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Talk for Observing the Frontier 2017,
Introduction
I am very excited to
be here, and honored to be counted in the same group as Pierre-Marie
Robitaille, Dave Talbot, and Ben Davidson.
Proposed large scale electrical structure
between stars and planets
I have proposed this
diagram for the large-scale electric potential structure between the Sun and
Earth.
The same overall
structure should be true between all stars and their orbiting planets. The star
is the highest electrical potential, the anode. Each planet is a cathode, a
local minimum, which has a very steep rise in electrical potential as you move
away from the surface, then a hump at the planet’s Van Allen belts, then a slow
rise of a much smaller amount up to the star. I proposed this shape by
combining laboratory measurements of plasma discharge with electrical
measurements coming from multiple satellites orbiting the Earth. This sketch is
static and only one-dimensional. The reality is of course much more complicated,
as each planet is spinning on its own axis, and orbiting in an ellipse through
the vast electrical three-dimensional electric field of the star, and there are
spiraling waves of electric and magnetic fields coming from the star as well as
streams of charged particles. If we were to examine in detail any one piece of
my simple sketch we would find many complex, beautiful, dynamic phenomena.
The steep rise of
electrical potential while leaving the planet has been verified on Earth. The
potential does rise several hundred thousand volts going from the ground up to
the ionosphere. How might the planet stay at such a low electrical potential?
Wouldn’t any imbalance tend to leak away over time? I have found one possible
mechanism. The Birkeland currents flowing into and out of the Earth appear to
have just such an imbalance, constantly feeding fresh negative charge into the
Earth.
While presenting this
possible mechanism today, I will also make a fresh appeal to anyone studying
our Solar System, that we need to make much more bold theories about the
functions of various electromagnetic structures we are finding. What is the
function of the Van Allen belts? Not simply what are its properties. What is
the function of the ionosphere? What is the function of lightning? We too often
are still looking at the things around us as inevitable and random structures. But
they are not inevitable and they are not random.
In our own bodies, the
multilayered walls of arteries and veins are not random, inevitable structures.
They are structures that serve very particular functions within a complex
whole. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be a tiny, tiny astronomer
stuck on one of the molecules inside one of the cells inside one of the layers
in a blood vessel. If I were that small relative to the structures around me,
and I turned my tiny telescopes out at all that was around me, would I be able
to see that I was inside such a structure? If perhaps I had a very short life
span, living only a few microseconds, would I be able to study such things as
the flow of blood or the actions of nerves? From such a limited vantage point,
I could imagine getting into arguments with my fellow micro-beings if the world
around us was simply random, disconnected, and inevitable – or whether we were
organized beings that lived inside larger structures that are also organized,
and that everything at every level is serving some function.
I definitely fall into
the second camp, and I am asking that we all ponder deeply, what might be the
functions of such things as magnetospheres and ionospheres and aurora borealis.
The larger magnetic earth
Now we know that
electromagnetic fields and currents can travel through space, and that our
solar system is filled with them. We are finding more every year. Every
satellite that goes up, we find more types of fields and currents and flux
tubes and travelling double layers and exploding double layers and magnetic
tornados and Birkeland currents connecting moons to planets and ribbons of
charges flowing around our heliosphere indicating that vast rivers of fields
and currents connect our Sun to surrounding stars. And all of this together is
more complicated than any one person or even group of people has yet conceived.
Or, to switch
metaphors, we have up until now been largely studying the skeletal system of
stars and planets, and we are just starting to piece together images of the
muscles, blood, and organs of solar systems. We are just starting to build a
picture of the flesh and blood of the Solar System.
Here is a cartoon
showing some of the large-scale structures we are fairly certain of
Figure 1
Magnetosphere currents, from COMET project
These yellow arrows show
the large scale flow of electric currents. The solid Earth is the shiny ball here.
We need start seeing the solid Earth more as the bones, and all this larger
electromagnetic substance as the muscles and organs. The Earth, the real Earth,
is much larger and much more complicated than the rock in the center, just as
you and I are large and much more complicated than our skeletal systems. It is
as if we have been using only one kind of brush to paint the stars and planets.
We have been using only the brush of rocky matter connected by gravity, this
way we only see the skeletons of planets and stars. In our bodies the skeleton
supports, gives the rocky structure, for the more subtle and fluid muscles and
organs, and all activated by electrical nervous systems. The solid Earth
supports, gives the rocky structure, to the more subtle and softer magnetic
structures, all activated by even finer electrical impulses.
Coming back to the
currents around the Earth, you can see sprouting out of the pole several arched
yellow bands. Those are called the Region 1 and Region 2 currents.
Current into and out of the earth
The outer current
sheet, Region 2, connects to a ring of current circling the Earth. The inner
sheet, Region 1, connects to regions farther out in the magnetosphere. Let’s
zoom out a bit. You can see that some currents connect the Earth back out to
the magnetosphere, and some currents stay local, closer to the Earth. I don’t
expect you to make sense out of this drawing by looking at it just once. I want
you to get a feeling for some of the complexity of the electric and magnetic
structures that make up what I am calling the larger body of the Earth.
Zooming in again, we
are going to look in more detail at these current sheets going into and out of
the Earth at the poles.
The currents going
into and out of the Earth are also called Field Aligned Currents, since they
follow the magnetic field lines of the Earth. Let’s look at some of this in
action, from space.
[there are 2 movie version] This is from NASA’s Imager for
Magnetopause-to-Auora Global Exploration satellite, taken in the far UV
spectrum. The aurora are where the field aligned currents meet the ionosphere.
As you can see the real life event is much more complicated than the simple
schematic.
Most American and
European papers I have read about this flow of charges are content to draw tidy
diagrams and do not call attention to what we do not know. Some Russian papers on the subject are more honest about what
is not yet clear. For example, the section in the drawing where the incoming
and outgoing currents travel along parallel to the Earth. In the simple diagram
those look like simple continuation of the incoming and outgoing field aligned
currents. But there is very little direct measurement of that part between the
incoming and outgoing currents. And what little direct measurement we have
seems to indicate those sections of current flow are only carrying about 1/10th
what is going into and out of the poles. In other words, current goes in, current
goes out, but we don’t really know what happens in between. Do those currents
go into the body of the Earth, do they go into complex circulations in the
ionosphere?
Here is a different
view of the electric current flowing into and out of the poles. This is from
the AMPERE project out of John Hopkins University. This is a fleet of
communications satellites whose on-board magnetometers are also being used by
the people at John Hopkins to measure magnetic field variations around the
Earth. Each of those trajectories is the path of one of the satellites. The colored
lines drawn on the trajectory represent the strength of the magnetic field at
that place.
Figure 3
Iridium satellites (image credit: JHU/APL)
Using Ampere’s law – that
magnetic fields are created by an electric current - we can work backwards from
all the magnetic field measurements to deduce what must be the electric
currents going into and out of the poles.
In this image, the
left side is like the image we were just looking at – the paths of the
satellites, and the strengths of the magnetic fields at each point. The right
side is the calculation of the electric currents that must be present in order
to produce the magnetic fields the satellites found. You can see the general
shape of our field aligned currents, the blue denotes downward current into the
Earth, the red denotes upward current away from the Earth. Here is a movie
version, so you can get a feeling for some of the complexity.
The currents coming
into and flowing out of the Earth are a beautiful, complex, 3-dimensional
transformation of electrical energy. We are looking at millions of amperes of
current flowing at any point in time.
A current is moving
charges. We define positive current flow to be the motion of positive charges.
But we know in the world there are both positive and negative charges, so when
we say “current is flowing up” we can mean that positive charges are flowing up
and also that negative charges are flowing down. If negative charges are
flowing down, we call that, and with many instruments actually measure that, as
current flowing up. Above the Earth we see both. In these red regions there are
positive ions flowing up and electrons flowing down. Which means, you guessed
it, that once again, the real picture of what is going on is much more
complicated that what we see here.
Ignoring for now
whether it is electrons or positive ions, we can simply look at “the current”
flowing into and out of the north pole,
Figure 5
Current into (blue) and out of (red) the North Pole. Time is first week of April 2010.
The red is the total
upward current out of the North Pole, the blue is the total downward current.
The horizontal axis is one week. You can see that the magnitudes of the
incoming and outflowing currents are very strongly correlated. That is, if a
lot is current is flowing into the north pole, then a lot of current is also
flowing back out. The vertical scale is in millions of amperes. This is
generally the scale: a continuous flow of 5 to 10 million amps flowing into and
out of the poles.
On the theme of
looking at the Earth as an electrical transformer, we can look at the
accumulation and discharge of electricity – like a battery or capacitor the
Earth might store and release charge. We can also look at the Earth as an AC
transformer where energy is transferred purely through the alternation of
current flow.
I first wanted to
study the net current flow of the entire Earth. That is, add up the amount of
current flowing into both poles, and subtract the amount of current flowing out
of both poles. If at some point in time that value is zero, it means that equal
amounts of electric current are flowing into and out of the Earth. You do not
need to charge in order to transfer energy. Think about AC transformers that
transfer energy by alternating charge, not by accumulating it. Here is the plot
of the same week, looking at the net current into the Earth, shown in green.
Figure 6
Adding the net current, in green
You can see that the
total is not zero, but fluctuates, sometimes even as much as a million amperes.
Correlations in Time
We know that
variations in the solar wind directly affect how much current flows into and
out of the Earth. Birkeland was basically run out of town for proposing such a
thing, and as late as 1960 you could still lose your job as an astronomy
teacher for proposing it. Now we can say that without fear. I wanted to look
for cycles here. There are no simple cycles obvious to the eye. But we can
perform what is called a cross correlation of the data. You shift the data in
time relative to itself, and see how similar the data is to itself after a
certain amount of time. For example, if I took readings of the intensity of
daylight here outside the hotel, and I took readings every few minutes for
several days. Now take that plot and shift it relative to itself, and see how
similar it is to itself. The light each day will tend to be maximum in the
middle of each day, so I would see the maximum self-similarity every time I
shifted the plots by 24 hours relative to each other. Here is such a shifting
correlation function, of the net current into the Earth between April and
November of 2010.
Figure 7
cross correlation of the net current over eight months April to November 2010
When the value of the Correlation
is higher, there is more similarity of the signal when it is shifted that much.
Looking at the Correlation function of our net current data, we can clearly see
there are peaks which are spaced about 27 days apart. That means, if you look
at the net current flowing into the Earth now, then then whatever that current
is doing, increasing, decreasing, staying the same, it was doing something
similar 27 days ago, and it will tend to do the same thing 27 days in the future.
Twenty-Seven days is very close to the rotational period of the Sun and also
close to the orbital period of our Moon. The Moon comes back to the same place
relative to the stars every 27.3 days, and back to the same place relative to
the Sun & Earth every 29.5 days. From the Earth’s point of view, the period
of the rotation of the Sun’s magnetic field is 27 days.
Figure 8
previous figure with markings for the long term self-similarity
This means that if you
look at the net current flowing through the Earth, that net current tends to be
similar to itself on a period close to the rotational period of the Sun’s
magnetic field. Whatever the pattern of net current flow through the Earth, the
general shape of that current tends to repeat itself with that frequency.
If we zoom into the
cross correlation function, we see this
Figure 9
zoom into net current correlation, showing 24 hours variation
These smaller
oscillations of similarity take place at 24 hour intervals. It does not mean
that any more or less current is flowing at some time of day, but means that
whatever the trends of the net current flow, it is similar to the trend of the
current flow 24 hours previously. This one surprised me because when you look
at movies of the aurora, they seem to be happening completely separate from the
solid Earth. And as far as I know, no one has published any results linking the
current flow of the aurora to features of the solid Earth. This would be a good
area for someone to look into, since this method could shed light on the
conductivities of various parts of the solid Earth. The size of the daily correlation
is substantial. Whatever factors the solid Earth contributes, those factors are
of equal magnitude to the variations imposed by the 27 day cycle of passing
through the Heliospheric current sheet.
Net charging of the Earth?
Since we have data of
the current flowing up out of the North pole, and down into the North pole, and
up out of the South pole and down into the South pole, we can add those all
together and have an estimate for the net current flow into the Earth as a
whole. If the Earth were a neutral body then we would expect that the net
current flow averages to zero. The satellite data comes in a cadence of 2
minutes. If the net current to the Earth were 1 million amps during 2 minute
interval, that is 120 seconds, so the Earth would accumulate 120 million
Coulombs of charge during that 2 minutes. When we do a running summation of the
net current to the Earth from April to November in 2010, we get this
Figure 10
cumulative charge on earth
This one surprised me.
As the days go by there is on average consistently a net positive current flow
out of the Earth. Of course my graph here does not take into account any other
ways that accumulated charge might dissipate. I am just looking at the current
at the poles. And yes, there certainly could be some systematic offset in the
satellite data. I am looking into both of those issues. But if we take the data
for what it is, that means the Earth has an ongoing removal of positive charge
– the net current is up, away from the Earth, and the direction of current is
defined as the direction of flow of positive charges. In other words, the Earth
is being driven to be negatively charged. The Earth is being driven to lower
electrical potential relative to its environment. Which is in agreement with my
proposed large scale electrical relation between stars and planets.
Earthquakes
I don’t think it is
possible to attend one of Ben’s conferences with at least trying to speak about
earthquakes.
We can look at
earthquakes during the same time, April through November 2010 and compare
earthquake activity to the net current flowing into and out of the Earth. The
blue line is a measure of the earthquake activity that day. The green line is a
cumulative sum of the net global current.
To get a measure of
the earthquake activity on a given day, I simply added up all the magnitude
values of all the earthquakes listed for that day. So if there were only two
magnitude 6 quakes on June 16th, the earthquake curve would have a
value of 12 for that day. The green line is the cumulative sum of the net
current to the Earth. (The vertical axis is fairly arbitrary units.) I wanted
to look at this because, I was thinking, if the Earth is accumulating charge it
will be under more stress, and being under more stress might have some correlation
to earthquake activity. I realize this is a very limited sample. But what it
looks like to me is that there is more earthquake activity when the net current
curve is flat. At first I thought this negated any correlation of the sort I
was looking for. I admit I was looking for the earthquakes to strike when that
net current curve was steeply rising or falling. But then I thought, what if
the earthquake is Nature’s way of getting the current flowing again. If the
Earth needs to maintain a proper negative electrical potential relative to its
surroundings, the quakes might happen when there is something blocking that
accumulation of charge. A flat green line here means there is no net flow of
positives away from the Earth out the poles, which means that the Earth is
heading towards neutral, towards not the proper tension between it and the Sun.
The way the Earth overcomes that, and gets things flowing again, is with
earthquakes. You see that after periods of no charge accumulation, there is a
burst of earthquake activity, which then allows the proper, healthy charging
process to continue.
Biological Example
Unless we know the
larger picture, we cannot know how the pieces fit in. Or, knowledge only of the
parts is partial knowledge. When we are studying the currents entering or
leaving the Earth, we are surely studying a small part of a very large whole.
That whole is our solar system. We scientists are struggling to fathom what is
the whole? Only then can we make sense out of the parts we are seeing.
Figure 11
SEM image of retina from Micronaut
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/92323861086214343/
Here is a Scanning
Electron Microscope cross section of our retina. These various blobs and
connecting cables are different types of nerves that are in the back of all our
eyes, firing away like crazy, allowing us to see what is going on in this room.
Here is a schematic, to simplify things.
Figure 12
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1672/20140195
Light travels up from
the bottom of this, and lands on the cones and rods, which are on the top of
the diagram. It is very strange that the apparently crystal clear visual image
we all see is constructed from light that has to pass through this incredible tangle
of nerves. Imagine now that we are instead looking at a cross section of the
layers that exist around the Earth. That is, imagine that the layer down here
is the outer layer of our magnetosphere, and the next layer is the Van Allen
Belts, and there must be connections between those two layers. Imagine the next
layer is the Ionosphere, and there must be connections between the Van Allen
Belts and the ionosphere. And so on, until you reach us standing here on the
surface of the Earth. What if I told you that there are just as many layers and
connections between the surface of the Earth and the solar wind as there are
layers and connections between the inside of your eye and the back of your
retina? I might study the Earth’s ionosphere all my life and yet only be
studying one layer. And I won’t really understand what I am looking at unless I
know something about all the other layers, and unless I know something about
the function of the whole. In the case of the retina, we only really understand
each of the layers if we also know that the function of the eye is for the
animal to see. I could show you the seven layers of skin cells, or the eight
layers of cells that make up a blood vessel, or the eight layers of cells
inside our nose that allow us to smell. In each of these examples, we can
understand one layer only when we know the function of the whole.
Figure 13
https://cosmotruth.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/skin-anatomy-101/
Figure 14
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~uzwiak/AnatPhys/Blood_Vessels.html
Figure 15
http://antranik.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/smell-olfaction-epithelium-cilia-olfactory-sensory-neurons-and-basal-cells.jpg
Astronomy is stuck now
because we do not sufficiently understand the functions of what we are looking
at. We see the ionosphere, we study some of its properties, but we don’t know
its place as a part of a larger functioning whole. Most astronomers will tell
you that the Earth’s magnetosphere protects the Earth from the dangerous solar
wind. To me that is like saying in the nose, the mucus layer protects the
delicate nerves from the raw air. Yes, that is true. But the mucus layer is
also a dynamic interface whose properties are controlled to allow for the sense
of smell to happen in the warm dry air inside your house as well as the cool
damp air when you step outside. The ionosphere, the magnetosphere, the Van
Allen Belts, they are all being dynamically adjusted to allow for the larger
process of transformation or digestion or perception of solar material down to
the Earth itself. Astronomy will be stuck as long as we only look at these
various layers around the Earth as responding blindly to the impact of the
solar wind. We will also be stuck as long as we see phenomena like lightning as
happening only because of conditions down here on the surface of the Earth. To
take the next step forward we need to acknowledge that there is a larger
functioning whole, which has its own needs, its own job to do.
[1] "Space Technology 5
observations of the imbalance of regions 1 and 2 field-aligned currents and its
implication to the cross-polar cap Pedersen currents" G. Le, J. A. Slavin,
R. J. Strangeway, JGR 3 July 2010 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009JA014979/full
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