- Photo Credit: Crab Nebula from VLT: FORS Team, 8.2-meter
VLT, ESO; X-ray Image (inset): NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al; Optical Image
(inset): NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. The Crab Nebula as viewed by the
Very Large Telescope (VLT). The inset superimposes two images: an X-ray
photograph of the Crab Nebula's intensely energetic core, taken by the
Chandra X-ray Observatory; and a Hubble Telescope photograph of the same
region.
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- The Myth of the Neutron Star
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- In his argument for the "Iron Sun", Oliver
Manuel relies on a popular theoretical concept -- the "neutron star".
Electrical theorists, on the other hand, say there is no reason to believe
that such exotic stars exist.
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- At the core of the Crab Nebula pictured above is a remarkable
churning "wheel-and-axle" structure (inset) whose discovery shocked
astronomers. No conventional model of supernova remnants ever anticipated
exotic structures comparable to what is seen here.
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- Some things are known about the Crab Nebula, however.
It is close to certain that it is the result of a supernova observed from
Earth in 1054 A.D. The inner ring of the central "motor" has
a diameter of about one light year. Intensely energetic jets stream outward
from the central light source in two directions along the axis of an intense
magnetic field. Additionally, observations over time have shown that rings
and strands of material are moving outward on the equatorial plane at great
speeds, some up to half the speed of light.
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- The point of light at the center of the image is a pulsar,
so called because it generates pulses at radio frequencies roughly 60 times
a second. (Pulses can also be observed optically and in X-rays.)
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- But what cause these rapid pulses? Most astronomers today
attempt to interpret pulsars using a strange idea based entirely on mathematical
conjectures. They say that the pulsar is a tiny spinning "neutron
star" -- the collapsed remains of the historic supernova.
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- Neutron stars were predicted theoretically in the 1930's
to be the end result of a supernova explosion. For many years astronomers
doubted their existence. But then, with the discovery of the first pulsar
in 1967, astronomers imagined that the pulses were due to a rapidly rotating
beam of radiation sweeping past the Earth. Having ignored all of the things
that electricity can do quite routinely, the theorists were required to
conceive a star so dense that it could rotate at the rate of a dentists
drill without flying apart. So the neutron star received a second life.
The energy of the star's radiation, it was supposed, came from in-falling
matter from a companion star.
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- The imaginative construct received no support from later
observations. In the Crab Nebula, what we now see is not gravitational
accretion, but material accelerated away from the central star. In fact,
all of the weird and wonderful things said about neutron stars, such as
the super-condensed "neutronium" or "quark" soup from
which they are claimed to have formed, lie outside the realm of verifiable
science. They are abstractions disconnected from nature, but required to
save a paradigm that has no other force than gravity to provide compact
sources of radiation.
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- Oliver Manuel and the Iron Sun advocates have taken a
daring step in questioning conventional fictions about the Sun. But unfortunately,
they have relied upon another popular fiction. They suggest that the Sun
was formed by accretion of heavy elements, chiefly iron, onto a "neutron
star" following a supernova explosion. They further claim that energy
from neutrons, supposedly repelled from its neutron star core, accounts
for the Sun's radiant energy and the source of protons in the solar wind.
The model does not explain the acceleration of the solar wind out past
the planets (a crucial requirement according to electrical experts).
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- Such speculations, resting upon the earlier flights of
cosmological fancy, beg the question as to the origin of all other stars.
Supernovae are exceedingly rare events, and there is no sound reason to
believe that neutron stars are even physically possible.
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- However appealing the original logic may have been to
some, the neutron star model should have been discarded when pulsars were
found with supposed "spin" and cooling rates that required the
mathematicians to conjure ever more dense and exotic particles -- like
quarks -- that have never been observed. (see Strange Star or Strange Science,
http://www.holoscience.com/views/view_strange.htm)
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- Critics of the "neutron star" hypothesis say
that it is a violation of common sense to speak of matter being gravitationally
compressed to the point that the orbiting electrons in an atom are forced
to join with the protons in the nucleus to form neutrons. The nearly 2000-fold
difference in weight between the electron and the proton will ensure charge
separation in an intense gravitational field. Each atom will become a tiny
radial electric dipole that assists charge separation. And the electric
force of repulsion is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, so
extremely weak charge separation is sufficient to resist gravitational
compression. The force of gravity is effectively zero in the presence of
the electric force.
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- All of today's popular ideas about supernovae, the supposed
progenitors of neutron stars, were formulated under a gravity-only ideology
that has, in recent decades, been challenged (and electric theorists would
say overturned) by the discovery of plasma and powerful electric and magnetic
fields in space. Supernovae have recently been identified as catastrophic
stellar electrical discharges (see Supernova 1987A Decoded, http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=re6qxnz1).
The remnant of such a discharge cannot be the imagined rapidly spinning
super-dense object: powerful electrical forces will always prevent gravitational
"super-collapse."
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- Plasma physicists have shown (in the words of K. Healy
and A. Peratt) that the pulsed radiation detected from some supernova remnants
may ".derive either from the pulsar's interaction with its environment
or by energy delivered by an external circuit. .[O]ur results support the
'planetary magnetosphere' view, where the extent of the magnetosphere,
not emission points on a rotating surface, determines the pulsar emission."
These concrete results do not rest on events merely imagined. And they
dovetail with facts that are now inescapable: electric discharges in plasma
are fully capable of generating the exotic structures of supernova remnants
seen in deep space. The "wheel and axle" form of the supernova
remnant in the Crab nebula is that of a simple Faraday electric motor.
Its structure also conforms to the stellar circuit diagram espoused by
the father of plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén.
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- It is a pity that the "Iron Sun" researchers
are not conversant with plasma cosmology and the Electric Sun model. They
make a compelling case against the standard solar model, and their recent
findings of electrically induced nuclear reactions on the solar surface
could open a pathway to discoveries reaching well beyond solar science.
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- To be continued. NEXT: Exploding the Myth of the Imploding
Supernova
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- Thanks to Wallace Thornhill (www.holoscience.com) for
much of the scientific content in this series.
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