Apr 12, 2006
The Supernova Nobody Saw
The
enigmatic features of the strongest extrasolar radio source in the sky
have been heavily obscured by astronomers’ ad hoc attempts to save
preconceived theories. But they are clear manifestations of electrical
activity in space.
Cassiopeia A, pictured above in a composite of
x-ray, optical and infrared images, is one of the first objects
observed by radio telescopes. It is also the strongest extrasolar
radio source in the sky. It wasn’t identified with an optical object
until 1954, when Walter Baade and Rudolph Minkowski matched it up
with a “most remarkable” nebula. Their paper in the Astrophysical
Journal (Vol. 119, pp. 206-214) remarked: “[R]ed-sensitive
plates ... show ... broken bits of nebulosity .... Some are
elongated streaks ..., others have almost stellar appearance ....
Not a single one ... registers on the blue-sensitive plates.... [I]t
is for the first time that we encounter the type of nebulosity that
we described.” Emission nebulae are usually blueish.
Baade’s and Minkowski’s plates only imaged a few
parts of the nebula in its northern sector. What they called the
“northern arc”, roughly the area shown here near the top in yellow
and white, appeared to have “marked motions”—around 2000 kilometers
per second—“and intensity changes.... In contrast, the red broken
bits ... show neither perceptible motions”—at most, around 50
kilometers per second—“nor intensity changes.” Because an exploding
star—a supernova—was expected to throw off a shell of material with
a uniform expansion velocity and a uniform luminosity, they
concluded, “[T]he nebulosity is not a shell of this type.”
Later astronomers decided it was “a
shell of this [supernova] type” and calculated the shell’s expansion
back to a supernova explosion that would have been seen in 1667. A
search through the historical documents of that time, however,
turned up no mention of it. Although it is the youngest and one of
the nearest nebulas that are considered to be remnants of
supernovas, no one saw the explosion. Perhaps recalling the
admonition that “lack of evidence is not evidence of lack”, these
later astronomers declared that the explosion had been “heavily
obscured” by dust.
Now the Spitzer Space Telescope has measured the
“marked motions” in infrared light and has found them to be much too
high even for a supernova explosion. The new explanation is a “light
echo” (although “heat echo” would be more accurate): The white dwarf
remnant of the supernova emits bursts of radiation that heat up
tendrils of dust in the vicinity. “Hot spots”, where radiation front
meets dust, appear to move “at tremendous speeds”, but the dust
doesn’t move. No one has addressed the question of whether the
“light echo” explanation undermines the assumptions on which
retrocalculation is based.
In addition to anomalous motions, the nebula
displays a mysterious “element enhancement”. Some parts are enriched
in iron, others in silicon, still others in calcium or sulfur. These
observations have become usual with nebulas, provoking exclamations
about “unexpected” features that are “not well understood”. In the
image above, the left outer edge is enriched with iron. According to
the accepted theory of stellar structure, the iron would have been
at the core of the star before it exploded. The explosion somehow
“overturned” the star’s layers, throwing the inside outside and
leaving the outside inside.
But another viewpoint is possible. Sorting elements
and moving matter at several speeds is what
electricity in space
does. It also organizes matter into
filaments. And those
filaments often show the twisting and braiding and knotting into
strings of “beads” that show in the above image. The strong electric
fields in the “
double layers” or insulating walls of the
surrounding cells and filaments accelerate ions and electrons to
x-ray and even to cosmic-ray energies. They also generate the
copious radio waves that first brought attention to this nebula. The
Electric Universe viewpoint suggests that this energetic output of
Cassiopeia A, as in all
planetary nebulas and supernova
remnants, results from a “pinch” in a plasma current. The local
current is part of a larger galactic circuit, and the discharge
effects of this current show up in the “jets” that emerge from the
nebula at left and right.
In the
electrical view, a supernova is not so much a mechanical explosion
as an electrical discharge: a stellar thunderbolt. The accompanying
nebulosity may or may not have come from the central star; in either
case, it will have been sorted, condensed, rarified, accelerated,
slowed, and otherwise modified from its previous state by the
electric force. Retrocalculation is not a reliable guide for dating
the outburst of radiation. Nobody saw the flare-up of Cassiopeia A
in 1667 because, most likely, it didn’t flare up then.
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