The Conditions of Solar Maximum

June 2014, the Sun emits 3 X-class solar
flares in 24 hours. Credit: NASA/SDO

Thunderbolts.info | Jun 25, 2014 | Stephen Smith

Sunspot activity has dramatically increased.

The Sun exhibits a solar cycle that lasts approximately 22 years, oscillating in output strength and the number of sunspots visible across its surface. This last 11 year period, when the number of sunspots was expected to increase, there was a “delay”; the Sun remained quiescent past its predicted time.

Since late February 2014, however, that quiescent period ended with the eruption of a large solar flare from an active sunspot region, and then several other powerful shocks from ever more energetic sunspots, as shown in the image at the top of the page. Solar max has arrived.

According to consensus opinions, solar flares, or coronal mass ejections (CME), occur when magnetic loops in the Sun’s atmosphere “reconnect” with each other, causing a short circuit. The explosive release of “magnetic energy” is said to accelerate the superheated gases out into space. No one knows what “magnetic reconnection” is, but it is offered as the only explanation by heliophysicists for the flaring phenomenon.

Since CMEs increase auroral brightness and frequency when they meet Earth’s magnetic field, they are a flow of charged particles. Although space scientists refer to the ion stream pouring out of the Sun as a “wind,” and that atomic fragments “rain down” on Earth, that they are attracted to and follow the polar cusps should definitively establish their electrical nature.

Wal Thornhill states that: “While enormous time and resources have been poured into the effort to understand stars based on a single outdated idea, those familiar with plasma discharge phenomena have been paying close attention to the observed phenomena on the Sun and finding simple electrical explanations. After 100 years of neglect, an electrical model of stars is just beginning to emerge.”

Conventional thinking suggests that the Sun accelerates charged particles into space in the same way that sound waves are amplified. Eruptions in the photosphere travel outward through “acoustical wave-guides,” known as magnetic flux tubes. Structures called spicules rise thousands of kilometers above the photosphere and carry the hot gas with them. Its overall behavior suggests that it is electromagnetic in nature, and not kinetic or acoustic.

The Sun is the locus of positive charge with respect to interstellar plasma. Sunspots appear when electric discharges penetrate the photosphere, allowing electric current to flow into its depths. Electromagnetic flux tubes expose the Sun’s cooler interior. No doubt those flux tubes are also involved with connecting the Sun’s electromagnetic environment with Earth’s ionosphere, as well.

As the electric Sun theory relates, sunspots, flares, coronal heating, and all other solar activity most likely results from fluctuations in electrical input from our galaxy. Birkeland current filaments slowly rotate past the Solar System, supplying more or less power to the Sun as they go. The Sun could experience cyclic influences involving its galactic circuit, as well.

The circuit connecting the Sun is of unknown length, but probably extends for thousands of light-years. How much electrical energy might be contained in such magnetically confined “transmission lines”? No one knows, but astronomers are continually “surprised” by the incredible detonations that they observe from solar flares.