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NEWSCIENCENEWSCIENCENEWSCIENCE THE ELECTRIC GLOW OF THE SUN half of the 20th century still warranted after decades of space exploration? Those proposing an electrical perspective, based on more recent data, insist that the earlier conjectures are not only unwarranted but discredited by direct observation and mea- surement. They emphasise that every fea- ture of the Sun, as we now observe it, defies both the gravitational assumptions and the standard gas laws relating to pres- sure, density, temperature and relative motions of gases. The deepest observable surface of the Sun yields a temperature of about 6,000 degrees Kelvin. As we peer into the darker interior of sunspots we see cooler regions, not hotter. But moving out- ward to the bottom of the corona, the tem- perature jumps spectacularly to almost two million degrees. Thus, the superheated shell of the Sun's corona reverses the expected temperature gradient predicted by models of internal heating. It seems that the Sun does not even "respect" gravity. The mass of charged particles—expelled by the Sun as the solar wind—continues to accelerate beyond Mercury, Venus and Earth. Solar promi- nences and coronal mass ejections do not obey gravity, either. Nor does sunspot migration. Nor does the movement of the atmosphere, since the upper layers rotate faster than the lower—reversing the situa- tion predicted by theory—while the equato- rial atmosphere completes its rotation more rapidly than the atmosphere at higher lati- tudes—another reversal of predicted motions. If the Sun's atmosphere were sub- ject only to gravity and the hot surface, it should be only a few thousand kilometres thick instead of the hundred thousand kilo- metres or more that we measure. Even the shape of the Sun defies the expectations of theory. The revolving Sun should be an oblate sphere. But it is virtu- ally a perfect sphere, as if gravity and iner- tia have been overruled by something else. For the electrical theorists, the "some- thing else" should be obvious from the dominant, observed features of the Sun (in contrast to things assumed but never seen). The anomalies facing the standard model of the Sun are predictable features of a glow discharge. Refer to Pictures of the Day at http://www.thunderbolts.info.. A growing group of independent researchers, however, insists that the popular idea is incorrect. These researchers say that the Sun is electric. It is a glow discharge fed by galactic currents. And they emphasise that the fusion model anticipated none of the milestone discoveries about the Sun, while the electric model predicts and explains the very observations that posed the greatest quandaries for solar investigation. More than 60 years ago, Dr Charles E. R. Bruce, of the Electrical Research Association in England, offered a new per- spective on the Sun. An electrical researcher, astronomer and expert on the effects of lightning, Bruce proposed in 1944 that the Sun's "photosphere has the appearance, the temperature and the spec- trum of an electric arc; it has arc character- istics because it is an electric arc, or a large number of arcs in parallel". This discharge characteristic, he claimed, "accounts for the observed granulation of the solar surface". Bruce's model, however, was based on a conventional understanding of atmospheric lightning, allowing him to envision the "electric" Sun without reference to external electric fields. by David Talbott © 2005 Thunderbolts.info little known fact: popular ideas about the Sun have not fared well under the tests of a scientific theory. The formulators of the standard Sun model worked with gravity, gas laws and nuclear fusion. But closer observation of the Sun has shown that electrical and magnetic properties dominate solar behaviour. For centuries, the nature of the Sun's radiance remained a mystery to astronomers. The Sun is the only object in the solar system that produces its own visi- ble light. All others reflect the light of the Sun. What unique trait of the Sun enables it to shine upon the other objects in the solar system? Today, astronomers assure us that the most fundamental question has now been answered. The Sun is a thermonuclear furnace. The ball of gas is so large that astronomers envision pressures and densities within its core sufficient to generate temperatures of about 16 million K, producing a continuous "controlled" nuclear reaction. Most astronomers and astrophysicists investigating the Sun are so convinced of the fusion model that only the rarest among them will countenance challenges to the underlying idea. Standard textbooks and institutional research, complemented by a chorus of scientific and popular media, "ratify" the fusion model of the Sun year after year by ignoring evidence to the contrary. Plasma Glow Discharge Years later, a brilliant engineer, Ralph Juergens, inspired by Bruce's work, added a revolutionary possibility. In a series of articles beginning in 1972, Juergens sug- gested that the Sun is not an electrically isolated body in space but the most posi- tively charged object in the solar system, the centre of a radial electric field. This wat HAVE You come To PEsTRoy out counTRY ? des rr we've reat SEEN Tem cRulse’s ‘\ PER FORMANCE IM ain Th “WAR oF THE WoRLPS" [Note: This article, dated 27 May 2005, is copyright © 2005 Thunderbolts.info. The full text of this article, with text links, can be viewed at http://www.thunderbolts.info/ tpod/2005/arch05/050517fusion.htm. ] 46 = NEXUS ‘Beweetiede www. nexusmagazine.com AUGUST — SEPTEMBER 2005