- Photo Credit: Trace Team, NASA
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- Caption: This colorized picture is a mosaic of ultraviolet
images from the orbiting TRACE satellite sensitive to light emitted by
highly charged iron atoms. Growing in number, the intricate structures
visible are the Sun's hot active regions (with temperatures over a million
degrees Fahrenheit), all with associated magnetic loops.
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- Nuclear Reactions at the Solar Surface
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- (Proponents of the "Iron Sun", a theory widely
represented on the Internet in recent months, challenge the popular idea
that the Sun is powered by thermonuclear reactions at its core. And they
point to nuclear reactions on the Sun's surface, something considered impossible
under the standard model.)
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- Scientists now supporting a new approach to solar physics
-- the "Iron Sun"-- mention neither the Electric Universe nor
the "Electric Sun". But their findings add powerful support to
the electric model of the Sun posited by Wallace Thornhill, Donald Scott,
and earlier pioneers beginning with engineer Ralph Juergens in the late
60's (see The Electric Glow of the Sun: http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050427sun.htm).
It was the electrical theorists who first suggested that surface events,
not a hidden nuclear furnace at the Sun's center, appear to be the source
of neutrino production (the subatomic signature of nuclear fusion).
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- In recent years nuclear chemist Oliver Manuel and several
of his collaborators have attracted scientific attention for proposing
a radical alternative to the standard model of the Sun. Manuel suggests
that the Sun is the remnant of a supernova, now holding in its core a "neutron
star" encased within an iron shell. In this model, most of the radiant
energy of the Sun comes from the neutron star's slow decay over long spans
of time.
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- Manuel draws attention to recent discoveries by solar
scientists. He finds compelling evidence that nuclear reactions occur at
the foot points of solar flares-hot spots associated with prominent magnetic
loops and intense electric fields. This observation places the nuclear
reactions far from where conventional theorists locate them--at the Sun's
core.
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- To confirm these surface events Iron Sun proponents point
to the telltale signatures of the "CNO cycle" first set forth
in the work of Hans Bethe. In 1939 Bethe proposed that the stable mass-12
isotope of Carbon catalyzes a series of atomic reactions in the core of
the Sun, resulting in the fusion of hydrogen into helium. This nucleosynthesis,
according to Bethe, occurs through a "Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen (CNO)
cycle," as helium is constructed from the nuclei of hydrogen atoms-protons-at
temperatures ranging from 14 million K to 20 million K.
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- For some time now, solar scientists have observed the
products expected from the CNO cycle, but now they see a relationship of
these products' abundances to sunspot activity. This finding is crucial
because the nuclear events that standard theory envisions are separated
from surface events by hundreds of thousands of years as the heat from
the core slowly percolates through the Sun's hypothetical "radiative
zone". From this vantage point, a connection between the hidden nuclear
furnace and sunspot activity is inconceivable.
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- Proponents of the Iron Sun, therefore, have posed an
issue that could be fatal to the standard model. But as we shall attempt
to show, there is a good deal more room to add objections within this question.
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- The Iron Sun proponents are to be congratulated for their
research showing that the Sun does not shine because of nuclear fusion
in its core. It takes great courage to stake your work and reputation against
established dogma. If science operated in the way it advertises, the search
for the truth in this essential matter would involve a concentration of
resources to confirm or deny the evidence amassed by the Iron Sun proponents.
The questions raised are crucial whether or not the proposed model of the
Sun is correct. Yet there seems to be pressure on researchers to have a
model at hand to explain "anomalous" results. In the case of
the "Iron Sun", the result is less than perfect because there
is a flaw at the very heart of popular cosmology:
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- All matter in the universe is composed of electric charge.
The electric force between charges mediates all physical interactions,
irrespective of scale. It is the electric force that energizes matter.
By ignoring electricity, cosmologists have committed an error so fundamental
that the mistake invariably propagates through any and all of their theoretical
excursions. The electrical theorists see this as the overriding cause of
the oft-noted "crisis in cosmology", and the effects on related
disciplines-bound as they are by the assumptions of cosmologists-have been
nothing less than catastrophic.
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- NEXT: The Iron Sun Debate (2): The Myth of the Neutron
Star
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