Best Of: Wal Thornhill: An Electric Cosmology for the 21st Century | EU Workshop

Thunderbolts Project | Jan 17, 2015 | Wal Thornhill

This talk by Wal Thornhill at the EU Workshop Nov 14-16, 2014 offers a compendium of the things that scientifically curious people need to know in order to see the electric force in its dynamic role from microcosm to macrocosm.

Hubble takes the biggest image ever of Andromeda at 1.5 billion pixels

Cosmos Magazine | Jan 6, 2015

The Hubble Space Telescope's image of the Andromeda Galaxy is the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of it. Click to expand but for an even closer view go to the Hubble website and use the zoom tool.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have released the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy. The image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has an amazing 1.5 billion pixels that would require 600 HD television screens to display in full.

This panorama is the product of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. Images were obtained from viewing the galaxy in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard Hubble.

The view shows the galaxy in its natural visible-light color as photographed in red and blue filters.

This image is too large to display at full resolution and is best viewed here, using the zoom tool.

Andromeda Galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 31, is a large spiral galaxy that lies "just" 2.5 million light years from Earth. Hubble's detailed view  captures more than 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40,000 light-years.

The whole galaxy contains over one thousand billion stars.

But the image represents just a third of the giant galaxy. It traces the galaxy from its central galactic bulge on the left of the image, where stars are densely packed together, across lanes of stars and dust to the sparser outskirts of its outer disc on the right.

Imagery of this sophistication has more than a "wow" factor. It will help astronomers interpret the light from the many galaxies that have a similar structure but lie much further away from us than Andromeda.

Much of Earth's Water Is Older Than the Sun

Planets form in the presence of abundant interstellar water
inherited as ices from the parent molecular cloud.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech)/ESO/J.
Emerson/VISTA/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

Live Science | Sep 26, 2014 | Mike Wall

Much of the water on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system likely predates the birth of the sun, a new study reports.

The finding suggests that water is commonly incorporated into newly forming planets throughout the Milky Way galaxy and beyond, researchers said — good news for anyone hoping that Earth isn't the only world to host life.

"The implications of our study are that interstellar water-ice remarkably survived the incredibly violent process of stellar birth to then be incorporated into planetary bodies," study lead author Ilse Cleeves, an astronomy Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, told Space.com via email. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]

"If our sun's formation was typical, interstellar ices, including water, likely survive and are a common ingredient during the formation of all extrasolar systems," Cleeves added. "This is particularly exciting given the number of confirmed extrasolar planetary systems to date — that they, too, had access to abundant, life-fostering water during their formation."

Astronomers have discovered nearly 2,000 exoplanets so far, and many billions likely lurk undetected in the depths of space. On average, every Milky Way star is thought to host at least one planet.

Water, water everywhere 

Our solar system abounds with water. Oceans of it slosh about not only on Earth's surface but also beneath the icy shells of Jupiter's moon Europa and the Saturn satellite Enceladus. And water ice is found on Earth's moon, on comets, at the Martian poles and even inside shadowed craters on Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.

Artist's concept showing the time sequence
of water ice, starting in the sun's parent
molecular cloud, traveling through the
stages of star formation, and eventually being
incorporated into the planetary system itself.
Credit: Bill Saxton, NSF/AUI/NRAO

Cleeves and her colleagues wanted to know where all this water came from.

"Why is this important? If water in the early solar system was primarily inherited as ice from interstellar space, then it is likely that similar ices, along with the prebiotic organic matter that they contain, are abundant in most or all protoplanetary disks around forming stars," study co-author Conel Alexander, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

"But if the early solar system's water was largely the result of local chemical processing during the sun's birth, then it is possible that the abundance of water varies considerably in forming planetary systems, which would obviously have implications for the potential for the emergence of life elsewhere," Alexander added.
 
Heavy and 'normal' water 

Not all water is "standard" H2O. Some water molecules contain deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen that contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. (Isotopes are different versions of an element whose atoms have the same number of protons, but different numbers of neutrons. The most common hydrogen isotope, known as protium, for example, has one proton but no neutrons.)

Because they have different masses, deuterium and protium behave differently during chemical reactions. Some environments are thus more conducive to the formation of "heavy" water — including super-cold places like interstellar space.

The researchers constructed models that simulated reactions within a protoplanetary disk, in an effort to determine if processes during the early days of the solar system could have generated the concentrations of heavy water observed today in Earth's oceans, cometary material and meteorite samples.

The team reset deuterium levels to zero at the beginning of the simulations, then watched to see if enough deuterium-enriched ice could be produced within 1 million years — a standard lifetime for planet-forming disks.

The answer was no. The results suggest that up to 30 to 50 percent of Earth's ocean water and perhaps 60 to 100 percent of the water on comets originally formed in interstellar space, before the sun was born. (These are the high-end estimates generated by the simulations; the low-end estimates suggest that at least 7 percent of ocean water and at least 14 percent of comet water predates the sun.)

While these findings, published online today (Sept. 25) in the journal Science, will doubtless be of interest to astrobiologists, they also resonated with Cleeves on a personal level, she said.

"A significant fraction of Earth's water is likely incredibly old, so old that it predates the Earth itself," Cleeves said. "For me, uncovering these kinds of direct links between our daily experience and the galaxy at large is fascinating and puts a wonderful perspective on our place in the universe."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Big Bang? Mystery Extends Into Nearby Galaxy, Puzzling Cosmologists

National Geographic | Sep 10, 2014 | Michael D. Lemonick

New observations of the star cluster Messier 54, shown above,
reveal that it is just as strangely deficient in lithium as our own
galaxy, deepening a mystery about the element's big bang origins.

Theory suggests stars should contain three times as much lithium as they do. 

A star cluster some 80,000 light-years from Earth looks mysteriously deficient in the element lithium, just like nearby stars, astronomers reported on Wednesday.

That curious deficiency suggests that astrophysicists either don't fully understand the big bang, they suggest, or else don't fully understand the way that stars work. (See interactive story "Cosmic Questions.")

The discovery, slated for publication in an upcoming issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, doesn't threaten the basic idea of the big bang—that is, that the cosmos began in a state of enormous heat and density, then expanded and evolved into the universe of stars and galaxies we see today. (Related: "Big Bang Discovery Opens Door to the 'Multiverse.'")

"The most radical solution to the problem is that the big bang theory is incomplete. But less radical solutions haven't yet solved the problem," says theoretical physicist Brian Fields of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the observations.

Still, the mismatch between theory and observations is a sign that something isn't right. According to basic cosmological theory, the universe served as a nuclear reactor during its first few minutes of existence, forging the three lightest chemical elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Every element heavier than these, including oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon, and the rest, was created either in the cores of stars or in powerful supernova explosions.

Cosmic Questions

Exactly how our universe began
and what it's made of are among
the cosmic questions that scientists
are still trying to answer.

Based on their understanding of those very earliest nuclear reactions, theorists can predict how much of the three light elements should have been produced, says Joel Primack, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was also not part of the new observations. In general, those predictions are spot-on. "It's one of the great successes in cosmology," he says.

As long as you leave out lithium, that is.

"With lithium," Primack says, "the predictions are about three times higher than what we actually see in stars."

Different Galaxy...

This shortfall of lithium was uncovered in 1982, when the husband-and-wife astronomy team of François and Monique Spite first measured it. "So many people have gone back and re-measured it since then and gotten the same answer," says Primack, "that it's regarded as being well confirmed."

But nobody had measured stellar lithium in stars beyond the Milky Way, and that's what Alessio Mucciarelli of the University of Bologna and his colleagues set out to do with the new study. "We said, 'OK, if the problem is the same in another galaxy, it would confirm that this is a universal problem, not just local,'" Mucciarelli says.

They chose a globular cluster of stars known as Messier 54, part of a small galaxy known as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which is being slowly torn apart by the gravity of the Milky Way. "We honestly weren't sure it was even feasible," he said, "because these stars are so faint."

In the end, it took 30 hours of observation with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, one of the world's most powerful, to get the evidence. Stars outside the Milky Way have the same lithium deficit as those within.

...Same Mystery

One possible explanation for the lithium shortfall could be that stars originally contained much more lithium than they do now, and that the element was somehow destroyed in nuclear reactions. "It's not a crazy idea," says Fields, "but it's hard to work out in detail."

A more likely explanation, according to both Fields and Primack, is that there was some sort of energy release in the first few minutes after the big bang that suppressed the production of lithium, and which isn't being accounted for. If that's true, the now-missing lithium may have started out in another form as cosmological detritus. That flotsam, in turn, may have decayed into "dark matter"—a kind of invisible stuff thought to make up most of the matter in the universe today.

If that's true, says Primack, "the lithium problem might not be telling us something boring about stars. It might be telling us something fundamental about dark matter."

Given that the nature of dark matter is one of the major outstanding mysteries of cosmology, that could be a very big deal indeed.

Follow Michael D. Lemonick on Twitter.

Mysterious dance of dwarf galaxies may force a cosmic rethink

At approximately 2.5 million light-years away, the
Andromeda galaxy, or M31, is our
Milky Way's largest galactic neighbor.

Sott.net | Jul 21, 2014

The discovery that many small galaxies throughout the universe do not 'swarm' around larger ones like bees do but 'dance' in orderly disc-shaped orbits is a challenge to our understanding of how the universe formed and evolved.

The finding, by an international team of astronomers, including Professor Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney's School of Physics, is announced today in Nature.

"Early in 2013 we announced our startling discovery that half of the dwarf galaxies surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy are orbiting it in an immense plane" said Professor Lewis. "This plane is more than a million light years in diameter, but is very thin, with a width of only 300,000 light years."

The universe contains billions of galaxies. Some, such as the Milky Way, are immense, containing hundreds of billions of stars. Most galaxies, however, are dwarfs, much smaller and with only a few billion stars.

For decades astronomers have used computer models to predict how these dwarf galaxies should orbit large galaxies. They had always found that they should be scattered randomly.

Our Andromeda discovery did not agree with expectations, and we felt compelled to explore if it was true of other galaxies throughout the universe," said Professor Lewis.

Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a remarkable resource of colour images and 3-D maps covering more than a third of the sky, the researchers dissected the properties of thousands of nearby galaxies.

"We were surprised to find that a large proportion of pairs of satellite galaxies have oppositely directed velocities if they are situated on opposite sides of their giant galaxy hosts," said lead author Neil Ibata of the Lycée International in Strasbourg, France.

"Everywhere we looked we saw this strangely coherent coordinated motion of dwarf galaxies. From this we can extrapolate that these circular planes of dancing dwarfs are universal, seen in about 50 percent of galaxies," said Professor Geraint Lewis.

"This is a big problem that contradicts our standard cosmological models. It challenges our understanding of how the universe works including the nature of dark matter."

The researchers believe the answer may be hidden in some currently unknown physical process that governs how gas flows in the universe, although, as yet, there is no obvious mechanism that can guide dwarf galaxies into narrow planes.

Some experts, however, have made more radical suggestions, including bending and twisting the laws of gravity and motion. "Throwing out seemingly established laws of physics is unpalatable," said Professor Lewis, "but if our observations of nature are pointing us in this direction, we have to keep an open mind. That's what science is all about."

Journal Reference:

Neil G. Ibata, Rodrigo A. Ibata, Benoit Famaey, Geraint F. Lewis. ''Velocity anti-correlation of diametrically opposed galaxy satellites in the low-redshift Universe''. Nature, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature13481

Source: ScienceDaily

Earth & moon 60 million years older than previously thought

AFP Photo / NASA

RT | Jun 10, 2014

The timing of the giant impact between Earth’s ancestor and another planet-sized body happened 40 million years after the start of the solar system. This means Earth is a bit of an older lady than previously thought.

New research by Geochemists from the University of Lorraine in Nancy, eastern France, was presented at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Sacramento, California.

The scientists measured changes in the proportions of different gases (known as isotopes) which have survived in some rocks from when Earth was very young.

Bernard Marty and Guillaume Avice, two of the key scientists in the research, analyzed xenon gas, found in South African and Australian quartz, which was found to be 3.4 and 2.7 billion years old respectively.

This is because the gas sealed in the xenon is in a ‘time capsule’, which allows scientists to compare the current isotopic ratios of xenon with those that existed billions of years ago.

This allowed them to estimate when Earth began to form.

“The xenon gas signals allow us to calculate when the atmosphere was being formed, which was probably at the time the Earth collided with a planet-sized body, leading to the formation of the moon. Our results mean that both the earth and the moon are older than we had thought,” said Avice.

The time Earth was formed had previously been estimated at around 100 million years after the formation of the solar system and as the atmosphere would not have survived the moon-forming impact, this new data puts the formation of the Earth at just 40 million years after the solar system formation.

“This might seem a small difference, but it is important. These differences set time boundaries on how the planets evolved, especially through major collisions in deep time which shaped the solar system,” said Marty.

In a separate paper published in Science last week, new evidence from the Apollo missions of the 1970s has been analyzed, showing traces of material to support the hypothesis that the formation of the moon was the result of a giant collision between Earth and another Mars-sized planet.

The debris from this impact about 4.5 billion years ago is believed to have resulted in the formation of the moon.

Ancient exoplanet found in sun’s neighborhood, could sustain water

AFP Photo / NASA

RT | Jun 4, 2014 |

Two new planets have been discovered in the galactic halo, orbiting the very old Kapteyn’s star in what is known as a “habitable zone”, meaning they are the right distance from the star to support liquid water and potentially life as we know it.

The ancient star, just 13 light years from Earth, was initially discovered at the end of the 19th century by the Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn. The red dwarf is the second fastest moving star in the sky and belongs to the galactic halo, an extended cloud of stars orbiting our galaxy. It can actually be seen with an amateur telescope in the southern constellation of Pictor.

An international team of researchers coming from London’s Queen Mary University and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) have been collecting data on Kapteyn’s star for over a decade at the Keck Observatory.

In the most recent study, they measured tiny periodic changes in the motion of Kapteyn’s star, which are caused by the gravitational tug of the orbiting planets. Scientist can then work out some of the properties of these planets such as their mass and orbital periods.

“We were surprised to find planets orbiting Kapteyn’s star. Previous data showed some moderate excess of variability, so we were looking for very short period planets when the new signals showed up loud and clear,” says lead author Dr Guillem Anglada-Escude, QMUL’s School of Physics and Astronomy.

“Finding a stable planetary system with a potentially habitable planet orbiting one of the very nearest stars in the sky is mind blowing,” says US co-author Dr Pamela Arriagada, from the Carnegie Institution.

“This is one more piece of evidence that nearly all stars have planets, and that potentially habitable planets in our galaxy are as common as grains of sand on a beach.”

The planets were given traditional names of Kapteyn b and Kapteyn c.

For the time being only a few properties about them are known, such as their approximate masses, distances to the star and orbital periods.

But using new instruments currently under construction, scientists will be able to measure the planet’s atmospheres and may be able to detect the presence of water.

The two planets are estimated to be 11.5 billion years old, which is 2.5 billion years older than earth and only two billion years younger than the universe itself.

Kapetyn c is far bigger than earth and its year lasts 121 days. However, astronomers think it’s too cold to support liquid water.

Kapetyn b is the most likely to support water; its mass is five times bigger than Earth’s and takes 48 days to orbit its star.

As scientists believe the star itself was born in a dwarf galaxy that eventually got absorbed and destroyed by our own Milky Way galaxy, the life it could host might have come from a very deep space.

“It does make you wonder what kind of life could have evolved on those planets over such a long time,” Anglada-Escude said.

‘Sibling’ sun found 110 light yrs from Earth in the Constellation Hercules

AFP Photo / Fabrice Coffrini

RT | May 11, 2014

The sun could have a sibling according to researchers at the University of Texas, who believe the star was born from the same cloud of gas as our sun. It is hoped this could give astronomers fresh insights into how life on earth started.

The study was conducted by astronomer Ivan Ramirez, based at the University of Texas, who says that the star is 110 light years away from Earth.

"We want to know where we were born," Ramirez said in a statement announcing his discovery. "If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here."

The solar sibling, named HD 162826 by the team that made the discovery, is 15 percent larger than the sun and can be found in the constellation Hercules. It can be seen with the aid of binoculars and is not far from the bright star Vega.

Ramirez and his team studied 30 stars that other astronomers believed could be potential solar siblings. He managed to narrow down the list by analyzing the orbit and chemical make-up of each star. His team also included information about the stars' orbits, where they had been and where they are going in their paths around the center of the Milky Way. After taking all this data into account, they were able to pin point HD 162862 as the sun’s sibling star.

The next step will be to try and find if the star has any planets in its orbit which could support life forms.

AFP Photo / NASA

There is a chance, "small, but not zero," Ramirez said, that these solar sibling stars could host planets that have life on them. In their earliest days within their birth cluster, he explains, collisions could have knocked chunks off of planets, and these fragments could have traveled between solar systems, and perhaps even may have been responsible for bringing primitive life to Earth.

"So it could be argued that solar siblings are key candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life," Ramirez said.

Ramirez said that observatory teams have been monitoring HD 162682 for more than 15 years. However, studies by The University of Texas' Michael Endl and William Cochran, together with calculations by Rob Wittenmyer of the University of New South Wales, have ruled out any massive planets orbiting close to the star (so-called hot Jupiters), and indicate that it's unlikely that a Jupiter analog orbits the star. The studies do not rule out the presence of smaller terrestrial planets.

The finding of a single solar sibling is intriguing, but Ramirez points out the project has a larger purpose, which could create a road map for how to identify solar siblings, in preparation for the flood of data expected soon from surveys such as Gaia, the European Space Agency mission to create the largest and most precise 3D map of the Milky Way.

Ramirez's findings are due to published in the June 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Warped Space Time for Warped Minds

The Crab Nebula pulsar, a hypothetical neutron star.
Credit: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al.

Thunderbolts.info | Apr 30, 2014 | Stephen Smith

May 01, 2014

A University of Michigan press release announces “warped space-time” around a so-called “neutron star”. Could electricity provide a better explanation?

The smeared lines of an iron spectrum have given NASA and University of Michigan astronomers another mystery to solve when it comes to explaining the universe. Using the XMM-Newton and the JAXA/NASA X-ray observatories, high-velocity particles in orbit around Serpens X-1 seem to indicate relativistic effects. According to Sudip Bhattacharyya of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center:

“This is fundamental physics. There could be exotic kinds of particles or states of matter, such as quark matter, in the centers of neutron stars, but it’s impossible to create them in the lab. The only way to find out is to understand neutron stars.”

Part of what they are trying to understand is the observation of spectral lines from “hot iron atoms” that appear to be orbiting close in to the surface of the neutron star. As interpreted by conventional theory, the spectra indicate that some of the material is moving at over 40 percent light-speed. Since iron atoms glow at certain optical frequencies when heated to their incandescent state, there should be dark lines within the specular distribution of the color bands. Called Fraunhofer lines, they mark places within the spectrum of any material where the emission energy is absorbed, leaving a dark line within the band of color generated by a prism.

Because Fraunhofer lines are supposed to occur at specific frequencies identified in the spectrum by the kind of element that is being absorbed, if they are in a different location, then they have been Doppler-shifted because of their acceleration. This forms the backbone of galactic-scale distance calculations and the supposed speed of recession that the galaxies display.

Using this system of “redshift” some galaxies are measured to be moving away from Earth at an unbelievable 90 percent of light-speed. The velocity assumption is derived from a gravity-only version of the cosmos. A supermassive object composed of tightly packed neutrons is the only mechanism that could provide the gravitational strength needed for the iron ions to achieve such fast orbits.

In a previous Picture of the Day, an analysis of neutron stars revealed that the science behind their hypothetical existence does not support the very idea of such objects. As previously written, a foundational concept in nuclear physics is the “island of stability”.

Plotting the number of neutrons against the number of protons in the nuclei of all elements demonstrates that the ratio is about one-to-one for light elements and one-point-five-to-one for the heavy ones. An atomic nucleus outside the range will spontaneously decay so that it reaches a stable configuration and remains in equilibrium. If there are too few neutrons, the atom will emit protons in order to stabilize and vise-versa. A nucleus – or star – composed of neutrons alone would be completely unstable and would immediately decay.

The hot iron that has been found around the Serpens X-1 stellar phenomenon is most likely the result of electrical discharge action on and around the star. Stars exist as anodes in a galactic circuit that causes the majority of them to blaze in arc mode. No “millions of continuous H-bomb explosions” are taking place at the core and the observational data leads to the conclusion that they are actually giant balls of plasma. The information gleaned from the Hinode spacecraft and other science experiments observing the sun has confirmed that understanding.

If ad hoc conjectures must be invented to save theories that do not directly explain new observations, then discovering the true nature of the Universe will be hampered.

Stephen Smith

CLICK HERE FOR THE 2013-11-14 SPANISH TRANSLATION

Milky Way's Structure Mapped in Unprecedented Detail

Live Science | Apr 25, 2014 | Katia Moskvitch. Space.com

The Milky Way arches over an old windmill near Paulden, Arizona.
Astrophotographer Sean Parker sent this image to SAPCE.com on Dec. 30, 2013.
Credit: Sean Parker | www.sean-parker.com

Astronomers are one step closer to solving a longstanding mystery — just what our Milky Way galaxy looks like.

It may seem odd that a comprehensive understanding of the Milky Way's structure has so far eluded researchers. But it's tough to get a broad view of the galaxy from within.

"We are fairly confident that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, but we don't know much in detail. At the most basic level, we'd like to be able to make a map that would show in detail what it looks like," said Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the new study.

Read more..

The Electric Comet Hale-Bopp | Space News

ThunderboltsProject | Apr 25, 2014 | Subscribe

A team of scientists analyzing the coma and tail of Comet Hale- Bopp have published their observations in a landmark paper. What they discovered cannot be explained by the standard model of comets. The scientists analyzed the comet's surprising coma and tail at distances up to 27 times the average distance between the Earth and Sun. The structure of the comet's tail and its relative brightness at such a large heliocentric distance remains a mystery for comet scientists.

Ben Davidson: The Variable Sun and Its Effects on Earth | EU2014

©Thunderbolts.info

Thunderbolts.info | Apr 7, 2014 | Ben Davidson

The message has been loud and clear for many years—a community of scientists insisting that human activity is warming our planet, taking humanity to the edge of a precipice. But now, as science begins to understand earth’s place in the electric solar system, the meaning of the present warming plateau becomes clearer. The Earth-Sun connection, together with the Sun’s galactic environment, can help to explain climate extremes of every kind. Today, new voices and new perspectives are bridging the theoretical gaps, and independent investigations have reached some startling conclusions. No one can know the future, but some of the electrical changes in our solar system could point to catastrophic change on the horizon.

Ben Davidson is the researcher behind the Suspicious0bserver channel on YouTube, a channel that has rocketed in only 2 years to over 28 million views with 2 million added a month. Ben was classically trained in law and legal research, before taking up independent research in diverse sciences. His online presence has been a constant source of data dissemination, inspiring public interest in a variety of scientific fields, including the ‘electric universe’ theories. Ben focuses on the daily solar environment and the electromagnetic interactions between the sun, earth, and the galaxy. It was this interdisciplinary “due diligence” that led him to the surprising conclusions he will present at the conference.

youtube.com/user/suspicious0bservers; suspicious0bservers.org

David Talbott: Exposing the Myths of "Settled Science"

Thunderbolts Project | Aug 9, 2013 | David Talbott

Wal Thornhill and Dave Talbott will each give two thought-provoking presentations at EU2014 Conference: All About Evidence, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, March 20 - 24, 2014. For more information on all the speakers start here:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2013/...

Is it possible that the foundational assumptions of the theoretical sciences all express a common misunderstanding? From cosmology, the "queen of the sciences," a core dogma of the 20th century filtered down through every discipline, constraining our ideas about galaxy and star formation and ultimately (from the same underlying assumptions) all of the space sciences, infecting our views of earth history and even our sense of what it means to be human. The core dogma was the idea that gravity alone, seen through the lens of general relativity, rules the cosmos. Dispelling this most common misconception has become the essential requirement for scientific progress, since all of the new evidence makes clear that we live in an Electric Universe.

David Talbott presented this talk at the annual meeting of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, University of Maryland, July 10-13, 2013. Part Two of the talk will be given at the upcoming The Thunderbolts Project(TM) conference (Electric Universe 2014: All About Evidence) March 20-24, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. See www.thunderbolts.info for announcement in September 2013.

Other Electric Universe presentations at the NPA20 conference included Wallace Thornhill's talk "The Interdisciplinary Story of the Electric Unvierse" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxaP9...

Also posted from the NPA20 conference is the talk of Dr. Gerald Pollack, "The Fourth Phase of Water" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q33Ky...

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Picture of the Day: http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/daily...
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Essential Guide to the Electric Universe: http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/eg-co...

Best of Time Lapse: Milky Way Auroras Thunderstorms Present Stunning Images

Space.com | Mar 10, 2014

Randy Halverson (dakotalapse.com) captured the footage from April-Nov 2013 in South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. 2 Canon 5D Mark III and 1 Canon 6D cameras were used to create this compilation.

Credit: Randy Halverson

Stephen J. Crothers: Black Holes, General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation

© Thunderbolts Project

Thunderbolts Project | Nov 28, 2012 | CHANNEL

For several years now, far from the spotlight of mainstream media, a controversy has been brewing over the mathematical foundations of black hole theory and other widely accepted cosmological theories.

Mathematician Stephen J. Crothers has offered the proofs that he says refutes the very existence of black holes, and also the Big Bang cosmology and Einstein’s “gravitational waves.” In this discussion – far and away the most challenging, technical presentation to date on these pages – Stephen presents a summary of his evidence on black hole theory, in the clearest language possible. Our hope is that Stephen’s summary will serve as a timeless resource and a subject of much debate amongst mathematical specialists for years to come.

Stephen Crothers is among the featured speakers at the forthcoming conference EU 2013 – The Tipping Point, in Albuquerque, NM, Jan 3-6. Also speaking will be Wal Thornhill, David Talbott, Rupert Sheldrake, Gerald Pollack, Mae Wan Ho, Dean Radin, and many more, including most of the speakers highlighted in the ThunderboltsProject videos. To learn more, visit our official conference page here. 

Stephen’s webpage, with many of his papers and articles: http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/
A PDF of Stephen Crothers’ recent powerpoint presentation at EU 2013 – The Tipping Point may be downloaded here: http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Crothers-EU-2013.pdf

Speeding, 900-foot Asteroid to Zoom (Safely) by Earth Monday, Live Stream Available

Speeding, 900-foot Asteroid to Zoom (Safely) by Earth Monday, Live Stream Available
Feb 17, 2014 | Nature World News | James A. Foley

An asteroid the size of nearly three football fields will zoom past Earth on Monday and the so-called "close-approach" will be broadcast online for all to see.

An asteroid the size of nearly three football fields will zoom past Earth on Monday and the
so-called “close-approach” will be broadcast online for all to see. Asteroid 2000 EM26 will fly
at at 27,000 mph at 8.8 lunar distances from Earth. (Photo : Slooh Community Observatory )

The asteroid in question, dubbed 2000 EM26, is estimated to be 885 feet (270 meters) in diameter, and considered a "potentially hazardous asteroid." While it poses no risk of harming Earth, it's worth keeping an eye on, according to officials at the online Slooh Space Camera project, which will track the asteroid as it passes by Earth, broadcasting a live stream of the event here.

Slooh will begin its coverage of the close-approaching asteroid Mon., Feb. 17 at 9 p.m. EST.

Tune in quickly, though. The asteroid will fly by at an estimated speed of 27,000 mph, according to Slooh.

At its closest approach, asteroid 2000 EM26 will be 8.8 lunar distances away from Earth, according to Space.com.

Slooh regularly tracks large asteroids and comets considered to be potentially hazardous to Earth, and since 2003 has connected land-based telescopes to the internet for easy access by the broader public.

"We continue to discover these potentially hazardous asteroids - sometimes only days before they make their close approaches to Earth," Paul Cox, Slooh's technical and research director, said in a statement. "Slooh's asteroid research campaign is gathering momentum with Slooh members using the Slooh robotic telescopes to monitor this huge population of potentially hazardous space rocks. We need to find them before they find us!"

Monday's event happens nearly one year after two remarkable near-Earth asteroid events, one that astronomers knew about, and another that took them by surprise.

On Feb. 15, 2013, astronomers were tracking asteroid "2012 DA14" which Slooh described as "a 40,000 ton space rock, 98ft (30m)in diameter, due to miss Earth by a measly 17,200 miles (27,680 km) closer even than our geosynchronous satellites."

While all eyes were on 2012 DA14, another asteroid - one that was completely off the radar of astronomers - entered Earth's atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia with a force equivalent to more than 20 atomic bombs. Residents of Chelyabinsk were lucky to have all survived the event, which caused significant damage to buildings, as well as injuries to more than 1,000 people, mainly from broken glass.

"On a practical level, a previously-unknown, undiscovered asteroid seems to hit our planet and cause damage or injury once a century or so, as we witnessed on June 20, 1908 and February 15, 2013," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement. "Every few centuries, an even more massive asteroid strikes us - fortunately usually impacting in an ocean or wasteland such an Antarctica. But the ongoing threat, and the fact that biosphere-altering events remain a real if small annual possibility, suggests that discovering and tracking all NEOs, as well as setting up contingency plans for deflecting them on short notice should the need arise, would be a wise use of resources."

To commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Chelyabinsk event, 10 gold medals from the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were embedded with fragments of the Chelyabinsk asteroid and awarded to athletes on Sat. Feb. 15.

Hawking Still in the Dark on Black Holes | Space News

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Hawking Still in the Dark on Black Holes | Space News
Feb 4, 2014 | ThunderboltsProject

Listen as mathematician Stephen Crothers tells us why not much has changed since Stephen Hawking's recent "revelation" in his 4-page paper in Nature. Crothers will be a featured speaker at the upcoming Electric Universe 2014 Conference : All About Evidence, March 20-24 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For more information, click on:
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Astronomers: NASA’s Kepler craft shows Earth is an anomaly among worlds

Astronomers: NASA’s Kepler craft shows Earth is an anomaly among worlds
Jan 6, 2014 | Agence France-Presse

Astronomers call them super-Earths, and they are abundant outside our solar system. But the more experts learn about them, the weirder our own planet seems in comparison.

Planets the size of Earth and up to four times larger are believed to make up about three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.

Astronomers have eagerly catalogued some 3,000 of these planets in the hopes that they may point to the existence of life elsewhere in the galaxy.

But experts told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society outside the US capital on Monday that while super-Earths and mini-Neptunes are common, they bear little resemblance to the planet we call home.

“Our solar system seems to be different. All these planets that Kepler has found, they are strange,” said Yoram Lithwick of Northwestern University.

“Twenty to 30 percent of all stars have these crazy planets.”

Super-Earths and mini-Neptunes that are more than two and a half times the radius of Earth “must be covered with lots and lots of gas, which is the most surprising result,” said Lithwick.

He studied about 60 such planets and found that they likely formed “very quickly after the birth of their star, while there was still a gaseous disk around the star.”

“By contrast, Earth is thought to have formed much later, after the gas disk disappeared,” he said.

Not only are many of these planets hotter than Earth, having a huge amount of gas covering their rocky core would result in extreme atmospheric pressure.

“It would be like being below 10 oceans here on Earth,” said Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley.

Asked if life could exist under such conditions, Marcy told reporters he had asked some of his friends who are biology experts the same question. In short, they were not sure.

“It is not impossible,” he said. “We know very little about how life got started and in what environments it might flourish.”

Since Kepler cannot return any data about mass, astronomers have learned to study it through alternate methods, like making Doppler measurements of the planets’ host stars, seeing how they wobble as a result of the gravitational tug from the orbiting planet.

Planets with higher mass make for more intense wobbling because they exert a greater gravitational tug on their stars.

David Kipping, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, described his team’s latest discovery of a planet called KOI-314C in a presentation called “An Earth-mass world nothing like home.”

Located some 200 light years away, “a stone’s throw by Kepler’s standard,” the planet orbits its star every 23 days.

The planet’s temperature is about 220 degrees Fahrenheit (104 Celsius), and it is coated in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium hundreds of miles thick.

The planet is one of three in a mini solar system, in which the cohabitants “kick each other, they perturb each other frequently,” he told reporters.

Since it is relatively close, Kipping said he hopes further study with the Hubble space telescope or its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope to be launched in 2018, could shed more light on its characteristics.

Another prospect for further research is the super-Earth exoplanet GJ 1214b, some 40 light years away, which is believed to be covered with clouds, according to researcher Laura Kreidberg at the University of Chicago.

Its atmosphere lacks water, methane or carbon dioxide, and its clouds could be made of zinc sulfide and potassium chloride, she said.

At the conference, astronomers announced 70 new planet confirmations, 16 mass determinations from Doppler follow-up observations and five new rocky planets.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope launched in 2009 on a mission to find Earth-like planets by observing transits, or dimmings in light, as they passed in front of their stars.

It is no longer fully operational, having lost traction in the second of its four orienting wheels last year, but astronomers hope it will be able to continue offering limited observations of distant worlds.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

The Calculation That Proves We're Not Alone in the Universe | Light at the End of the Tunnel

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The Calculation That Proves We're Not Alone in the Universe | Light at the End of the Tunnel
Dec 20, 2013 | breakingtheset

Abby Martin remarks on a recent discovery of five Jupiter sized planets that contain water within our milky way, and outlines the Drake Equation by astrophysicist Carl Sagan.

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The "Impossible" Exoplanet

The "Impossible" Exoplanet
Dec 15, 2013 | ThunderboltsProject