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Supernova remnant G1.9 + 03 (left). Location within the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (right).
Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.);
Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/Cambridge/D.Green et al.);
Infrared (2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF/CfA/E.Bressert)
Aug 13, 2008
Two Views of a SupernovaThe cornerstone assumptions of conventional theories about supernovae and their remnants were set in place before space-age discoveries revealed the fault lines of data that were shifting beneath them.
The image above is a composite of two images taken 12 years apart. The object is a supernova remnant that lies only about a thousand light-years from our galaxy’s core. It has been named G1.9+0.3. The blue image, from 1985, is in radio “light;” the orange image, from 2007, is in x-ray “light.” Clouds of gas and dust that circle the galaxy's core obscure the "visual light" from G1.9, but radio and x-ray wavelengths can penetrate those clouds.
Conventional theories understand G1.9 as the debris from an internally powered star that exploded. “The debris…crashes into surrounding material, generating a shell of hot gas” that radiates x-rays and radio waves. By measuring the distance between the two images, conventional theorists can calculate that the explosion must have occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova explosion known in our galaxy. (It was not observed because the galactic clouds hid it from view on Earth.) But this calculation is troubling because it results in an “unprecedented expansion speed”—nearly 5% the speed of light—and the “most energetic electrons” ever measured in a supernova remnant.
The discovery that space was permeated with cells and filaments of plasma overturned the “empty space” cornerstone assumption. The discovery that electromagnetic forces in plasma could be many times stronger than gravity fractured the “gravity-only” cornerstone. The discovery that Birkeland-current filaments could connect cosmic bodies into hierarchies of coupled circuits threatened to replace the “internally powered” cornerstone with an “externally powered” one. Only theorists’ dogmatic adherence to the obsolete assumptions preserves them.
The Electric Universe understands G1.9 as an overload response of the central star to a surge in the galactic circuit that powers it. The entire star was engulfed in an exploding double layer (DL), a larger-scale version of the exploding DLs that we call flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) on the Sun. Most likely, the original star fissioned into two unequal bodies in order to present a larger surface area that would accommodate the increased current. See the electric description of V838 Mon.
Exploding DLs accelerate as they expand, unlike conventional explosions whose debris moves in an inertial response to the initial impulse. Calculations from later debris movements to determine the time of explosion are therefore much less reliable: G1.9 is apt to be more recent than 140 years.
Because DLs accelerate charged particles, fast electrons are expected. As well, the electrons will spiral in the magnetic field and emit synchrotron radiation. Conventional theorists calculate a “gas temperature” from the energy of the radiation, assuming that the radiation comes from particle collisions, as in a glowing iron bar. But synchrotron radiation has little to do with temperature: the “gas” is really plasma, and the radiation is powered by electricity, not heat.
Space age instruments have furnished abundant data showing that supernovae remnants and their lower-energy siblings, planetary nebulae, are not spherical “shells.” They tend to have an hourglass shape, showing bipolar symmetry. The circular ones only appear so because we are seeing them along their axes.
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