Precessional Magnetar - 16 May 2014

[jjohnson]

Toward the end of this Picture of the Day - an artistic picture, I must say; not astrophotography for sure - is a reference to the Healy-Peratt paper, "Radiation properties of pulsar magnetospheres: Observation, theory and experiment." It is unnecessary to pay Springer a hefty fee for a download.

You can find this 1995 article for free, (and it's all legal at the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) site at Harvard University, at this link. It is an excellent examination of the observations of pulsars, drawing on the well-documented phenomenon of a magnetic mirror (in most standard introductory textbooks on plasma physics, such as Paul Bellan's "Fundamentals of Plasma Physics", 2006, or J. A. Bittencourt's textbook of the same title, 2004). Note the thoroughness referenced at the last part of the title: they reviewed the observed data on pulsars; they hypothesized a mechanism using standard model physics and known behaviors of charged particles moving in plasma conditions, and worked out models from lab experiments. The latter even included reproducing the "timing glitches" that occasionally and randomly can appear in pulsar radiation observations!

Well worth the reading and understanding it brings to the table. If you haven't come across the subject of magnetic mirrors, buy a textbook or look it up in Wikipedia.

I am convinced that Electrical Engineers such as Don Scott, working in the various fields where plasma is pervasive, lending plasma physics interpretations to commonly observed cosmic phenomena in space, and writing in IEEE and other peer-reviewed journals, will eventually shed the sorely needed but widely ignored light on today's astromomers' and theoretical physicists' darkest theories.

Also n.b. (fancy talk for "note well") this link to a discussion on Scott's paper on the magnetic field variations with radial distance from a Birkeland current in the Electric Universe board of the Forum titled "Evidence for Donald Scott's Filament Model".

Jim