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Account Disabled
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Missouri, USA
Posts: 4,814
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Quote:
If the anode were in direct contact with the plasma, its fixed size would render it incapable of adjusting to fluctuations. For example, a random current adding to the drift current in such a way as to exceed the current that the discharge was capable of sustaining would result in an instability needing to correct itself. It does so by physically disengaging the anode from the plasma. By initially accepting an excess of electrons that repels lower-energy electrons from the immediate vicinity, the anode creates a thin charge-separation sheath above itself, of the kind we met before. The outer boundary of the sheath becomes the effective anode surface, but since it is a dynamic structure, it is able to alter its size to present a varying surface area. In other words, it adjusts its current density to the level needed for collecting the total electric current, enlarging itself if need be to "reach out" into the plasma to collect more electrons.
As the sheath expands, its associated electric field (arising from the separation of charges) grows stronger, accelerating electrons to greater energies and intensifying the discharge glow in the anode vicinity. But this can only be taken so far. Beyond a certain point, further current increase cannot be handled by increasing the sheath's area. It wouldn't do much good in any case, since a limit is reached where all the collectible plasma electrons are being swept up by the anode anyway. So at this point a different mechanism takes over. When ionization becomes appreciable, the sheath itself breaks down to initiate a new mode of anode burning. Suddenly, at one or more localized points of intensified activity, small "tufts" of secondary plasma spring into being, forming highly luminous nodules within the anode glow region. These high-temperature regions yield a copious supply of positive ions that are swept away in the opposite direction to augment the current of the incoming electrons. A condition for tufting to occur is a gas density great enough to support a sufficiently high rate of ionizing collisions.
It should be clear by now that the suggestion here is that what we're seeing when we look at the Sun's photosphere is the anode plasma of a cosmic electrical discharge, with tufting showing itself as the bright granulated structure and providing the protons that supply the solar wind. Eventually the accumulation of excess electrons reduces the tuft potential to a level where de-ionization sets in, and the tuft simply dies away to be replaced by a newly budding one, in keeping with the pattern observed. The radiated energy comes primarily from the tufts. It is delivered by electrons accelerated from interstellar space, which calculation indicate would achieve relativistic velocities in the voltage drop near the solar anode. The system acts, in effect, like a local step-down transformer of the power distribution grid, converting lethal cosmic supply-line energies to forms of radiation more conducive to supporting life.
Prominences and other dynamic structures are consistent with the behavior of plasmas in a complex external electrical environment. Magnetic effects follow naturally from the currents involved, without recourse to fields "frozen" into plasmas--never observed in laboratories--field lines "breaking" and "reconnecting," whatever that means (they are abstract concepts, not physical realities), and other fanciful theoretical notions introduced to relate them to dynamo-like processes hypothesized to take place in the solar interior. The differential rotation of the Sun's surface layers, whereby the equatorial zone moves fastest, testifies to a driving force applied from the outside. It's a motor, not a generator.
The appearance of the dark blotches called sunspots would indicate areas of reduced current density, where tufting isn't needed and temporarily shuts down, providing glimpses of the true "anode" surface. That it is darker than the surrounding granulated photosphere favors the suggestion that the radiant energy is being generated at the photosphere, not coming up from below. It implies the impinging of some kind of filamentary currents on the surface. A possible cause is the interception of part of the incoming electron flux by the magnetospheres of the planets. Is it mere coincidence that the basic 11-year sunspot cycle corresponds to the orbital period of Jupiter? Further analysis of solar activity shows a 170-180 year repetition of sunspot cycle intensity that has been linked to recurring lineups of planets but conventionally conjectured to be a tidal effect. It is also possible that the pattern could reflect the Sun's passing through regions of filamentary structures traversing space.
The "Fraunhofer spectrum" from the cooler region at the base of the Sun's atmosphere contains over 27,000 dark spectral lines, which remove about 9% of the energy from the background sunlight and indicate the presence of 68 of the 92 naturally occurring chemical elements. No standard model has ever been able to explain even the gross characteristics of this spectrum. Elements heavier than iron cannot be formed by the fusion reactions said to be going on at the Sun's core, and the usual solution is to have them manufactured in the supernova explosions of an earlier generation of stars, out of the debris from which a second generation of stars including the Sun was then formed. However, supernovas are processes that violently disperse matter, and at the currently observed rate of occurrence they seem too rare to account for the abundance of heavy elements implied.
But gravitationally bound fusion plasmas are perhaps the most inefficient way of manufacturing heavy nuclei. The laboratory method of using electric fields to accelerate protons or other light nuclei is much simpler and can make them fuse with just about any element in the Periodic Table. It's practically 1920s vacuum tube technology. You could probably make such a working fusion machine fairly cheaply in your garage. Don't be deterred by the high temperatures that fusion scientists like to talk about to impress people. The unit that researchers use to measure acceleration energy is the "electron-volt," equal to the particle's charge number (one for an electron or proton) multiplied by the voltage it's accelerated through. To equate this figure to degrees Kelvin, multiply by 11,604. Hence, a daunting-sounding 50-million-degree "ignition" temperature is achieved with a paltry 4300 ev. And the nuclear reactions involved in such fusions would be expected to generate all three kinds of neutrinos, at all kinds of energies.
What we're suggesting, then, is that the elements are made right there in the Sun's photosphere, where we see them. And the mix of neutrinos that's measured is what's produced, without any sleight of hand and statistical legerdemain to derive what is from what we think ought to be.
It would be in order at this point to mention another strange thing about neutrinos, too. There seems to be an undeniable correlation between the neutrino count rates reported by the various experiments, and solar activity as indicated by sunspots and solar wind. The standard model attributes the neutrino flux to events deep in the interior that by every other means need tens of thousands of years to emerge tangibly, and has no explanation for how they can affect or be affected by events taking place at the surface. But if element synthesis is in fact a result of the external electrical environment, it follows that the neutrino by-products of that synthesis should vary with other factors that are also dependent on the same electrical activity.
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