Solar Hurricane Rips Off Comet's Tail 105
coondoggie writes to mention that NASA recently captured images of a solar hurricane ripping the tail off Encke's comet. "In a release, NASA said preliminary analysis suggests that the tail was ripped away when magnetic fields bumped together in an explosive process called "magnetic reconnection." Oppositely directed magnetic fields around the comet "bumped into each" by the magnetic fields in the hurricane. Suddenly, these fields linked together--they "reconnected"--releasing a burst of energy that tore off the comet's tail. A similar process takes place in Earth's magnetosphere during geomagnetic storms fueling, among other things, the Northern Lights, NASA said."
Wonder what the RF signature of that was like (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wonder what the RF signature of that was like (Score:5, Interesting)
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Apropos of nothing (Score:1)
Don't you get a rather large electrical bill when a magnetic field like that collapses? Should be an amazing revenue source.
Honestly, I have no idea why.
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Tsk tsk tsk (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tsk tsk tsk (Score:4, Funny)
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1. The Sun sold the Comet's Tail a Plasma TV, but when it got home, it discovered there was only a cement block in the box.
2. The Sun cheats at poker.
3. The Sun also hustles pool.
Pick one.
Solomon
Re:Tsk tsk tsk (Score:5, Funny)
Well, hey, hold on there... we first need to decide whether this comet tail should be rebuilt at all. If another solar hurricane is just going to come and wash the tail away, then it's a waste of valuable ice and dust to rebuild it and we should disincentivize comet tails from forming by saying, hey, comet tails, we're not bailing you out anymore! Stop mooching off the rest of the solar system and take some responsibility for yourselves!
Curiously, by accident or design it seems that most of the damage and disruption was confined to the ion tail, instead of the wealthier dust tail area... that's typical electromagnetic justice for you.
Magnetic Reconnection? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060711magnetic.htm [thunderbolts.info]
IMarv
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http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm [electric-cosmos.org]
Re:Magnetic Reconnection? (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as the magnetic reconnection issue...well there's no reason to trust (or even read) anything a crackpot like this says.
Re:Magnetic Reconnection? (Score:5, Informative)
There have been plenty of intelligent people who believed that space plasmas are electrical. You just have not read about them. Hannes Alfven, Ralph Juergens, Kristian Birkeland, Anthony Peratt, to name a few. Hannes Alfven received the Noble Physics Prize for his creation of magnetohydrodynamics, which is the mathematics used to model space plasmas. You may be surprised to learn that in his acceptance speech, he disagreed with the idea of modeling space plasmas with frozen-in-place magnetic fields -- a technique which he originated and that persists to this day. He was completely ignored.
If you have not read the story of Halton Arp, then you are limiting your exposure to observations to those which you agree with. In truth, there is no good reason for why Arp's observations are not correct. Arp has been obstructed from sharing his findings at every step of the way, oftentimes by the very people whose research is threatened by his observations.
There is a person on wikipedia called ScienceApologist, who has been censoring EU Theory from wikipedia on the basis that there are no published papers which support EU Theory. Well, Anthony Peratt, Wallace Thornhill and a handful of other EU theorists did in fact get published in September in an IEEE publication. ScienceApologist decided to actually send a letter to the IEEE editor, objecting that the papers were pseudo-scientific (and yet in the absence of any evidence supporting his statements). Apparently, his requirement that EU Theorists be published is in fact not sufficient at all. There appears to be no burden that can be met by the EU Theorists that would satisfy him, and the ethical problems associated with his being both a wikipedia referee and a player involved in influencing the publication of the theory appears to escape him.
Not being popular is not an excuse to avoid reading about something, especially when there are such over-zealous censors who believe it is their duty to prevent the public from understanding the debate about electricity in space. If a theory appears to be logically coherent and supported by observational evidence, then it stands a chance of being true regardless of how many adherents it possesses (nature does not care what people prefer to believe), and it deserves investigation and even attempts to quantify it. Evaluating theories purely on the basis of who looks or sounds the smartest is a downward spiral. I recommend that you think twice before suggesting that others follow your lead. You very well could be redirecting people away from fruitful lines of research and investigation. Despite your good intentions, you may in fact be causing harm. You can't possibly know until you *read* what the theory says and talk to people about it, right?
Re:Magnetic Reconnection? (Score:4, Insightful)
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But magnetic reconnection is *extremely* important as it attempts to explain why the Sun's atmosphere is 100x hotter than its surface. We see a similar inverse temperature situation with the Earth's atmosphere, but it is generally agreed that this is a result of an external energy source. If Don Scott is right about magnetic reconnection, then the most popu
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The problem is that many of the people who believe that space plasmas are electrical have very impressive credentials. Don Scott is merely one of many. Hannes Alfven was convinced enough of it that he postulated a mechanism for how charge separation could occur in space -- his critical ionization velocity -- which was subsequently validated within the laboratory.
When you erroneously call somebody a crackpot as a result of limiting your reading selection so much that
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I'm sure many of his peers, 'actual physicists', thought he was a crackpot for trying.
I doubt it. Alchemy wasn't entirely discredited at the time Newton tried it. It's more likely that he was thought a crackpot for claiming that an apple pulls the Earth upwards as it falls (when everyone knows things fall down because that's what 'down' means) than for his dabbling.
Actually, this being Newton, it's more likely people thought he was a crackpot for giving a lecture to an empty room after frightening his students so much that none of them showed up to his lecture.
Context is important.
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Probably not as many as you think. Elementalism and alchemy were still widely accepted in his day.
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The explanation is indeed due to the electromagnetic nature of plasma, and the large potential differences and EM fields around the sun. However this is no need to gratuitously break several laws of physics by implying that field lines actually exist (they don't, they only represent the direction of a continuous unbreakable field), and that these so called lines can brea
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Agreed.
"Instead, we should attempt to understand the arguments that are being made and discuss the logic behind both sides in the argument."
Science is not a democracy; all ideas and proposals need not and should not be given equal weight, and it is proper for ideas that are outlandish on their face to be casually dismissed without bothering to engage in such a dialog; the nature of the claims make it apparent that a truly rational discourse with its adherent is not
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Re:Magnetic Reconnection? Immee, baby! (Score:1)
Immanuel Velikovsky! Is that you? Heyyyy!
Watcha doin' on
You promised! Next ten years? OK,then!
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Science is not a democracy, by the way. We do not vote on ideas based upon who is saying them, contrary to the increasing belief that this is how it works. Instead, we should attempt to understand the arguments that are being made and discuss the logic behind both sides in the argument.
The unfortunate reality is that science can be very threatening to established business interests. Most naive young scientists and engineers have an idealistic model in their minds of how science operates, completely ignoring politics, power, business and capitalism. But the world can be a very hostile place for brilliance, when that brilliance touches on any of the following subjects:
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We are making slow, albeit steady, progress. Laypeople
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Are you aware of what helioseismology is and what the implications of the oxygen ratio crisis are? Helioseismology was created to model activity on the Sun based upon observations and theories regarding the Sun's composition. Everybody claimed that it "proved" that we understood the Sun's inner workings. Then, one day, it was discovered that the theories regarding the Sun's com
Re:Magnetic Reconnection? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now all I have to go on are three newly-ordered-from-amazon books. by Arp, Scott, and Lerner. I don't think all the points you mention in your post are covered there.
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Are you aware of what helioseismology is and what the implications of the oxygen ratio crisis are? Helioseismology was created to model activity on the Sun based upon observations and theories regarding the Sun's composition. Everybody claimed that it "proved" that we understood the Sun's inner workings. Then, one day, it was discovered that the theories regarding the Sun's composition were in fact somehow wrong.
I thought everyone knew for years (at least) that the sun wasn't a barge (or a chariot as an alternative theory stated) drifting across the sky. This is hardly news.
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Actually, I would agree that the Sun does in fact look like a series of tubes ...
From http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=APCPCS000932000001000026000001 [aip.org]:
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My guess is that you have been restricting your reading materials in a pseudo-skeptical manner. I recommend that you read what is being said before discounting it. That would certainly reduce the amount of garbage that people have to wade through on these forums to get to actual discussion.
That's a pretty impressive retort to being called pseudo-scientific.
There was a time when learned men actively sought out phenomena that didn't agree with understood scientific theory so that they may have new material from which to work from. Today, it has been programmed into our pseudo-intellectuals that they shouldn't even bother looking at something that doesn't fit with well understood theory. I can't honestly see how someone could call themselves a scientist if all they do is read about and stu
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Well, it goes like this [wikipedia.org].
That you just posted is a piece of pseudo-scientific dreck from all I can tell. I had a course on MHD in grad school, the theory of magnetic reconnection most certainly can account for the speed of energy release in solar events. It's also an important problem in plasma instability in tokamaks. Searching on google scholar didn't find any peer-reviewed papers by plasma physicists refuting magnetic reconnection.
Perhaps they were confused by Biskamp's 1986 paper [aip.org] on the Sweet-Parker
Tail wasn't connected anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
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Toonces' World of Nature (Score:1, Funny)
Reptillian origin? (Score:1)
Oh no... (Score:1)
The real question... (Score:1, Funny)
S-
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Well with the "coronal mass ejection", you betcha it did!
Solar Hurricane??? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if they are talking about coronal mass ejections? If so, I don't get the analogy. Hurricanes are basically large vortices's. Coronal Mass Ejections are not.
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Or maybe they are just using the term 'hurricane' as an emotional allusion to a violent storm.
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I always tell kids certain books are forbidden to them, for example, which almost gaurantees they'll go and read it at the first opportunity.
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Solar Hurricane = CME (Score:2)
Cometary Tails as Electron Sources (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cometary Tails as Electron Sources (Score:4, Insightful)
Why mod you down when I can point you here? [wikipedia.org]
"Keep in mind that there is a difference between saying that a theory is not properly quantified and a theory *cannot* be quantified."
A theory can be unquantifiable due to its subject matter (intelligent design) or, as is the case with the "electric universe theory," due to its authors' refusal to let it be quantified when it would be to their egos' detriment. Only observations that have a (usually fleetingly small) connection to this pet theory are allowed in, permitting people such as yourself to churn out several paragraphs of "We're right!" all while cheerfully ignoring something as trivial as we've fucking been there! In that respect, you have more in common with the Flat Earth types than the ID folks you allude to, whose statements are truly unassailable (placing it outside the realm of science) rather than willfully ignorant.
At least you're "interesting" rather than "informative." Thank His Noodliness for such small blessings.
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Only because you insist on including yourselves in "everybody." Any hand-waving explanations for the lack of an aether wind belong in the same category as epicycles.
"There is legitimate disagreement amongst the theorists on how to replace quantum mechanics"
Replace quantum mechanics? Why? Have all of our semiconductors suddenly stopped working?
"gravitational lensing, for instance, appears to be quite bunk,"
Um... [wikipedia.org]
"as does the 1919 e
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Why mod you down when I can point you here? [wikipedia.org]
The article neither proves nor disproves either theory.
What isn't mentioned in that wikipedia article is the arc between the probe and the comet just before impact.
If you think about it, the comet is passing through a charged region of space (solar wind), hence it will be equalise potential to the surrounding p
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Only if you ignore the reported figures for what was ejected from the impact: 250,000 metric tons of water.
"What isn't mentioned in that wikipedia article is the arc between the probe and the comet just before impact.
If you think about it, the comet is passing through a charged region of space (solar wind), hence it will be equalise potential to the surrounding plasma. Hence as a probe with a different potential approaches (similar to that of the Ear
OMG (Score:1, Redundant)
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Spaceweather.com has... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oh lord... (Score:1)
Ouchie (Score:1)
Seriously, though, I have a question. I have not read TFA, but I'll get around to it, so if I need to do that to answer this question then don't bother to answer this lazy bum. Why would a solar hurricane rip off the plasma t(r)ail ? Wouldn't the tail just increase, ie. wouldn't more material from the comet just go into it with increased winds ?
And put it in lizard terms if you can. (j
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Slashdot party game (Score:3, Funny)
Periodic comets (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
If not wrong, then this is certainly misleading. Encke's Comet was the second periodic comet identified, but sheesh - would you say "Sputnik 2 was only the second satellite ever launched"? There are hundreds of known periodic comets [wikipedia.org].I live in Miami (Score:2)
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