Was Biggest Canyon in the Solar System Scarred by Plasma?
© 2012 by Linda Moulton Howe
“Valles Marineris looks like nothing more than an electric arc
blasting across the surface of Mars and removing immense
amounts of material from the planet.”
– David Talbott, Video Producer, The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars
Valles Marineris, our solar system’s biggest canyon, runs along the Martian equator
for 2,500 miles (4000 km) at depths up to 4 miles (7 km ). For comparison, Arizona’s
Grand Canyon is about 500 miles long (800 km) and 1 mile deep (1.6 km). Valles Marineris
spans one-fifth of the entire distance around Mars! NASA 1980 global mosaic image by Viking 1.
July 27, 2012 Albuquerque, New Mexico – The 19th Annual National Philosophy Alliance (NPA) conference was held July 25 – 28, 2012, at the Marriott Pyramid North hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Presentations ranged from quantum physics and relativity to the electric universe hypothesis. Electric universe researcher David Talbott argues that Valles Marineris on Mars was sculpted by large bolts of plasma, not by water or continental drift forces seen on Earth. Further, Wallace Thornhill from Chapman in the Australian Capital Territory near Canberra, presents new evidence that hourglass-shaped and filamentous galactic nebulae are linked to electrical behavior more than gravity.
At the heart of the electric universe hypothesis is a startling fact about this cosmos: 99% of all matter (beyond mysterious and unidentified dark matter and dark energy) is plasma. If plasmas move, electric currents are produced. If electric currents are produced, such as the Birkeland currents at the heart of the electric universe hypothesis, is it possible that electrical phenomena more than gravity are responsible for the largest canyon in this solar system, the Valles Marineris on Mars. Could electrical phenomena also be producing hourglass shapes of nebulae and the spherical filaments of a cosmic mystery such as the Ant Nebula, the Hourglass Nebula and the Glowing Eye Nebula.
The Ant planetary nebula photographed by Hubble Space Telescope is 8,000
light-years from Earth. This image reveals the “ant’s body” as a pair of fiery lobes
protruding from a dying, Sun-like star. Though approaching the violence of an explosion,
the ejection of gas from the dying star at the center of Mz3 has intriguing
symmetrical patterns unlike the chaotic patterns expected from an ordinary explosion.
Scientists using the Hubble space telescope would like to understand how
a spherical
star can produce such prominent, non-spherical symmetries in the gas that it ejects.
The Hourglass Nebula (MyCn18) is a young planetary nebula
located about 8,000 light-years away. This artificially colorized image
was taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 aboard NASA’s
Hubble Space Telescope on January 16, 1996.
Interviews:
Wallace Thornhill, Co-author with David Talbott, The Electric Universe and the video, The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars, and producer of Holoscience.com: “The evidence I’m looking at particularly has to do with the electrical behavior around stars – and in particular, planetary nebulae. Planetary nebulae are these beautiful objects in the sky that are given all sorts of interesting names like the Cat’s Eye nebula, the Butterfly nebula and so on. Generally they have an hourglass shape. Inside the hourglass are all sorts of interesting phenomena – high speed glows moving away along the axis of the hourglass. I’ve been able to explain those in the Electric Universe (Model) terms. In Standard Model, there is no real explanation for them.
HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN IT IN THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE HYPOTHESIS?
I don’t know whether you remember the old science fiction (movies) had something called ‘Jacob’s Ladder.’ Whenever they had a laboratory, they always had a Jacob’s Ladder, which was a discharge that moved up between two wires, which were set in a V-shape like a pair of rabbit’s ear antennas. The discharge starts at the bottom and sort of zaps its way up between the two wires and then fizzles out at the top. The Electric Universe Model explains that kind of behavior of a star in a planetary nebula. You’ve got Birkeland currents coming in concentrated in that hourglass shape. And if a discharge starts down near the star, then it will move outwards like the old science fiction movie. And that’s exactly what you see.
When you talk about the best evidence, for the electric universe, when the sun rises in the morning, you are looking at it. None of the phenomena that we see on the sun or above the sun have any business being there if it’s what we are told – the thermonuclear bomb going off very slowly and releasing energy into space. All the complex magnetic fields and phenomena that we see and the filamentary material being shot out of the sun would not occur if it’s just trying to release heat energy into space.
I WONDER IF YOU COULD HELP THE GENERAL AUDIENCE UNDERSTAND WHAT BIRKELAND CURRENTS ARE AND HOW THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE WOULD WORK FROM YOUR POINT OF VIEW?
When you have an electric current flowing in plasma – and plasma is a better conductor than a copper wire – the plasma in space is very, very thin, so it can’t carry concentrated current. It’s spread out a bit. But when current flows as anyone in high school physics knows when you have two wires carrying current in the same direction, the two wires are pulled towards each other. And this is what happens in space. So if you have current flowing in space, then the various filaments will tend to draw towards one another. As they come close, they actually spiral around one another to form what is called a ‘twisted pair.’ Electrical engineers use twisted pairs all the time because they are an efficient way of transferring energy over wires. And it seems that Nature does the same thing.”
Birkeland Currents
“Kristian Birkeland determined that intense ionospheric currents
were associated with the aurora. Birkeland suggested that these (electrical)
currents originated far from the Earth and that they flowed into and away
from the polar atmosphere along the geomagnetic field lines. The existence
of such field-aligned or “Birkeland” currents was disputed … until satellite
observations have determined the large-scale patterns, flow directions and
intensities of Birkeland currents in the auroral and polar regions, and their
relationship to the orientation and magnitude of the interplanetary magnetic field.”
– July 1987, Birkeland Currents in the Earth’s Magnetosphere,
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Auroral-like Birkeland currents created by scientist Kristian Birkeland
in his terrella, a small, magnetized anode globe representing the Earth to
simulate our planet’s magnetosphere in an evacuated chamber. Source: The
Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition 1902-1903, Volume 1: On the
Cause of Magnetic Storms and The Origin of Terrestrial Magnetism,
Section 2. Chapter VI: p. 667, © 1913 by Kristian Birkeland.
A Birkeland current is a set of electrical currents, which flow along magnetic field lines connecting the Earth’s magnetosphere to the Earth’s high latitude ionosphere. Further, the term Birkeland currents has been expanded by some researchers to include magnetic field-aligned electrical currents in cosmic plasmas. Cathode rays are so named because they are emitted by the negative electrode, or cathode, in a vacuum tube.
The currents were predicted in 1908 by Norwegian explorer and physicist Kristian Birkeland, who organized expeditions beyond the Arctic Circle to study the aurorae. He confirmed that when Northern Lights plasmas appeared, the needles of magnetometers changed direction. This could only imply that electrical currents were flowing in the atmosphere above. He theorized that somehow the Sun emitted a cathode ray and “corpuscles” from what is now known as a solar wind entered the Earth’s magnetic field and created electrical currents, thereby creating the aurorae.
[ Editor’s Note: Cathode rays (electron beams) are streams of electrons observed in vacuum tubes. If an evacuated glass tube is equipped with two electrodes and a voltage is applied, the glass opposite of the negative electrode is observed to glow, due to electrons emitted from and traveling perpendicular to the cathode. ]
Birkeland currents were ridiculed and dismissed by other researchers until 1967 when a satellite launched into the auroral region showed that in fact the electrical currents predicted by Birkeland do exist. See Websites below.
“Twisted Pairs” in Space
David Talbott’s and Wallace Thornhill’s web research in Thunderbolts.Info states: “There is another cause of filamentation of currents in plasma. This is due to the fact that there is a force of attraction between any two parallel currents. Each current generates a magnetic field which circles the first current and attracts the other current according to the normal laws of electro-magnetism. Therefore the two currents are drawn together, as illustrated in this brief MIT physics demonstration video.
“This effect will apply to individual electron streams as well as to wires carrying currents. Therefore, in a plasma, a diffuse current will tend to become concentrated into a filament, as we have seen. Similarly, a sheet of current will also tend to coalesce into individual filaments, rather like a sheet of falling water breaks up into individual streams. If two parallel filaments occur in the same vicinity, or form out of a sheet of current due to the filamentation processes, then they will attract each other and initially move toward one another under under the magnetic attraction described by the Biot-Savart Law. Therefore there is a tendency for current filaments to occur in pairs.”
Braided current sheets glow softly in visible and infrared light along the
Cygnus Loop of the Veil Nebula. Image credit: W. P. Blair
and R. Sankrit, Johns Hopkins University and NASA.
The braided current sheets of the Cygnus Loop above can be compared to two
electrical wires on Earth twisted together form a twisted pair. Twisted pairs in cables
is an extremely effective way to send high-speed signals down a cable because
most electrical noise entering into and/or radiating from the cable can be eliminated.
Birkeland currents can be any size from something in the laboratory, which is only a few centimeters, up to the Birkeland currents that we see in the aurorae and to the vast filaments of material that get shot out of the sun. They are always filaments and that’s because they are electric currents. One good example of filament currents distributed in a circular pattern is the Glowing Eye Nebula.
Glowing Eye Planetary Nebula NGC 6751 in the constellation Aquila is approximately
6,500 light-years from Earth. The nebula is estimated to be around 0.8 light-years
in diameter. The star at the center of the nebula has a surface temperature of
approximately 251,540 degrees Fahrenheit (140,000 Kelvin). It was formed when
a star collapsed and threw off its outer layer of gas several thousand years ago.
Image by Hubble Space Telescope.
Then you have in deep space the filaments are invisible because they are so diffuse that they give out no light, but they do give out radiowaves. And it’s those radiowaves that can be detected by radio astronomers. It’s my view that radio astronomers in the future will be able to trace the electric circuits in space with their telescopes.
Now on the grander scale, Tony Peratt (electrical engineer Anthony Peratt, Ph.D.) pointed out that you will get electric currents in plasma even by the very fact that plasma is moving. Just the movement of plasma generates electric currents. The view that Tony Peratt had put forward was one which is called electrodynamics where you’ve got particles moving and charge moving in electric currents.
WHY IS THERE SUCH A REJECTION BY TRADITIONAL ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICISTS OF THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE HYPOTHESIS?
Observationally all you have to do is train radio telescopes on space and you find magnetic fields. Those magnetic fields cannot be generated any other way than by electric currents. You cannot have a disembodied magnetic field.
I think the electric universe has the advantage now of the Internet because people can do their own reading and research and figure it out for themselves. And what we are proposing is a very simple cosmology.
THE BASICS TO YOU ARE?
Well, the basics are purely electrical engineering. And at the particle physics level, it’s just proposing that you repeat the pattern. You have patterns, which are made of orbiting charged particles and then the electric universe suggests that those electrons and protons – these orbiting particles themselves are made up of smaller orbiting charged particles. When you do that, you can then explain gravity and magnetism in real terms.
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE NEXT EVOLUTIONARY STEP IS FOR THE ELECTRIC UNIVERSE HYPOTHESIS?
The next step for us is to perform experiments and get funding to perform those experiments, which show, for instance, that the sun is an electrical phenomenon. I think this is the way things are heading because scholars and those who are in the mainstream cannot say they support us. But there is support growing from the mainstream physicists and engineers.”
Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars?
Wallace Thornhill’s colleague in electric universe research is David Talbott, who produces the website www.thunderbolts.info. The two men co-authored a 2007 book entitled The Electric Universe. David Talbott has also produced a 2011 DVD entitled The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars. Recently, I asked David what Martian feature first attracted his attention as evidence of plasma bolts carving the planet’s surface in an electric universe paradigm.
The largest canyon in the Solar System is named Valles Marineris. Far larger than Earth’s
Grand Canyon, Valles Marineris spans one-fifth of the Martian circumference, which is
1,864 miles (3,000 km) long, some 373 miles (600 km) across, and about 5 miles deep
(8 km). By comparison, the Earth’s Grand Canyon in Arizona is 800 kilometers long,
30 kilometers across, and 1.8 kilometers deep. The origin of the Valles Marineris
remains unknown. The above mosaic was created from over 100 images
of Mars taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s. Credit: Viking, USGS, NASA.
David Talbott, Director, Thunderbolts Project, co-author with David Talbott, The Electric Universe and video, The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars; and producer of Holoscience.com, Beaverton, Oregon: “No question about it – it was the Valles Marineris because when the Mariner probe reached Mars, going back decades, and the image was received, there was this huge scar across the face of the planet. Now, that was inherently interesting – not just to me, but interesting to other people in our circle. We had a writer, Ralph Juergens, who is one of the true pioneers of the electric universe paradigm. He looked at that and he said, ‘That’s an electrical scar.’ He said Valles Marineris looks like nothing more than an electric arc blasting across the surface of Mars and removing immense amounts of material from the planet.
THE SCARRING ON VALLES MARINERIS HAS WHAT KIND OF UNIQUE FEATURES COMPARED TO A CANYON THAT WE KNOW WAS CREATED ON THE EARTH BY GEOLOGICAL FORCES?
Now, that is a very good question. There are certain specific details you look for and one is there are these tributaries that look like from a distance – these could be erosional tributaries to a major trench cut by water erosion. Now, in the end geologists had to abandon that explanation because we eventually began to see that huge trench with increasing resolution at the level of detail (that shows) it’s just not cut by water. And in fact part of that trench – a huge chasm that is just to the north of Valles Marineris – it is recognized to be part of this same geologic activity and it doesn’t have any outflow region at all.
When we look up close, those tributaries are not tributaries. They are alcoves that are smooth and sharply cut and the most profound thing running across thousands of miles of Valles Marineris are these dendritic ridge systems. They are very sharply sculpted. They are completely enigmatic. You would never get any form of that sort by erosion.
East facing wall of Ophir Chasma in Viking image 915A10.
And the great puzzle of the planet Mars is that these dendritic forms – these are raised tributaries that are not cut by erosion. They are raised and they are like the positive, let’s say, of the negative relief that you get in a dendritic erosional system. Now, there is nothing that scientists can name that creates that dendritic raised ridge and the puzzle is that you see these all over the planet Mars.
COULD YOU PLEASE PAINT A WORD PICTURE OF WHAT YOU THINK WAS OCCURRING IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF MARS THAT COULD HAVE CAUSED WHAT YOU CALL IN YOUR VIDEO, ‘THE LIGHTNING-SCARRED PLANET MARS’?
If the planet Mars were immersed in electric discharge, it would be cratered across its surface. Electrical cratering in the laboratory will produce a morphology of craters that more precisely matches the abundant craters on Mars than any impact experiment will. It includes burning towards the center and a bump at the center. And it includes even those dendritic ridges along the cliffs of the bigger craters. And that cratering on Mars is just a huge puzzle for planetary scientists because it’s concentrated in the southern hemisphere on Mars.
Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) maps
clearly show a distinction between lowlands and highlands.
The northern lowlands have overall elevations about five kilometers
lower than the cratered uplands of the southern hemisphere.
Image by JPL/NASA Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter.
In a conventionally constructed model of planetary evolution, you won’t get hemispheric dichotomies like this. Almost all of the craters are in the southern hemisphere. What about the north? The north was excavated miles deep. We’re not talking about a distortion of the crust. We’re talking about excavation of the shallow crust. It is a complete anomaly.”
Recent Scientific Discoveries
That Might Link to An Electric Universe
– November 16, 2011, journal Nature: Magnetic fields set the stage for the birth of new stars. Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have, for the first time, measured the alignment of magnetic fields in gigantic clouds of gas and dust in a distant galaxy. Their results suggest that such magnetic fields, which on Earth associated with electric current, play a key role in channeling matter to form denser clouds, and thus in setting the stage for the birth of new stars.
Image of the Triangulum Galaxy M33. The pink blobs are graphic overlays
by Thomas Davis of regions containing newly formed stars.
Source: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.
– July 18, 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: A team of scientists has created an “MRI” of the Sun’s interior plasma motions, shedding light on how it transfers heat from its deep interior to its surface. The result upends our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation. This means the conventional theory about heat transfer in the sun from the interior to the surface has not been confirmed, leaving the electric universe researchers proposing that the sun could be externally powered like a “light bulb on a wire.”
A team of scientists from NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical
Sciences and its Department of Physics; Princeton University;
the Max Planck Institute; and NASA has created an “MRI” of the Sun’s
interior plasma motions, shedding light on how it transfers heat from its deep
interior to its surface. In order to develop their “MRI” of the Sun’s plasma flows,
the researchers examined high-resolution images of the Sun’s surface,
shown above, taken by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager
(HMI) onboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Using a 16-million
pixel camera, HMI measures motions on the Sun’s surface caused by convection.
More Information:
For further reports about our solar system and the cosmos, please see Earthfiles archived reports from the Earthfiles Archive.
• 03/01/2012 — Updated 030112: Solar CMEs Hitting Earth’s Magnetic Fields – Do They Make Strange, Loud Sounds?
• 12/22/2011 — Updated: Asteroid YU55 “Puzzling Structures”: Equatorial Ridge and Tall, “Pointy” Hill? With mp3 interview.
• 11/22/2011 — Updated: Will Solar Cycle 24 Maximum Be Weakest in 100 Years and Go to Grand Minimum without Sunspots?
• 09/06/2011 — Comet Elenin Update and November 2011 Asteroid’s Close Approach
• 09/06/2011 — NASA: “DNA Building Blocks Actually Created in Space”
• 06/29/2011 — Black Holes and Galaxies Grew Up Together in Early Universe
• 04/29/2011 — Cosmic Explosion So Strange Scientists Say It’s “Unprecedented”
• 08/26/2010 — Where Did Our Moon Come From?
• 04/30/2010 — M82 Galaxy’s Mysterious Radio Waves
• 01/14/2010 — Death Stars: Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts
• 01/06/2010 — Earliest Image Yet of Our Universe
• 11/19/2009 — Large Hadron Collider: Looking for the “God Particle” and Beyond
• 11/02/2009 — Updated: Is There Life in Europa’s Huge Ocean?
• 10/30/2009 — How Long Will Our Sun Remain Quiet and Cosmic Rays Increase?
• 10/06/2009 — Cosmic Rays Reaching Earth At Highest Level in 50 Years
Websites:
“Birkeland Currents in the Earth’s Magnetosphere” by T. A. Potemra, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory: http://www.tau.ac.il/~colin/courses/AtmosElec/Potemra%20ASS%20144.pdf
Wallace Thornhill Website, Hioloscience.com: http://www.holoscience.com/wp/
David Talbott Website, Thunderbolts.info: http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/
Types of Plasmas: http://www.plasma-universe.com/Image:Plasma-types.jpg
Birkeland Currents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland_current
NASA IBEX Spacecraft: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/news/nobowshock.html
Ant Nebula: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/05/image/a/
Hourglass Nebula: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/opo9607a.html
Glowing Eye Nebula: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2000/12/image/a
Heliosphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
July 18, 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Helioseismology challenges models of solar convection”:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/30/11896.extract?sid=ebd98beb-f879-42df-b0d0-3f6ec9b2a75a
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