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 Credit: NASA/CXC/PSU/G.Pavlov et al. |
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Sep 20, 2004 With the aid of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers recently peered deep into the Vela "supernova remnant", which lies about 800 light-years from earth. The cloud is believed to be the remains of a great explosion more than 10,000 years ago. At its core lies a "Pulsar", whose radio signal turns on and off about 11 times per second. What the Chandra astronomers found came as a great surprise. They observed "striking, almost unbelievable, structures consisting of bright rings and jets". These structures, they concluded, "indicate that mighty ordering forces must be at work amidst the chaos of the aftermath of a supernova explosion". The implied forces have the power to "harness the energy of thousands of Suns and transform that energy into a tornado of high-energy particles". See: http://chandra.harvard.edu/chronicle/0201/vela.html The investigators found that electrical and magnetic fields centered on the Pulsar are accelerating charged particles to "nearly the speed of light". It is commonly assumed that the pulsing is due to the rotation of a "neutron star"--a hypothetical body never observed but imagined to be the result when a star's career ends in a supernova explosion and its entire mass collapses to the density of an atomic nucleus. The supposed diameter of the Vela neutron star is only about 12 miles, though its mass is claimed to be that of several Suns. But astronomers have not yet considered the most obvious explanation in an electric universe--that the Vela Pulsar itself is not the "neutron star" of mathematical conjecture, but an electrical discharge at the center of an intense electric field. If this is so, the "pulsing" of the star is simply the natural pulsing of plasma discharge. Astronomers expected that the "rotation" (pulsing) of the neutron star--conceived as an isolated mass in space -- would slow at a consistent rate. But then they observed a significant "glitch" in the pulse rate, an event that "released a burst of energy that was carried outward at near the speed of light by the pulsar wind." Of course, unpredictable variations in both the pulse rate and intensity of an electrically discharging Pulsar would be expected with any changes in the electrical environment through which it moved. Proponents of the electric model are particularly impressed by the two embedded "bows" seen along the polar jet (upper left). Astronomers initially called these "windbow shocks", a theorized mechanical effect of high-velocity material encountering the interstellar medium. But electrical theorists recognized a configuration common to intense plasma discharge in laboratory experiments: toruses or rings stacked along the polar axis of the discharge. And subsequent enhanced pictures (cf., upper right) made clear that the "bows" were in fact stacked toruses, not easily explained in gravitational terms. Also noteworthy is the manner in which the axial jet or column, as it extends beyond the "upper" torus, takes on an undulating, serpentine quality, as revealed by a series of Chandra snapshots (lower array). This too is of great significance to the electrical theorists since some in their group--years before these recent observations in space-- claimed that ancient witnesses observed such undulating phenomena stretching along the polar axis of the earth, when our planet moved through a more dense, more electrically active environment. |
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