact, this idea was proposed in 1995 in the scientific paper,
"Radiation Properties of Pulsar Magnetospheres: Observation, Theory and Experiment"
by Dr. Anthony Peratt of Los Alamos Laboratories and co-author Kevin Healy.
Peratt and Healy examined well over a dozen pulsar anomalies
that the standard lighthouse model has failed to explain.
They wrote,
"...there yet exists no self-consistent theory to describe the pulsar electrodynamics."
Using electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations, the team proposed a,
"...magnetospheric disk field-aligned current transmission line system
as the source of the observed radiation,
with external wave excitation by as yet an unexplained source."
This model does not require a rotating object nor the lighthouse effect.
Rather, it in effects states that an electrical discharge occurs close to a star
which then travels along magnetic field lines outwards
where it encounters a disk of matter surrounding the star.
Where it meets that more dense matter, a kind of short circuit occurs
and the signal is reflected as in transmission lines in electrical engineering theory.
While astrophysicists believe a mechanically spinning lighthouse
is the only explanation for a pulsar's atomic clock-like stable periodicity,
Peratt and Healy have shown a theoretical and experimentally tested electromagnetic model
that is sufficiently stable to explain the phenomenon.
The most stable oscillator ever achieved on Earth is known as an ion trap.
Their model is a kind of stellar ion-trap
involving a "pulsar surface-magnetosphere relativistic double layer."
Double layers are naturally formed by all electric stars.
Pulsars are distinguished by having a power supply
sufficient to form relativistic double layers.
Importantly, the electromagnetic pulsar experiment of Healy and Peratt
also showed the features of gradual pulsars' slowdown
due to losses in the dielectric media and in synchrotron emission.
What's more, it showed sudden pulse speed-up or glitches
where a short circuit occurs across the magneto-spheric circuit
shortening the transmission line and the pulse period and increasing the pulse frequency.
No incredible neutron star "whirling dervish" is needed.
It must be emphasized that the formation of neutron stars
relies on the standard theories of stellar evolution
which assumes that stars burn themselves up in supernova explosions.
Scientific discovery has proven extremely problematic for these theories.
In fact, as we will report in a forthcoming Space News episode,
the standard theory of supernovas
will never be resolved with increasingly stunning observations.
As reported on November 8, 2017, in the phys.org article,
'Star exploded, survived and exploded again more than 50 years later'.
"An international team of astronomers...discovered a star
that exploded multiple times over a period of 50 years.
The finding, published by Nature,
completely confounds existing knowledge of a star's end of life..."
The lead author of a paper on the discovery says,
"This supernova breaks everything we thought we knew about how they work..."
But as viewers of this series are painfully aware,
this type of confession has become numbingly routine from space scientists
on every celestial phenomena at every possible scale throughout the cosmos.
Yet, we still await any meaningful reassessment of consensus theory
or any attempt at exploring real alternatives.
Do dying stars collapse gravitationally forming neutron stars of such massive density
that a single teaspoonful of their material would weigh a billion tons on Earth?
Does a mechanically spinning lighthouse switch from X-ray to radio emissions?
Do dead stars, 20 kilometers in radius,
spin at speeds of tens of thousands of revolutions per minute,
nearly twice the speed of the blades of a typical kitchen blender?
Does a miniscule dead star shine with the brightness of tens of millions of living stars
in defiance of the "known laws of physics"?
Astrophysics in 2017 presents a bedazzling specter.
The unfathomably exotic is the cultural norm
while the real practitioners of Occam's razor are labeled crackpots and cranks.
Like every other fantastic electromagnetic phenomena in space,
an extremely exotic explanation of pulsars is only necessary
if one holds to a completely untenable position that electricity causes nothing in space.
Rather than affirming the dominance of colossal gravity throughout the cosmos,
the discovery of pulsing electromagnetic signals
is yet another confirmation that our universe is electric.
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