Fast-Paced Neptune

[jjohnson]

The problem with pinning your arguments on a thermal, fluid dynamics model working with gravity and pressure and flows due to uneven solar heating, is that you are ignoring the possibility of alternate explanations that very well may help your model along, as it has a tough time explaining some of the observations on and about the remote gas giants in our solar system.

Granted, Neptune is far away and measurements are scarce and incomplete, but it is no secret that it has rotation, a magnetic field, and moons in a strong plasma environment, like several others closer in. These measurements are accompanied, at Jupiter and cold Saturn, by similar hot spots, polar auroras, active plasma rings in the rotation plane, and strong electric currents connecting some moons to the planets' polar regions. Electric currents have been measured and are shown to exist, and are the subject of press releases that increasingly are willing to actually use the term "electric current" in conjunction with cosmic phenomena. The EU has been offering electric current explanations for cosmic "mysteries" for years now, as a simplifying and more realistic interpretation of how things work.

I think it would be surprising NOT to find that moon Triton and Neptune are similarly linked by an electric ring current field-aligned with the planet's magnetic field, as with Io and Ganymede and Enceladus. Triton rotates in a retrograde direction (opposite Neptune's direction of rotation) but electromagnetically that is irrelevant - it is still a motion crossing Neptune's magnetic field with a perpendicular component, which generates an EMF that moves charged particles

In Neptune's magnetosphere, the circuit between the poles and out through the moon has to pass through each the moon and the planet. The effects on Io are unambiguous. Joule (or ohmic) heating, as the electrical current overcomes the natural resistance of a not-perfect conducting medium (like a planet or a moon) creates markedly warmer conditions at and near the surface where the current comes in from space near one pole, and where it exits at the other. This might explain the thermal driver of winds and pressure gradients and weather in these planetary atmospheres.

With atmosphere present, this can also result in "hot spots" in the auroral oval(s), which may be visible as at Jupiter, or may be in the X-ray wavelengths as at Saturn. This electrical model seems to be gaining traction in consensus thought, at least in two of the 4 gas giants in our system. Voyager 2 observed nitrogen and dark dusty material in "geyser-like eruptions" extending kilometers above Triton's surface. Sounds a lot like early observations of Enceladus, before the polar current was discovered as a highly charged "magnetic flux tube", or the electrically excavated sulfurous "volcanoes" of Io and the three polar hotspots on Jupiter.

Granted that nearby measurements of the outer 2 giants are currently lacking. [-apology for the pun.] When appropriately instrumented laboratories visit Neptune and Uranus, I suspect that their electrical environment will be found to be rather similar to Jupiter and Saturn, with polar auroral ovals, moon-circuited ring currents, hot spots at surface contact points of current flows, and plasma rings. We know that electrical measurements are not yet available in detail, and the available bandwidth and resolution of the imaging of these distant bodies is not as broad as it needs to be for a complete picture. That makes it hard for science to hang their hat on an electrically driven quantitative model; we understand that. But first looks are intriguingly similar to the inner two, already, and if it quacks like a duck...

Jim

[carl_gustov]

Mel is on fire today with in "Sonic Booms"

plasma, a word that’s not present in consensus astronomy’s lexicon

and...

astronomers have no word for electricity

It makes me laugh.

Regarding Neptune and speaking of sonic booms, I was shocked to find out that winds there exceed the speed of sound by more than triple. Something else that stokes the imagination: "Gravity" seems to be this lethargic, passive force. So this Neptune is orbiting the Sun at such an impossibly remote distance yet it 'falls' at 3 miles per second! A pretty good clip when light itself only clocks in at 186,000. And since time immemorial! This celerity seems hardly 'passive'.

I wonder where science would be today if Newton had been struck by lightning rather than fresh fruit?