Electric Meteors and Meteorites

[Total Science]

1. I believe Stephen Smith has said in a TPOD a year or two ago that such meteor fragments appear to form from Earth material when megalightning strikes the Earth. Alternatively, the Saturn Theory suggests that comets, asteroids and meteors formed as spills, when planets and moons formed electrically from fissioning of gas giant planets or stars.
2. Such bodies only interact electrically with other bodies with charge differences. If they encounter bodies on different orbits, electrical discharging is more likely. In the case of the Moon and Earth, if the Moon encountered Earth, they might not discharge much, since their charges would be about the same. When spacecraft come down to Earth, there's usually no discharge between them. See the thread on the Columbia disaster.

I agree with this much.

3. The Earth doesn't seem to be a very strong magnet, so Earth's magnetic attraction may not affect such a body as much as gravity does.

I don't agree with this. The Earth has one of the strongest magnetic fields in the solar system.

Again, metal spacecraft as well as satellites and aircraft don't seem to be strongly attracted to Earth magnetically.

Gravity is electromagnetic.

http://www.varchive.org/ce/cosmos.htm

[Lloyd]

Lloyd: 3. The Earth doesn't seem to be a very strong magnet, so Earth's magnetic attraction may not affect such a body as much as gravity does.

Total: I don't agree with this. The Earth has one of the strongest magnetic fields in the solar system.

* This site http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a10015.html says:
At the surface of the Earth, the magnetic field has a strength of about 0.5 Gauss units (50000 nano-Teslas, or 50000 nT). In comparison, a typical toy magnet, or one used on your refrigerator, produces about 100 Gauss.
* This site http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/ ... field.html says:
The magnetic field at an average place on the Sun is around 1 Gauss, about twice as strong as the average field on the surface of Earth (around 0.5 Gauss). ... The magnetic field of the Sun actually extends far out into space, beyond the furthest planet, [and] is called the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF), [carried by] the solar wind.... The local magnetic field in the neighborhood of a large sunspot can be as strong as 4,000 Gauss... much, much greater than the Sun's average field.
* Since Earth's magnetic field is much weaker than a refrigerator magnet, it seems inconsequential to me. If you let a piece of iron and a rubber ball fall from a high tower at the same time, I'm confident that both would hit level ground at the same time, thus showing no significant magnetic increase in the terminal speed of the iron. I think the same would hold if they were dropped from a jet 2 or more miles up.

Lloyd: Again, metal spacecraft as well as satellites and aircraft don't seem to be strongly attracted to Earth magnetically.

Total: Gravity is electromagnetic.

* But gravity, electricity and magnetism aren't the same thing; are they?

[junglelord]

BLINDING FIREBALL: On Friday night Sept. 25th, at approximately 9:03 pm EDT, an asteroid the size of a child's tricycle hit Earth just above Lake Ontario. It was a lucky strike, right in the middle of a network of seven all-sky cameras operated by the University of Western Ontario (UWO). The disintegrating asteroid produced a blinding fireball 100 times brighter than a full Moon. Click on the image to view a movie from the Hamilton, Ontario, station:

http://spaceweather.com/swpod2009/10oct ... vg239cakn7

The asteroid exploded in flight, producing strong low-frequency sound waves in the atmosphere. Analysis of infrasound records
http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/research/ ... plot-2.jpg

along with video from the seven camera stations lead researchers to believe that fragments of the asteroid could have reached the ground. "This bright fireball was large enough to have dropped meteorites in a region south of Grimsby, Ontario, on the Niagara Peninsula,
http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/research/ ... l_path.jpg

providing masses that may total as much as several kilograms," according to a UWO press release.

Researchers at Western Ontario are interested in hearing from anyone within 10 km of Grimsby who may have witnessed or recorded the fireball, seen or heard unusual events at the time, or who may have found possible fragments of the freshly fallen meteorite. Meteorite-hunting tips and more video may be found here.

http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/research/ ... 5sept2009/

[nick c]

JL,
re:
http://spaceweather.com/swpod2009/10oct ... vg239cakn7
Wow! an amazing video.
It has the appearance that the meteor is at first moving directly toward the camera and then flashes or explodes and then is deflected on a course away from the camera. I realize that this could be an effect of a "fisheye" lens, however it seems to be real, any thoughts?

nick c

[junglelord]

The link to the direction of travel, on the map, shows a straight line...
However when it spits apart, they must explode in all directions, would it not?

[mharratsc]

How about the fact that it is a tiny little fireball, then all of a sudden the diameter of the 'fireball' grows by a factor of 20, and flickers/flashes? That was not an explosion! Matter of fact- it wasn't a 'fiery' anything!

Yet another mini-comet event, from something not 'cometary' in nature, hmm?


Mike H.

[MGmirkin]

Video available here:

(Pictures and Videos Capture Canadian Fireball from Sept. 25, 2009)
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/07 ... t-25-2009/

Pretty clearly brightens, fade, brightens, fades, then breaks up. Methink it's like looking into an arc welder!

Do they ever take spectra on these things? Could they confirm if it was something like an arc welder going off and/or an eventually exploding capacitor / condenser?

(Comets & Lightning Jets)
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9kee2918

...the connection between ionized meteor trails and electrical discharge activity in the ionosphere. The meteor trail acts as a giant lightning rod that connects the conducting ionosphere to the upper atmosphere. If the earth is an electrical body in an electrical solar system, it is the equivalent of a temporary short-circuit of a giant capacitor. The current flowing along the meteor trail gives rise to the unexplained brilliance and long-lasting glows of some meteors. It causes them to disintegrate like an exploding capacitor, high in the atmosphere. The Tunguska explosion was probably the most noteworthy example of the effect.

(Comets Impact Cosmology)
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=uf4ty065

I wrote in January, '"Powerful internal stresses caused by redistribution of charge within an actively discharging comet are responsible for their observed tendency to fragment. The effect is like an exploding condenser. It is not due to the comet being a weakly coherent rubble pile."'

Read "meteor" in place of "comet" and you get the idea.

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin

[junglelord]

Z Pinched into infinity with no debris or very little if any. The arc welder explosive events are clearly electrical hence the Z Pinch explosive moments clearly pulsed trained high, low, high, low.

[junglelord]

NETHERLANDS FIREBALL: A fireball as bright as the full Moon startled observers in the Netherlands yesterday when it raced across the evening twilight sky. A lucky shot by photographer Jan de Vries at approximately 1658 UT caught the meteor in mid-flight:



"It was spectacular," says eyewitness Dominic Doyle of the European Space Agency in Noordwijk. "I estimate its magnitude to be about -12," adds amateur astronomer Koen Miskotte, who saw it from the small village of Ermelo. Various observers report it breaking apart into as many as a half-dozen pieces, followed by sonic booms, low rumbles and shaking windows.

A Royal Dutch Meteorology Institute listening post
http://www.knmi.nl/~evers/infrasound/dbn/dbn.html
detected strong infrasound (low-frequency sound) waves,
apparently confirming a high-altitude breakup event: data.
http://www.knmi.nl/~evers/infrasound/DB ... 86267.html

[junglelord]

Another space visitor with a really good photo.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091015.html

[jjohnson]

This last picture of 'another space visitor' is illustrative of pieces breaking off the main body and decelerating more quickly than the main mass, as their lower mass/momentum relative to frontal area responds to drag by decelerating more quickly. This leads them to fall behind. In the instance of the first meteor video, the separation was definitely more energetic, although any physical explosion, absent atmospheric drag, results in the center of mass's remaining on its same trajectory, if any. Electromagnetically induced explosions would not necessarily respond the same as simply physically being torn apart along weak lines by atmospheric drag, or by chemically-induced explosions like fireworks. The kinky trajectories due to collapsing double sheaths in solar flares and at larger scales indicated by radio astronomy images of quasar ejection are examples of more electrified phenomena. The first video looks like the main mass shed a pair of smaller objects, at least one of which looked like it hooked a sharp turn, distinctly non-ballistic.

[mharratsc]

Regarding that link that JL posted (thanks JL- good pic!):

To take Jim's diagnostic a step further- consider those pieces that broke off and decelerated sooner than the parent body. Unless that meteor was a flammable metal, *why* are the pieces that are braking in the atmosphere (and presumably cooling more rapidly than the parent body) showing just as much incandescence as the parent is?

My suggestion is that it is because the body is luminous primarily due to electrical stress vs heat from friction, and that the pieces that are breaking off are doing so not from thermokinetic force, but rather the main body is fissioning to provide greater surface area to handle the electrical stress of approach to a body of much, much greater charge potential (much as how Wal Thornhill has theorized planetary birth in the EU model.)

I would be willing to wager that- if we had the instruments to see it with- we would detect twisting pairs of current filaments connecting the parent body and the children, and that it would probably look very much like a short, filamentary comet tail.

There! How's that for a non-scientist-type person? Whatcha think?


Mike H.

[jjohnson]

I'm thinking' it sounds plausible if fissioning can happen on a small scale. Shoemaker-Levy for example? It didn't just dip into an event horizon to break up into 2 dozen bitty pieces by steep gravitational stress, did it? Plasma phenomena scale down and up, right? Trouble is we can't know what voltage potential differences might have existed when this occurred.

I can't answer the brightness angle because I don't know if smaller pieces decelerating at higher g's would maintain or increase their brightness thermally or not. We always have thought of meteors as rocks entering and if they "go out" then we have assumed that they "burned up" through atmospheric friction, or slowed so much that they stopped radiating in the visible prior to hitting the earth. Has anybody ever trained an IR camera or video camera on a meteor shower like the Leonids and observed the heat patterns during reentry? UV or X-ray cameras? Anybody: other than radio receiver arrays, what imagers are candidates for seeing filamentary currents, presumably in the dark mode? Especially in-atmosphere? We need a little he'p over here!

[redeye]

I would be willing to wager that- if we had the instruments to see it with- we would detect twisting pairs of current filaments connecting the parent body and the children, and that it would probably look very much like a short, filamentary comet tail.

I read something similar on a tpod. I think it was the Chicago fire TPOD from a few years back - I'm at work but I'll have a look when I get home.

Cheers!

[redeye]

Here we go: The Chicago Fire (2)

Cheers!