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Account Disabled
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Missouri, USA
Posts: 4,814
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Quote:
I confess that when I first came across this theory some years ago, my first inclination was to dismiss it as preposterous. Everybody knows that the Sun is an enormous hydrogen bomb, because every textbook, encyclopedia, and treatise on popular science says so, and we have been able to recite things like "hydrogen-deuterium fusion" since our high-school days. But let's remember that all it really stems from is an authoritative consensus based on pronouncements of fact never actually observed and now known to be erroneous, and acknowledge the degree to which cultural conditioning can take on the appearance of being fact. Once the effort is made to recognize and allow for such preconceptions, the subject starts to become astonishingly intriguing.
A first objection that occurred to me was that if the Sun doesn't have a thermonuclear heat source at its core, what prevents it from collapsing to a smaller size than we see, as the standard gas laws would seem to require? There turns out to be a simple possible answer. The case for fusion reactions involves rarely occurring reaction chains, which in turn require recourse to quantum mechanical tunneling to ignite them. Dispensing with all this eliminates the need for temperatures compatible with thermonuclear fusion, and at the lower temperatures we're now talking about, not a lot of the hydrogen would be ionized. In other words, atoms and molecules will predominate. The strong gravitation that still exists would be sufficient to induce a slight offset of the nucleus of each atom from the center, so that each atom becomes a small electric dipole (a body of net neutral charge, but with its positive and negative components displaced to create local "polarization"). Alignment of these dipoles would result in a radial electric field, causing the highly mobile electrons to diffuse outwards from the Sun's center, leaving behind positively charged ions. The electrical repulsion of these like charges will then oppose the compressive force of gravity without need of a central heat source. Here, perhaps, we have an explanation for the Sun's apparent isodensity as indicated by the observed 2 hour, 40 minute pulsations that violated models where density increases with depth. (It would seem to follow that the stronger the gravity, the more powerful the electrical repulsion to balance it becomes, making it questionable whether neutron stars--and hence black holes, of which they are supposed to be the precursors--could ever happen at all. But that's another can of worms that we'd probably best leave be for the moment.)
What we're considering, then, is that clouds of hydrogen pinched together initially by forces arising from electrical currents in the cosmic plasma filaments become dense enough for self-gravitation to condense them into protostars in pretty much the kind of way that classical theory says. But long before any thermonuclear ignition takes place at the core (if, indeed, it ever could), strong electric fields are created that limit density increase and prevent further collapse. Strong electric fields also attract and focus electric currents--we've already talked about cathode and anode discharges in connection with the arc machining of planetary and other surfaces. So let's take a closer look at discharge phenomena in plasmas.
PLASMA DISCHARGES
Plasma discharges evolve through three basic types with increasing electric field strength, or voltage gradient (volts per meter), between the negative cathode and positive anode. Transitions from one type to another can be abrupt, with millivolts separating different regions.
At the low end are "Dark Current" plasmas, which are invisible optically but give off radio frequency emissions. Planetary magnetosphere's are of this type (which we said ought to be called "plasmaspheres"), as is the Sun's "heliopause," extending out past Pluto. Next, as the increasing field strength initiates ionization in the intervening medium, comes the "Corona" or "Glow Discharge" type of plasma seen in fluorescent tubes, phenomena like "Saint Elmo's fire," and planetary auroras. Finally, with avalanche breakdown of the medium under strong fields, "Arc Discharge" as occurs in welding and machining, arc lamps such as those used as searchlights, and which maybe stands as a better candidate to account for much of what's seen around the Solar System than the presently favored impact theory can.
Early studies of plasma discharges tended to concentrate on the cathode region, which, as emitter of the small-mass, high-mobility electrons that carry most of the current, was considered to be where the interesting things happened. (Although electrons move physically from the negative cathode to the positive anode, the current is regarded as flowing from positive to negative. The convention was adopted arbitrarily before the underlying physics was understood, and we're stuck with it.) As a consequence, anode phenomena received relatively little attention for a long time. This was an unfortunate assessment, since discharges can occur without any definable cathode at all. High-voltage, direct-current transmission lines, for example, discharge practically continuously to the surrounding air. In the case of a positive (anode) line, electrons--always present in the atmosphere--are drawn by the positive potential, gaining energy as they accelerate through the electric field and frequently exciting air molecules by collision to produce glow effects. At higher field strengths ionization sets in, freeing more electrons and creating positive ions that drift the other direction in the field. In this way a more or less steady discharge is maintained, although there is nothing other than the surrounding air that plays the role of cathode.
The situation is curiously reminiscent of our electrically positive ball of gravitationally compressed hydrogen, sitting in a sea of electron-rich plasma formed from the same galactic currents that created it. The Sun, in other words, takes on the role of the anode in a local, cosmic-scale, cathodeless discharge. Contrary to what early investigators thought, it turns out that some far-from-uninteresting things happen around anodes, and a lot of the peculiarities that we noted earlier start to make more sense.
The hot--as measured by particle velocities--gases of the corona and the "wind" of protons accelerating away from the Sun behaves as a flux of positive particles ought to in an electric field. The recently reported "anomalies" of space probes in the outer Solar System being slowed down by some mysterious agency could be due to their acquiring a negative charge from the electrons flowing the other way. Such a possibility has apparently not been considered by the research people quoted, who rush into inventing new, unknown forces and exotic unobservable physics.
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