View Single Post
  #18 (permalink)  
Old 26-September-2003, 10:57 PM
Tim Thompson's Avatar
Tim Thompson Tim Thompson is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 2,261
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by John T
Any comments on this statement?
Quite a few comments, actually, but not much time to make them. Now it's time to go back to the webpage I referenced earlier: On the "Electric Sun" Hypothesis. It does not deal much with the cosmological issues, but examines the idea of an "electric star' in much detail. Many of the notions you put forth here are dealt with.

For instance ...

Quote:
Originally Posted by John T
Positively charged protons (and accompanying electrons) leave the sun to complete the environmental "circuit" (so to speak) at the highly negatively-charged heliopause. .......... "Positive ions leave the Sun and cosmic electrons enter the Sun. Both of these flows add to form a net positive current leaving the Sun. This constitutes a plasma discharge analogous in every way (except size) to those that have been observed in electrical laboratories for decades."
There is a really big problem here: There are no cosmic electrons entering the sun! This is not a guess, it's a cold, hard fact, supported by several decades of in-situ observations of charged particles (electrons, protons, ions, and charged dust) in the heliosphere. Granted, most of those observations have been restricted to the plane of the planets. but Ulysses has travelled the polar regions of the heliosphere more than once now. Those incoming electrons should be just as detctable as the outgoing electrons, but none have been seen. If they were there, they would have been detected by now. The entire hypothesis is emphatically falsified by this fact alone.

Most of the rest of the stuff, like galaxies and Birkeland currents is just a lot of hocus-pocus, words strung together that make no physical sense. Just because one can describe something in words, this does not mandate that it be physically reasonable or even physically possible. Like the proposed solar system currents, there are huge stability issues that Scott, et al., simply ignore. Besides, galaxy formation is pretty well understood at the basic level (but not at the detail level), and there is no real problem that screams out for an "alternative" solution anyway. Certainly not one that weird.