8 - The Solar System

The Solar Plasma

The space surrounding the Sun, its corona and beyond, is a plasma. Indeed, much of all space is occupied by plasma - mostly in the dark current mode. The planets and their moons each carry an electric charge as they travel through this plasma.

The plasma sea in which the solar system floats extends out to what is called the heliopause - where there is probably a double layer that separates our Sun's plasma from the lower voltage plasma that fills our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

In solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME's), charged particles are thrown outward from the Sun. These flows constitute electrical currents. And what form do (Birkeland) currents take in plasmas? - They twist!

Planetary Magnetotails

Each planet has a 'plasma sheath' - a well known electrical phenomenon - the size and shape of which is determined by the difference between the electrical potential (voltage) of the planet and that of the nearby solar plasma. The shape of this plasma sheath is usually a tear-drop or wind-sock shape, the pointed end facing away from the sun. The boundary of this sheath is a double layer that separates the planet's surrounding plasma from the solar plasma.
 

Interactions of Magnetotails

The plasma sheath of Venus is extremely long, almost touching the Earth when the two planets are at their closest approach. Jupiter's plasma sheath has the same relationship with Saturn. Recently NASA astronomers have discovered what they call 'stringy things' in the long plasma tail of Venus. Such twisted (stringy) filaments are exactly the paths Birkeland currents take in plasmas.

Apparently Venus is discharging an electrical current. The plasma tails of all the planets today are in the dark current mode of operation. But were they always thus?

The ancients reported that Venus once was seen to have a fiery tail and 'twisted hair'.

Could it have been that her plasma tail was then in the normal glow or even the arc mode of operation?

Consider for a moment what the shape of Venus' plasma tail would look like if it were visible. The diameter of the plasma sheath around Venus is, at most, possibly two or three times the planet's diameter - say about 20,000 miles. But the distance from Venus to Earth during their closest approaches is in the order of 26 million miles.

So the Venusian tail is approximately a thousand times as long as it is broad at its thickest point. That is a very long, thin, twisting snakelike shape. If, at some time in the past, this plasma tail were in the normal glow mode, it would have been visible from Earth!

How would the ancients have described it?
 

Intersecting Plasma Sheaths

When a planet is surrounded by a double layer sheath, it is protected from direct electrical interaction with any outside body. Two electrically charged planets, each surrounded by such a plasma sheath cannot see each other electrostatically. However, if a body having a different electrical charge, penetrates the double layer, moving into the plasmasphere surrounding a planet, electrical interactions (current discharges) can and will occur.

Thus, if any other body such as a large meteor (or asteroid, comet, etc.) should come close enough to Earth to penetrate our plasma sheath, violent electric discharges would occur between the two bodies. It would, of course, be unfortunate to be standing at the point of origin of such a discharge.

But the discharge itself might destroy the intruder and thus protect the Earth from an otherwise disastrous collision.

Physicist Wal Thornhill states that Io, the innermost of the four large moons of Jupiter, is presently experiencing electric discharges from Jupiter and is being electrically machined as a result. He points out that Io is a living laboratory of electric plasma discharges sitting right in front of us, if we are only willing to see it for what it is.

NASA released the photo of Io shown below. Io is pretty much aglow. Note the heaviest glows on Io are on the sides directly toward and directly away from Jupiter. The famous 'volcanoes' on Io cannot be true volcanoes because they have moved around a distance of many miles since their discovery. Also the material ejected from the site of these phenomena is not disbursed over a circular area as volcanic ejecta would be.

It all lands in a thin ring - just as the output of a plasma gun does. These are clearly electric discharges, not volcanoes.

Original Caption Released with Image:

This eerie view of Jupiter's moon Io in eclipse (left) was acquired by NASA's Galileo spacecraft while the moon was in Jupiter's shadow. Gases above the satellite's surface produced a ghostly glow that could be seen at visible wavelengths (red, green, and violet). The vivid colors, caused by collisions between Io's atmospheric gases and energetic charged particles trapped in Jupiter's magnetic field, had not previously been observed.

 

The green and red emissions are probably produced by mechanisms similar to those in Earth's polar regions that produce the aurora, or northern and southern lights. Bright blue glows mark the sites of dense plumes of volcanic vapor, and may be places where Io is electrically connected to Jupiter.

The viewing geometry is shown in the image on the right. North is to the top of the picture, and Jupiter is towards the right. The resolution is 13.5 kilometers (8 miles) per picture element. The images were taken on May 31, 1998 at a range of 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) by Galileo's onboard solid state imaging camera system during the spacecraft's 15th orbit of Jupiter.

JPL manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. This image and other images and data received from Galileo are posted on the World Wide Web on the Galileo mission home page at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo. Background information and educational context for the images can be found at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo.

NASA recently directed the Galileo space probe to pass very close to one of the "volcanos" (electric arc discharges) on Io - with the following result (New Scientist October 30, 1999):

"On October 10 Galileo passed within 611 kilometers of Io, using its solid state imager to reveal features as small as 9 meters across near the volcano Pillan. But radiation took its toll, zapping a critical bit in Galileo's computer memory and blurring many images."

Flying a computer through a high intensity electric field is much more likely to "zap" its electronics than simply passing it no nearer than 380 miles distant from some smoke and molten rock.

Planetary Scars

Thornhill and other like minded investigators also believe that the monstrous scar across the face of Mars (the canyon called Valles Marineris) was produced by electric arc machining. The rocks and rubble that are found strewn everywhere across the landscape of Mars are most probably the detritus from this huge excavation. Just look at the size of that scar!

The Grand Canyon of Arizona would be lost in one small section of it.

There are many visible examples of electrical scarring on Mars. Electrical scars have characteristics that enable us to distinguish between them and water erosion and/or impact cratering.

Venus also exhibits evidence of having been electrically machined.

Presently a debate is occurring among some geologists as to exactly what process formed the Grand Canyon of Arizona. There is no evidence of where the soil that was removed went! There is no river delta. It has all disappeared. And the Colorado River would have had to flow uphill in order to create the Canyon. Also, no evidence of the "meteor" that formed Arizona's "Meteor Crater" has ever been found. Were both these scars also formed by electric arc machining? It is highly likely.

Mars

A full disk image of Mars is on the right. Notice that the southern hemisphere is covered with craters. The northern hemisphere is, for the most part, smooth and has many fewer craters. Below is an image of Martian "Sinuous rilles".

They are made up of chains of craterlets.

This too is characteristic of electric arc machining (certainly not water flow). Notice the faint horizontal rilles crossing the large one. The horizontal rilles obviously were made later than the large rille. Notice too that the horizontal rille goes up hill and down hill, cutting right across the earlier structure.

Terraced crater walls and small secondary craters sitting on the edge of larger craters are characteristic of electric arc machining. Also notice the flat floors and almost perfect circularity of the craters. If the twisting arc that creates an electrically formed crater stops on the rim and does not extinguish, it will form a secondary crater.

This effect is clearly demonstrated in a laboratory experiment shown on physicist Wal Thornhill's CD "The Electric Universe."


Venus

On the right is a close-up of the upper left region of Venus' crater Buck. It is a classic example of when the arc is extinguished before it can make a complete circular rotation. The fact that the sinuous rilles are made up of strings of small craters is obvious in this image. There are two straight rills to the left of the crater (as well as the curving ones leading down into it from the top of the photo).

Sinuous rilles are one of the typical characteristics of electric arc machining. The standard mainstream explanation for these horseshoe shaped craters is that one side of the crater wall has collapsed.

What do you think?

If all the "impact" craters on Mars, Venus, and our Moon were really formed by impacts, then probability would dictate that most (or at least a significant fraction) of them should be elliptical. Meteors very rarely come straight down. On the other hand, electric fields always impinge on conducting spheres at right angles to their surfaces (i.e., vertically) and that is why all these so-called circular "impact" craters are round.

They were not made by impacts. They were caused by electric anode scarring.


Saturn's Rings

An interesting phenomenon (called "mysterious" by those in the mainstream) is the fact that the planet Saturn has radial "spokes" in its ring system. The radial nature of these almost screams ELECTRIC FIELD at us!

But one of the official explanations is that,

"they are thought to be microscopic grains that have become charged and are levitating away from the ring plane."

Levitating??

And yet another property of Saturn's rings is that some of them are braided! They twist! The following is a quote from Science, Vol. 210, 5 Dec 1980, p. 1108:

"There was the F ring, revealed in Voyager's narrow-angle camera to be kinked and triply stranded - and, perhaps, in defiance of all commonsense celestial mechanics, braided."

Are the "braids" in Saturn's F ring due to just the kind of twisting currents that Birkeland observed?

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