Nah ... I can stick to the topic of pulsars.
Electrical engineer Donald Scott says the phenomenon that gives pulsars their name (rapidly pulsed radio signals) "is produced electrically (much like a radio station)." He says "In the plasma that surrounds a star (or planet) there are conducting paths whose sizes and shapes are controlled by the magnetic field structure of the body. Those conducting paths are giant electrical transmission lines and can be analyzed as such. Depending on the electrical properties of what is connected to the ends of electrical transmission lines, it is possible for pulses of current and voltage (and therefore power) to oscillate back and forth from one end to the other. The ends can both be on the same object (as occurs on Earth) or one end might be on one member of a closely spaced binary pair of stars and the other end on the other member of the pair similar to the "flux tube" connecting Jupiter and its inner moon, Io." Scott goes on to note that in 1995 several super computer simulations were performed on a transmission line system model with properties believed to be those of a pulsar atmosphere and the results matched seventeen different observed emission properties.
The 1995 analysis he refers to is "Radiation Properties of Pulsar Magnetospheres: Observation, Theory, and Experiment" by Kevin Healy and Anthony Peratt (
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/downloads/HealyPeratt1995.pdf ). Healy and Peratt concluded, “Our results support the ‘planetary magnetosphere’ view, where the extent of the magnetosphere, not emission points on a rotating surface, determines the pulsar emission. In other words, we do not require a hypothetical super-condensed object to form a pulsar. A normal stellar remnant undergoing periodic discharges will suffice. Plasma cosmology has the virtue of not requiring neutron stars or black holes
(BAC - or quark stars as some observations suggest to the mainstream) to explain compact sources of radiation."
Furthermore, the jets coming from some pulsars might be explained thus:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040920pulsar.htm ... rather than relying on a host of gnomes.
Well pointed out BAC. I think that all of this is a far more plasuible explantion for pulsars than the current one, and I hadn't thought of the possible link between this and the Jupiter-Io connection before, but that makes a lot of sense.
Cool topic, I was going to start a thread on millisecond pulsars when I had the time, but may as well post a few things now.
And this discovery is way cool, I had heard of pulsars spinning at 716 Hertz before (716 times per second, ref;
Astronomers Discover Fastest-Spinning Pulsar), but this one blows it out of the water at 2150 rotations per second. The question surely has to arise; Is this speed really tenable?, or are the pulses we detect from them due to something else? This sort of speed was certainly not anticipated when the original interpretation of pulsars was proposed.
As has been pointed out previously, the paper published by Peratt and co-authors in Astrophysics and Space Science certainly implies this (
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/downloads/HealyPeratt1995.pdf). They note many things that add credence to this view, a few being;
Because of the losses in the dielectric media and in synchrotron emission, the periodicity of the propagating pulses increases. However the experiment dramatically showed that there are glitches, the flow of electron flux across the magnetosphere, can shorten the line and concomitantly the period. The fractional frequency stability scaling versus measurements interval up to about 30,000,000 s for pulsars is nearly identical to that for trapped-ion clocks. This supports the pulsar surface-magnetosphere relativistic double layer model; itself a trapped ion mechanism [.....]
Both simulation and experiment suggest that micro-pulses and sub-pulses are produced by particle-wave interactions in non-uniform plasma eradiated by the electromagnetic wave. This effect is produced when the magnetically insulated voltage pulse reaches the pulsar surface. Because of the curvature, magnetic insulation is lost and plasma flows across this region. This tends to create a resonating or modulating component to the proper current pulse [...]
The source of the radiation energy may not be contained within the pulsar, but may instead derive from either the pulsars interaction with its environment or by energy delivered by an external circuit (Hannes Alfvén 1981).[2] This hypothesis is consistent with both the long term memory effect of the time averaged pulse and the occurrence of nulling, when no sub-pulses are observed. As noted earlier, our results support the 'planetary magnetosphere' view (Michael 1982) where the extent of the magnetosphere, not emission points on a rotating surface, determines the pulsar emission.
When Neutron stars were first discovered it was thought that they rotated rapidly - like lighthouses. But I find this very unlikely now, even when the observed rate of "rotation" got up to about once per second for certain pulsars, despite their having masses exceeding that of the sun, the old official explanation became largely untenable in my opinion. This is where the concept of the "Neutron star" was invented. It was proposed that only such a dense material could make up a star that could stand those rotation speeds. (Some nuclear chemists have noted that current explanations for Neutron Stars violate the Island of Stability, as it is now known that neutrons can not be packed that close together without spontaneously undergoing radioactive transformations. Despite this fact, most astronomers remain confident that the gravity of neutron stars is strong enough to alter the fundamental observations of nuclear chemistry significantly on the atomic scale, despite gravities role at this scale still being a bit of a mystery (ref:
The Nuclear Cycle that Powers the Stars Journal of Fusion Energy, 2006) . This quite recent empirical observation even challenges the conventional assumption that stars are powered by H-fusion, but that’s for another thread in the future, not here, I feel.
ref,
ref)
Their radio pulse characteristics of most pulsars are: the 'duty cycle' is typically 5% (i.e., the pulsar flashes like a strobe light - the duration of each output pulse is much shorter than the length of time between pulses); some individual pulses are quite variable in intensity; the polarization of the pulse implies the origin has a strong magnetic field, which in turn implies strong electrical currents which have to generate these fields. These characteristics are consistent with an focussed electrical arc interaction between two closely spaced binary stars, a very similar interpretation to the one first postulated by Healy and Peratt, using a discharge between two bodies instead of the magnetosphere interaction. Relaxation oscillators with characteristics like this have been known and used by electrical engineers for many years.
It is an odd fact that most of these millisecond pulsars are binary systems, which adds further credence to this interpretation. Further evidence for this theory is given by Hubble;
"Hubble Space Telescope Observations Reveal Coolest and Oldest White Dwarf Stars in the Galaxy: "Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have detected five optical companion stars orbiting millisecond pulsars. Only two other such systems are known. Three of the companions are among the coolest and oldest white dwarf stars known."
Another one that offers further proof of this is one of the nearest to us (is it
the nearest actually???), the "Crab Nebula", which is currently thought to have a Neutron Star at its centre, CM Tauri. The frequency of repetition of the pulsar's output is 30 pulses per second. The length of each flash, however, is approximately 1/1000 sec, just one millisecond. This lead Plasma cosmologists to wonder if this star was a binary pair producing its pulses from periodic plasma discharges, similar to the mechanism described by Healy and Peratt. No companion is visible from even the largest earthbound telescopes.
The Hubble orbiting telescope has recently found such a companion;
http://seds.org/messier/more/m001_hst.html (interesting webpage too, check out the abundance of EM filaments that surround it)
A small knot of bright emission located only 1500 AU (1500 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun) from the pulsar. This knot has gone undetected up until now because even at the best ground-based resolution it is lost in the glare of the adjacent pulsar. The knot and the pulsar line up with the direction of a jet of X-ray emission. A second discovery is that in the direction opposite the knot, the Crab pulsar is capped by a ring-like 'halo' of emission tipped at about 20 degrees to our line of sight. In this geometry the polar jet flows right through the center of the halo.
Also, NRL has detected five optical companion stars orbiting millisecond pulsars, three of which are the among the coolest and oldest white dwarf stars known. Ones called PSR B1937+21, to be precise, but the names of the others I can’t seem to find at the mo...
Another thing that I find fascinating about pulsars is that it is well known that the pulses are considered some of the most accurate clocks in the universe, of relative accuracy of 10
-15 And here on earth the most accurate clocks are Ion clock mechanisms; which is the exact mechanism that Peratt and Plasma Cosmologists propose is occurring in Pulsars, ie, ions periodically building up and discharging in the stellar circuit. So it seems to fit very nicely. (
ref) It is also well known that Neutron stars (pulsars) are highly ionized bodies, which again implies that this discharge mechanism is likely.
And to counter the usual "We all ready know nearly everything about pulsars, this is all plasma cosmology woo-hoo-poo" response I can anticipate; many details of pulsars are are still poorly understood, such as:
1) Their magnetosphere structures are a bit of a mystery (bandaged dipoles being one theory out of many, and, I think, the most popular current one;
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l27044q5g2148051/)
2) The work function of their polar caps, has been observed to vanish in the presence of a pair plasma corona, generated by electron bombardment
3) the origin of the extreme brightness temparature of their coherent radio pulses, reaching 10
28±2K in the peaks
4) Radiation at all higher than radio frequencies not explained by current theories
5) high degrees of polarization (which i think has been observed both circular
and linear)
6) intensity fluctuations from pulse to pulse, who's histograms fall into some five different categories (briefly addressed in Peratts publication)
7) 3-d bean shapes, or antenna patterns, composed of huge numbers of narrowed spikes, with net bean fraction ~1
8) The modes of formation (currently via SN explosion in all cases, even including the ms pulsars!)
9) modes of extinction (via suffocation?, or some other not fully known mechanism) A question remains on whether the ms pulsars are 'recycled', ie, spun by accretion, just born fast, or from the Van Allen hypothesis (which would explain why their magnetic fields are always so high, which implies a relation between the speed of rotation and the magnetic field, something lacking from conventional theories;
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4287019 [the plasma cosmology interpretation of the three]
10) occasional Giant pulses radio emission (these events, surprisingly, have actually been attributed to electric discharges already, see;
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~sz/Conference_files/pres/kuzmin.pdf "
Giant pulses radio emission is generated in the electric discharge taking place due to the magnetic reconnection of field lines connecting the opposite magnetic poles” [of course though, Alfvens electrical double layer, or
current disruption model, is preferred to the "magnetic reconnection" idea of "merging lines" by most PC proponents]
Even their spindown ages (t
sd := P/2P) have been occasionally questioned as upper bounds on their true ages. The spindown obeys;
[latex](p^{2})^{.}=\frac{16\pi^{2}D^2}{3c^{3}I}[/latex]
for a transverse magnetic dipole moment D, (≈ 10
31Gcm
3), and a moment of inertia I ≈ 10
45gcm
2. The positive initial period ( P(t
0) ) is uncertain, and so renders the rest of the relationship questionable.
This long list of uncertainties with pulsar theory certainly adds room for the possibility of the plasma cosmology interpretation turning out correct. And I feel this is one of the areas that PC excels at explaining.
If you look at pictures of the pulsar in the Crab Nebula, it certainly takes the morphology of a unipolar inductor, with a central current filament and a rotating EM field of plasma surrounding it;
,which certainly adds further credence to the Van Allen hypothesis and the PC interpretation. This unipolar-inductor model for stars has been independently reached by various astronomers recently, some astronomers at MSSL have considered this recently (see
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_astro/news/gtbr/rx1914.html) and Wu
et al have developed a quantitative theory that seems to fit the observation for these stars very well, based on a unipolar-inductor (or homopolar generator, or Faraday electrical generator, whatever you want to call it! [all the same thing]), without even reading the work of Plasma Cosmologists and the model they had proposed many years previously.
Am I still writing!? Are you still reading?
I think that just about covers it for now anyway
