This is a follow-up to
Electric Universe Fantasies & Heliopause Electrons.
The helpful press office at JPL was able to point me to the paper
THE MODULATION OF GALACTIC COSMIC-RAY ELECTRONS IN THE HELIOSHEATH
R. A. Caballero-Lopez, H. Moraal and F. B. McDonald
which was the primary reference for the press release
NASA's Voyager Hits New Region at Solar System Edge.
This was the press release used by Dr. Scott for an 'update' to his electric Sun model (
Thunderbolts: Voyager 1 Updates Solar Electron Flux. Since EU has a multitude of contradictory "electric sun" models, I call Scott's version as the Solar Capacitor Model to distinguish it among
those that I have analyzed.
The press release and the actual paper describes in-situ Voyager 1 & Voyager 2 measurements of the electron flux at the heliopause, about 100AU from the Sun. Voyager is reporting an increase in the flux of high energy electrons as the spacecraft moves towards the outer edge of the heliopause (
wikipedia). What the spacecraft is detecting is the higher energy galactic electron population that has penetrated into the outflowing region of the solar wind which is dominated by lower energy electrons (and spiced up with some higher energy electrons from Jupiter's magnetosphere).
There were a couple of items reported in the measurements that are grossly inconsistent with EU's claim of these electrons powering their “Electric Sun“.
- The measured electron flux was omni-directional. This is because these electrons diffuse into the heliopause region, scattering to sufficiently to lose information of their original direction. If there were an electric field driving these electrons sunward, it should show up as a strong directional character in the electron measurements.
- The measured electron flux is a power law, E^-1.5. We can use this to estimate the total electron flux and compare it to the number used in Dr. Scott's 'update'. Examining the Figure 1 from the original paper, we find that the omnidirectional flux measured by Voyager 1 (the larger of the two measurements) is about 100 particles/m^2/s/sr/MeV @ 4MeV. We can use this number to calibrate the calculation.
We'll use this value, combined with the definition of particle flux, to estimate the electron spectral density.
If we use E=4MeV in the above formula, we obtain a flux of about 100 electrons/m^2/s/sr/MeV. With this spectral power law, this gives a total particle flux of about
if we integrate (sum) all the particles in the energy range from 1MeV to infinity. Now the measured flux is omnidirectional because the Voyager detector has a fairly large field-of-view.
However, Dr. Scott claims the electron flux is all inbound, directed towards the Sun.
For the sake of argument, we'll compute the omnidirectional flux, but interpret it as a measured inbound flux. Since there are 4*pi steradians (sr) in a full sphere, we can multiply the directional flux by 4*pi to get the total flux:
(particle density) * (particle velocity) = 4*pi*df/dOmega = 4*pi*1600 particles/m^2/s
or about 20,000 electrons per square meter per second.
Since 1MeV electrons are relativistic, we can take the velocity as approximately 'c' and use this number to estimate the electron density.
n*v = 2e4 electrons/m^2/s
n= (2e4 electrons/m^2/s)/(3e8 m/s) = 7e-5 electrons/m^3 =7e-11 electrons/cm^3
Yet the electron density used by Dr. Scott is 1e4 electrons/m^3 (Thunderbolts), over 100 MILLION times larger than the most optimistic interpretation of the measured value!
Why is that? Will EU supporters again invoke mystically undetectable 'drift electrons' (see
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. III)?
Such 'drift electrons', if they existed, would pose a real threat to multi-million dollar space assets. Satellite engineers know that space plasmas are *very* detectable as
no satellite is a uniform perfect conductor. This is probably why I have yet to find an EU 'engineer' actually involved in designing and building satellites!
So where did Dr. Scott get his electron flux measurement? It looks like he just took his old estimate
and scaled it.
Why didn't Dr. Scott find out what the real value was? Did he just make up the value because it was convenient?
References
- Voyager CRS Instruments
- The Voyager Cosmic Ray Instrument. D.E.Stillwell, W.D.Davis, R.M.Joyce, F.B.McDonald, J.H.Trainor, W.E.Althouse, A.C.Cummings, T.L.Garrard, E.C.Stone, and R.E.Vogt. IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science 26, 513-520 (1979)