Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Electric Sun, Electric Comets & 'Conspiracies'

I got a good chuckle this week when I stumbled across this on the Thunderbolts Forum:
NASA Wiped Imagery of Comet Hitting Sun

Here's a few more rational evaluations:
The Electric Universe claims fail because EU supporters fail to compare this event to all the times that CMEs occur without a comet approaching the Sun.  Consider all these events from about a week in October-November 2003:

Solar storm Halloween 2003 SOHO EIT and SOHO LASCO‬

The 'snow' that strikes the camera after CMEs directed Earthward are the protons and other ions in the CME.  Some of particles scatter in the instrument at angles that let them cut across multiple pixels in the imager and create the occasional 'dash' structures that last for one image (as opposed to a comet that you would be able to track across multiple frames).

Update, June 4, 2012: Thanks to a reader who pointed me to a simple analysis of a possible comet/CME correlation on the Comets Mailing List: Sungrazer-CME statistical analysis.

3 comments:

Siggy_G said...

It should probably be noted that the EU claim isn't that comets is the reason for CMEs - the Sun huffs abd puffs every now and then. It is rather that the comets' apparent interference with the solar plasma and magnetic field indicate the electric nature of comets and their huge coma (which in no way can be held together by the comet's own gravity).

Why is this observation being brought up throughout magazines in the first place? When coincidences happen often, they're not called coincidents anymore. Try figure out why they happen instead. And yes, it's correct that a tiny electrically neutral ice ball shouldn't cause CMEs, so we can leave that one out.

One just have to like Phil Plait in that video - funny guy.

W.T."Tom" Bridgman said...

There's loads of crackpot silliness that gets attention. If professionals ignore them, the cranks twist that as proof of their claims and if the professionals engage them, they use that as evidence of their claims as well.

So how does one distinguish the unaided CMEs from the comet-aided CME? So do those EU 'theorists' have any kind of testable prediction beyond there's a comet in view?

Otherwise the claims are indistinguishable from the 'coincidences' of earthquakes with planetary alignments, comets, or whatever.

gene said...

You lied about what was actually said on the thunderbolts site. The post you refer to was from one of the myriad of posters to the forum and was a personal opinion of said poster. Unlike your site which is censored because you are a coward, the thunderbolts forum is not censored. The thunderbolts site merely suggests that there may be a connection. When a man tells a bald-faced lie about something like this, he loses all credibility with me. He also loses any respect I might have for him. Shame on you.

So...What Happened?

Wow.  It's been over eight years since I last posted here... When I stepped back in August 2015,...