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This colorized picture is a mosaic of ultraviolet images from the orbiting TRACE satellite sensitive to light
emitted by highly charged iron atoms. Growing in number, the intricate structures visible are the Sun's hot
active regions(with temperatures over a million degrees Fahrenheit), all with associated magnetic loops.
 Credit: Trace Team, NASA

Oct 02, 2006
The "Iron Sun" Debate (1)
Nuclear Reactions at the Solar Surface

Proponents of the "Iron Sun", a theory widely represented on the Internet in recent months, challenge the popular idea that the Sun is powered by thermonuclear reactions at its core. And they point to nuclear reactions on the Sun's surface, something considered impossible under the standard model.

Scientists now supporting a new approach to solar physics—the “Iron Sun” — mention neither the Electric Universe nor the “Electric Sun”. But their findings add powerful support to the electric model of the Sun posited by Wallace Thornhill, Donald Scott, and earlier pioneers beginning with engineer Ralph Juergens in the late 60's. It was the electrical theorists who first suggested that surface events, not a hidden nuclear furnace at the Sun’s center, appear to be the source of neutrino production (the subatomic signature of nuclear fusion).

In recent years nuclear chemist Oliver Manuel and several of his collaborators have attracted scientific attention for proposing a radical alternative to the standard model of the Sun. Manuel suggests that the Sun is the remnant of a supernova, now holding in its core a “neutron star” encased within an iron shell. In this model, most of the radiant energy of the Sun comes from the neutron star’s slow decay over long spans of time.

Manuel draws attention to recent discoveries by solar scientists. He finds compelling evidence that nuclear reactions occur at the foot points of solar flares—hot spots associated with prominent magnetic loops and intense electric fields. This observation places the nuclear reactions far from where conventional theorists locate them--at the Sun’s core.

To confirm these surface events Iron Sun proponents point to the telltale signatures of the “CNO cycle” first set forth in the work of Hans Bethe. In 1939 Bethe proposed that the stable mass-12 isotope of Carbon catalyzes a series of atomic reactions in the core of the Sun, resulting in the fusion of hydrogen into helium. This nucleosynthesis, according to Bethe, occurs through a “Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen (CNO) cycle,” as helium is constructed from the nuclei of hydrogen atoms—protons—at temperatures ranging from 14 million K to 20 million K.

For some time now, solar scientists have observed the products expected from the CNO cycle, but now they see a relationship of these products’ abundances to sunspot activity. This finding is crucial because the nuclear events that standard theory envisions are separated from surface events by hundreds of thousands of years as the heat from the core slowly percolates through the Sun’s hypothetical “radiative zone”. From this vantage point, a connection between the hidden nuclear furnace and sunspot activity is inconceivable.

Proponents of the Iron Sun, therefore, have posed an issue that could be fatal to the standard model. But as we shall attempt to show, there is a good deal more room to add objections within this question.

The Iron Sun proponents are to be congratulated for their research showing that the Sun does not shine because of nuclear fusion in its core. It takes great courage to stake your work and reputation against established dogma. If science operated in the way it advertises, the search for the truth in this essential matter would involve a concentration of resources to confirm or deny the evidence amassed by the Iron Sun proponents. The questions raised are crucial whether or not the proposed model of the Sun is correct. Yet there seems to be pressure on researchers to have a model at hand to explain "anomalous" results. In the case of the “Iron Sun”, the result is less than perfect because there is a flaw at the very heart of popular cosmology:

All matter in the universe is composed of electric charge.  The electric force between charges mediates all physical interactions, irrespective of scale. It is the electric force that energizes matter. By ignoring electricity, cosmologists have committed an error so fundamental that the mistake invariably propagates through any and all of their theoretical excursions. The electrical theorists see this as the overriding cause of the oft-noted “crisis in cosmology”, and the effects on related disciplines—bound as they are by the assumptions of cosmologists—have been nothing less than catastrophic.
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