Electric Sun: Why the Sun is a spheroid

[Nereid]

Since waaay before telescopes were invented, much less electricity discovered, our ancestors knew some of the primary attributes of the Sun quite well.

Some of these attributes we now account for in terms of the Earth rotating on its axis, and the Earth going round the Sun in an elliptical orbit; others in terms of local weather phenomena and atmospheric conditions.

What are the primary attributes of the Sun itself, known to our ancestors of many hundreds (and thousands) of years ago?

I think these two are the most fundamental (and important): the Sun always has the same brightness, and it is round.

In contemporary parlance, we'd describe the first of these as the Sun's total energy output, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, is constant (to within a fraction of a percent), over time periods as short as milliseconds to as long as centuries; it is 3.85 x 10^26 J/sec. Back in February this year, I started a thread to examine how well the electric Sun hypothesis (or model) - as published by Scott and Thornhill - can account for this primary attribute; see Electric Sun: A Quantitative Calculation.

Today, we'd describe the second fundamental fact about the Sun as something like this: the shape of the Sun is (and has been, for over several thousand years) a sphere, to within <1%, as measured at its photosphere; the radius is 695,000 km. To be somewhat more precise, the shape of the Sun is an oblate spheroid whose minor axis coincides with its axis of rotation (and we'd add some quantification about the degree of oblateness, and its measured uncertainty).

In this thread I'd like to discuss how the electric Sun model (or hypothesis) accounts for (or describes, or explains) the observed shape of the Sun, and its observed constancy.

I began to search for answers in the same two primary sources I used in the other thread (see that thread for links).

However, I came up blank.

Hence this thread; does anyone know of published material, by any EU theorist (not just Scott or Thornhill), on why the Sun is round?

[Goldminer]

Hence this thread; does anyone know of published material, by any EU theorist (not just Scott or Thornhill), on why the Sun is round?

What's the point, Neirid? EU theory does not exclude other forces such as gravity and surface tension. Indeed, why are all heavenly bodies above a certain size spherical? I gather from your context that you mean "spherical" rather than "round." What is the difference between an oblate sphere and an ellipsoid?

Almost all the planets currently seem to be experiencing "global warming." How do you explain that?

Go to the TPODS subjective index and click on solar. That material has been published, and you can read the thoughts of several "theorists"

[psychegram]

My understanding is that the EU model doesn't say 'there's no such thing as gravity'. In fact it's generally agreed that gravity dominates in electrically neutral environments (or at least, environments where charge neutrality has been achieved.) It simply adds that electrical effects must be taken account of, and suggests that stars may in fact be powered by these, rather than by nuclear fusion. Which sounds loopy I admit but is a fun idea to play with.

I seem to recall Thornhill suggesting that gravity results from the imperfect cancellation of atomic electrical dipoles, or something ... basically that it's a small residual force. Can't comment beyond that ... to the best of my knowledge, there are no quantitative calculations, and TBH so far as I'm concerned it's just one more of a loooooong list of possible explanations for 'what gravity is'. But one that seems relevant here. Although I would add that the failure of LIGO and Geo600 to do anything more than set upper limits would seem to argue that the question of what gravity is remains very much an open one (not that this in any way implies Thornhill is right.)

I think the more interesting question to ask, from an EU standpoint, is not so much 'why is the Sun round?', but rather 'why aren't all those protoplanetary and planetary nebulae at all round?' Yes yes, 'magnetic fields' , the usual handwaving answer ... but the MHD sims continue to have a difficult time reproducing the disk-and-stick or bipolar morphologies, to say nothing of more detailed features that practically scream 'electrical discharge'. Of course, those simulations don't, so far as I know, assume a current driven by a larger Galactic system. Then there's the fantastically detailed filigree of cold ISM dust as revealed by Herschel ... filamentation that, once again, is difficult to explain using only turbulent gas motions, but makes perfect sense in the context of Galactic currents.

[jjohnson]

I don't qualify as an EU theorist (or any other kind of theorist, for that matter - more an applied mechanic), so I'll just string a few thoughts and questions together and let theorists flail away at them.

There's nothing wrong with pointing to gravity as the force holding a large body together in a more or less spherical shape, particularly a fluid body which settles into a "natural position" more easily than, say, a cool rocky body. The Sun has sufficient mass that estimates of its surface gravity (the radial distance where a homogenous body's g-forces are greatest) is about, what 29 times that of Earth's). The assumption implicit there is that the Sun is a "fluid body", which means gas or liquid matter states.

Its visible surface, in contrast to its unseen interior, is observably too hot to be in the fluid state, and is in the plasma state. Someone's law or other, as Goldminer noted, indicates that above some critical radius, even rocky bodies such as planets or moons are found to be approximately spherical, depending on spin rate and the particular tensile strengths and gravitating mass of their composition. I don't think that there are good recorded observations of a planet or a star being formed from beginning to end, offhand.

It is quite possible according to the presumptions from both the primary electrical and the primarily gravitational stories of such formation that there is a lengthy "hot" (fluid or ionized or both) stage, during which all kinds of competing forces — inertial, gravitational attraction, electromagnetic attraction and repulsion and trajectory-curving, plasma dynamics, surface tension, possibly even Van de Waals forces on tiny scales — are found. What results in the otherwise microgravity condition of open space is a sphere if the body is large enough, and a deformed sphere if rotational-inertial forces are large enough. That is just an observation. Extending it to other stars whose disks, with the few exceptions many of us could count on our fingers, are not resolvable, is okay in my book. The Universe would be pretty "lumpy" if the same laws didn't obtain throughout, I'm thinking.

Gravity and EM fields coexist in space. (I don't use or discuss "aether" as background or scaffolding or its existence per se because I do not know anything at all about it.) I think that has been sufficiently demonstrated. To me, they fill space —space is therefore not "empty", although matter's presence may be rarefied or sparse in a given "volume" — and the cause of whether one or the other of the forces is dominant is due to the local intensity of their respective force "vectors". Vectors, like magnetic field lines or topograhic contour maps, don't exist as real "things" except as helpful constructs.

At the Sun, might it not be possible that the bulk mass has assumed the least-energy morphology of a sphere under gravitational forces, while the morphology of its plasma surface is dominated by the much larger influence of the plasma found there, and on up well into the corona? In a neutral fluid, least-energy distributions assume equal distance from neighbors, intra-neighbor distance decreasing in some materials with increasing pressure. In a volume such as a cylinder (like a wire) or a sphere, charged particles with the same polarity all try to locate themselves as far from one another as possible, regardless of direction (not just their immediate neighbors) and they cluster on the exterior surface. Dust gathers surface charge, like pith balls. A copper terella or a spherical metal charge collector like a Van de Graff generator concentrates charges on the surface. Perhaps the Sun's charged particles preferentially migrate to its surface.

If you look at the Earth from space, the oceans are apparently as smooth and still and calm as the land areas, reflecting sunlight like polished brass, and only the clouds moving through the transparent thin skin of air show evidence of motion. Put yourself in a small boat in the North Sea or the Bering Sea in a winter storm, and the surface morphology takes on a distinctively different aspect, driven by currents and winds unseen from a distance.

Observe the Sun through a small telescope with a solar filter from a distance of 1 AU as I occasionally do, and it looks pretty smooth and spherical, like a solid monochromatic bowling ball. Look at its surface in detail from SDO and SOHO and other observational satellites and surface solar observatories, at many wavelengths in and outside the visible ones, and watch the time-lapse videos of flares and coronal loops and mass ejections along the limb, and you get the notion that things on the surface are a little rougher than first appearances indicate. Those filamentary arcs of glowing plasma are electrical currents radiating hard X-rays and well down into the radio. They float for tens to hundreds of thousands of metres above the photosphere, insensitive the the 29-g local gravity, not because gravity isn't exerting its force on them, but because its force vectors are superseded by the EM vectors which force ionized matter into a different dance. The two forces always and everywhere coexist; but not necessarily in equal proportion. That's all. [paragraph's typos corrected- jj]

We don't/can't easily know how deep the plasma conditions extend into the Sun's interior. We do know that they extend at least from the visible surface to as far out as we've been able to detect the extent of the solar wind. For all I know, the inside of the Sun might be, as Thornhill muses, cool. Certainly we see "darkness" and bolometrically measure cooler temperatures when we peer at or into the center of a sunspot.

Is that how it is? A hot, violent exterior and a cool interior sphere of something else? That's a theoretical question. I can only say, yeah, the surface is hot, but not unusually so for what we think we know of stellar temperatures. No one knows through observation exactly what goes on beneath that writhing surface. Maybe the greater Sun is a large spherical and somewhat cool mass, fluid or solid, and only its surface is heated to ionization and driven to incandescance and massive gravity-overcoming ejections. If the energy to do all this were to come in from outside, this seems like it would be the form we see. A stable base interior and an excited, frothy exterior.

Beyond this place thar be dragons.

[jjohnson]

I forgot. Constancy of the Sun.

Depends on the timescale. Speaking as a carbon-based life form whose entire species' existence is probably less than one swing around the Galaxy, it smacks of hubris to think we know how constant our sun is. We have only recently learned to keep records and to see outside the optical spectrum, and already we know that the Sun can have dormant, low sunspot periods, even while maintaining a relatively constant 22 year bi-periodic cycle. We know that in terms of the X-ray output of its overall spectrum, it is classed as a "variable" star. Not as variable as, say, a Cepheid variable, or a Type 1 supernova, but not exactly constant, either. Everything changes. Tree rings, rock strata, constellations, sea levels, cell phone batteries.

If it's not constant, then what drives change? Does the rate of an interior fusion process vary significantly over time scales of several years? And if so, how are such changes telegraphed to the surface through the assumed maelstrom of turbulent "boiling" flows and eddies and convection columns, etc.

We don't really know why the Sun varies over time any more than we know how old it is or, if it is externally driven, what causes that power source, whatever and wherever it is, to vary. Some observers think stars "follow" a certain sequence on a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, but that is a static, not a temporal, record of observed stars. Some stars change dramatically, some on a surprisingly short time scale along an unexpected sequence (Thornhill and Talbott, Chapter 3). That the Sun exhibits a variety of changing conditions having a variety of periods, and occasionally aperiodic behavior, is no secret.

We need to watch carefully a lot longer to determine better how the Sun works. Meanwhile the theorists can spar to their hearts' delight.

[webolife]

Not meaning to turn this thread into another "what is gravity?" thread, please indulge me in a brief bit of perspective...
"Gravity" while the word appears as a noun, is conceptually a verb like the word "force", or preferrably "pressure", or an adjective like "sticky". Trying to make it a noun, ie an object, leads to conceptual mayhem. Something holds us, the earth and moon, the sun and stars, the galaxies, the universe together; Whatever it is, it makes Sol round and water level, and it is not obvious to the cursory view of mortals. This "holding together" is called gravity and there is no denying that it is happening, at every scale, atomic to astronomic. What ever it is, we can observe the effects of and measure its centropic vectors at or in relation to its centroid[s]. The philosophical question remains, what is the underlying cause of this gravitational pressure? Is it little packets of imaginary "gravitons", oscillations of space/time, the flexible fabric of space/time [a la Einstein], net electrostatic dipole accumulations [a la Sansbury], z-pinch effects of plasmic birkeland currents, the reciprocal of "spin", or a giant supracosmic hand? Or something else, perhaps a combination of two or more of the above? But the stuff of science is another question: How does gravity act? To start with, it makes big things round, which suggests a connection between gravity and bigness, hence Newton's Laws, relating both mass and distance to gravity and motion. Arguing pro and con for any particular gravitational philosophy may be fun, but does little to advance the understanding of science students, or science forum readers, unless the argument leads to a better understanding of why gravity acts like it does, or how it may be better harnessed to do work.

[PersianPaladin]

We cannot use the term "gravity fields" because it implies that there is such an entity. We do not understand gravity. The best thing that EU suggests is that gravity is a symptom of electromagnetic plasma interactions.

[psychegram]

At the risk of further infuriating Nereid (sorry, Nereid) I'm going to mention one of my private speculations.

Now, I'm sure many readers here are familiar with the concept of chakra, at least in passing. Virtually every Eastern esoteric tradition names these as the primary organs of the subtle body, and agrees on their location: axially aligned down the centre of the body. What's interesting is precisely where they are: top of the head, middle of the head, throat, chest, abdomen, sacrum, and 'root'. Now, if one were to visualize the null points of the (extremely weak, obviously) gravitational field of the human body, its null points would lie at essentially those locations, with the root chakra representing the connection between Earth and body (hence it would be located in the centre of the Earth ... which is usually where it is felt) and the crown chakra being the null point between body and everything in the sky (which, again, is where it is felt.)

Also interesting are the properties of subtle energy: it is extremely weak but all-pervading, and instantaneously connects everything to everything. Which is remarkably similar to gravity.

Of course, subtle energy is also directly implicated in consciousness, according to these esoteric traditions at least. Which would then imply gravity is so much more than the simple physical effect our materialist conception describes.

[David Talbott]

I regard the sphericity of the Sun as a reasonable subject to be included in the debate, and I look forward to addressing it, since the standard model does not predict or explain the more subtle aspects of this sphericity. Planets care a lot about the Sun's gravity, while charged particles appear to care very little. Of course, the dominating influence of the Sun's gravity on its sphericity is not an issue. But our claimed dominance of electric currents in star formation is an issue.

Constancy of solar output is surely no advantage of the standard model, since constancy is virtually inconceivable under the claimed conditions. The inconstancy of the Sun's radiation at higher frequencies is also an issue inviting a comparison of two models. Hence, on these issues I'm particularly eager to begin the debate.

And lastly, let's not complicate the definition of the "standard model." A star-sized sphere with a hypothesized nuclear furnace at its core is all we need to be concerned with. Since everything else about the standard model includes ever-changing guesses and unsolved mysteries, why complicate things.

[Nereid]

I gather from your context that you mean "spherical" rather than "round."

Thanks for asking.

I'm interested to know what material has been published, by electrical theorists, on what the electric Sun hypothesis (or model) says about the Sun's shape. What would be really good would be to find material which derives a shape, and then shows how well that prediction (or derivation) matches relevant observations.

Go to the TPODS subjective index and click on solar. That material has been published, and you can read the thoughts of several "theorists"

I did this, but found no TPOD contains - or is written by - an electric theorist and which addresses the question I'm interested in (I think you mean 'subject index').

Do you know of any? Did you find any when you went looking?

My understanding is that the EU model doesn't say 'there's no such thing as gravity'.

Indeed, and Scott explicitly states this:

Thompson states. "In order to reject the fundamental theory of fusion in the stellar interior, it would be necessary, to all at once sweep away literally everything known about hydrodynamics & magnetohydrodynamics, thermodynamics, gravitation, nuclear physics, statistical physics, and electromagnetism." This is a repetition of (2) and is an illogical assertion as well. All of the disciplines listed remain untouched by the Electric Sun model. It is simply that their domain of applicability is restricted.

For the rest of your post (yours too Goldminer), and your other one psychegram, your two jjohnson, and yours PersianPaladin and webolife, thanks. May I say, though, that I'm trying to find an answer to what seems to me to be a simple question.

I regard the sphericity of the Sun as a reasonable subject to be included in the debate, and I look forward to addressing it, [...] Of course, the dominating influence of the Sun's gravity on its sphericity is not an issue.

Thanks David!

Do you know of any published material, by electrical theorists, on why the Sun is round/spherical/an oblate spheroid/etc?

BTW, I also found <<moderator action - copyright infringing link removed>>this, which may be relevant:

And it [the electric model] doesn’t require internal heat to prevent gravitational collapse.

No reason is given as to what, in the electric Sun model, prevents gravitational collapse.

[D_Archer]

There is no such thing as gravitational collapse with regards to astrophysical bodies.

Gravity is a surface phenomenon, ie, a wtc on earth can gravitationally collapse if its structural integrity is lost. If you build a wtc in space and destroy its integrity it would not collapse.

Regards,
Daniel

[Lloyd]

Nereid said: No reason is given as to what, in the electric Sun model, prevents gravitational collapse.

* On this webpage, http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=rbkq9dj2, Thornhill said:

- The idea of what goes on inside a star stems from the work of Sir Arthur Eddington in his famous 1926 work, The Internal Constitution of Stars. He made a serious error of judgement when he applied mechanical ideal gas laws to the Sun’s interior. On that basis he calculated that there would be “no appreciable separation of the [electrical] charges.” It was a convenient conclusion because it simplifies the standard solar model so that it is “do-able.” It seems not to have been questioned since.
- In fact, atoms in the Sun’s strong gravitational field will distort to form small electric dipoles, with the positive nucleus offset within each atom toward the center of the Sun. The aligned dipoles will create a radial electric field that will tend to separate charge - free electrons moving toward the surface and positive ions toward the core. Gravitational compression inside the Sun is therefore offset by electrical expansion because like charges repel. Stars do not require a central furnace to maintain their size [because of repulsion of like charges]. The result is that the Sun is much the same density throughout. This was discovered decades ago by pioneering helioseismologists but not announced because it was believed that eventually a more acceptable explanation would be found in terms of the standard model! The enigma remains to this day. To accept the obvious conclusion would destroy the elaborate story of the evolution and death of stars. And another source of stellar energy would be required because nuclear fusion would be impossible in the core of an isodense star. Ah well, that's the price of progress.

* On this webpage, http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9r90r78d, he said:

- But Eddington ... was convinced that a star must collapse under its own gravity unless supported from within by an energy source. That was an incorrect assumption because gravity induces charge separation and electrical repulsion effects within a star – something that Eddington dismissed. The simple fact that a proton weighs almost 2000 times as much as an electron ensures that this will occur. Each hydrogen atom in a star will be distorted by gravity to form a tiny radial electric dipole. The resulting electric field will ensure charge separation inside the star. Free electrons will drift toward the surface and leave behind a positively charged core....
- The resulting internal electric forces counterbalance compression due to gravity more or less uniformly throughout the star. As the gadfly British physicist, Dr. Harold Aspden, had the temerity to remark, knowing the volume of a hydrogen atom and the mass of the Sun 19th century physicists could have calculated this. He wrote, “..the mass density within a star is not concentrated into a non-uniform distribution by the force of gravitation. The importance of this to cosmological science cannot be overestimated. It bears upon that question of how a nuclear fusion reaction can be initiated to feed the star's energy output. It obliges one to consider the prospect of a cold fusion process or to look for other explanations for the stellar energy source.” Precisely! – the simplest of observations about the Sun supports the electric star model.

[David Talbott]

Nereid, I really can't make sense of your question. Why is the Sun round? For the same reason that planets are round. For the same reason that planets are held in orbit around the Sun. The Sun is a gravitationally powerful object. Have you seen something written by EU proponents that disputes the obvious here?

How this gravitationally powerful object came into existence is a quite different matter. That question is a legitimate focus of a debate and will invite a contrast between the standard and the electric models. So too, the forces that subtly modify the shape of the Sun and modify its atmospheric density (a departure from the predictions of gravitational theory and gas laws alone) could not be ignored in a reasonable debate. Do you really believe that the standard model of the Sun answers your question at a precise level?

As for the ability of two models to explain the constancy of the Sun's brightness, perhaps we can examine the constancy of a hydrogen bomb, or conversely the constancy of failed laboratory fusion experiments. In fact, these are the only two known analogs for the hypothesized nuclear furnace at the center of the Sun. We can then compare their "constancy" to the constancy of a light bulb.

[jjohnson]

Not to pick nits, but a light bulb is a not source of energy, whereas the Fusion bomb is, and the fusion process, posited by Eddington and by NASA to power the sun, is too. A light bulb is an energy consumer; it cannot make energy; only transform it. But this departs from the question of why the Sun is round.

We are familiar with liquid and gas compressibility on Earth, and have a law that covers pressure: Pascal’s Law: It states that if pressure is applied at any part of a fluid it will be transmitted to all parts of the fluid undiminished. This implies that if pressure P is applied to any part of the fluid, the same pressure will also act at all other parts. I am not sure if this applies to "open" or uncontained fluids or not.

This means that, under gravity, the gaseous atmosphere is compressed by the weight of the "column" of air above it, so the lower toward sea level or land level you go, radially inward or "down", the denser or more compressed the medium, until you get to its lowest point. From the water surface, the pressure increases as you go deeper and deeper, too, until you reach the bottom. In gas or liquid, the pressure is the same in all directions at a given "point" or measurement location. But this is in a radial gravitational field, above a strong rocky/metallic core.

A water mass in the micro-gravity of the Space Station will assume a spherical shape unless disturbed, because that is the least energy, least surface area shape. If it is poked or disturbed, it will oscillate around that mean spherical "surface" and eventually return to it as the energy very slowly damps out due to internal friction (Reference: famous YouTube videos of water experiment by an astronaut on the Space Station.)

A water drop on a leaf, say, will assume a similar convex shape, except for the contact surface where it rests on the solid leaf below it, only it is more ovoid than spheroid. The contact angle that the curve makes where it contacts the leaf surface is a complicated function of liquid surface tension, gravity's force, liquid density, and likely the slope of the leaf if not horizontal.

But what if you keep adding water to the drop in the space station, and kept adding it, keeping it above freezing all the while, and it became as large as the Earth? The water now goes "all the way down" with nothing but the water "on the other side" to support it. Nature wants to even out the pressure and minimize the energy, so the most likely shape is [my guess here, frankly] is still a sphere. The same laws operate. How much water would you have to add before it would initiate gravitational collapse? SInce the gravitational force inside a homogenous spherical body decreases linearly with decreasing distance from the center of mass, less and less force is being exerted on each particle or "cell" of water as one goes toward the center. And in a continuous body of liquid, isn't the pressure the same at every point? Why collapse? And even if it did collapse to a more dense state, what would cause it to deviate from its least-energy form, a sphere?

The temperatures thought to exist throughout the interior of the prevalent model of the Sun (see link above) are so high that it must exist in the plasma state through and through, and is observed to be in that state from the photosphere upward through the corona, and out throughout the entire heliosphere in the form of the solar wind. Whether there are forces that drive a large, very hot plasma body toward a spherical state is not anything I have ever read or heard, from either the standard model side or the EU side.

I don't think, its never having been observed, that the EU's picture or concept of the Sun's interior includes even an estimate of what its interior temperature might be. The little evidence available is bolometric temperature of the darkest part (umbra) of sunspots, which is cooler than the surface layers by about 2000K. This supports the electric interpretation insofar as it doesn't have to explain how the immense heat of an internal fusion process is a. controlled and b) gets out past the much colder walls of the photosphere and chromosphere without even heating them up and then heats back up in the lower corona. The EU idea is that the heating occurs in those layers, and electric fields generated by plasma dynamics in those plasma layers accelerate the charged particles composing the solar wind into the solar system, kinetic energy increasing with increasing velocity, although becoming field-aligned reduces particle collision rates, so "collision" temperature decreases. But the plasma surface observed — photosphere plus chromosphere — is a tiny fraction (under 0.3%) of the depth of our star. If the Sun were a sphere 100 mm in diameter, its photosphere and chromosphere together would be no more than the thickness of an ordinary playing card.

The Sun's power and violent surface activity do not affect the overall grand shape of the star. Energy conservation and pressure equilibrium probably do. I am not convinced gravity needs to be invoked in this, but it might be. I'd enjoy hearing your explanation of its sphericity, Nereid, and what forces play a significant role in this question.

Jim

[squiz]

In regard to Achernar-

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=x50hfzxa

All stars and planets that reach a critical spin velocity bulge slightly at the equator. The Earth is 40 kilometres, or 0.3 per cent, wider from east to west than from north to south. Astronomers had been confident that their calculations of this oblateness were fairly accurate. "But the new observation means that the model for fast rotating stars is not complete," says astronomer Pierre Kervella, one of the team at the European Southern Observatory. "We clearly do not know enough." "Either the core is rotating faster than the surface or the star's matter is circulating in an unexpected way. We're not sure which possibility is correct at the moment," he told New Scientist.

There is a third important alternative, notable for its absence from the discussion. Perhaps we don’t know how stars work! The simplest way to explain stellar flattening due to swift rotation would be if the star were more homogeneous in density. But that would require giving up the notion of a central thermonuclear fire.

Usually just a lurker but I thought this would be fitting for the discussion.
Cheers.