Edge-on image of Saturn's F-ring. Credit: NASA/JPL Cassini-Huygens mission.
Posted on 11/13/2007 11:02:21 AM PST by Swordmaker
Nov 12, 2007
Kinks in Saturn's Rings
Braids and twists in the rings of Saturn suggest activity in addition to gravitational attraction. Could electricity be one of the formative agents?Saturn's F-ring was discovered by Pioneer 11 during its 1979 flyby of the giant planet. When the Voyager 1 space probe passed by Saturn in November of 1980, it returned stunning pictures of Saturn's rings that were completely unanticipated. Two of the most intriguing discoveries were the "spokes" seen drifting above the ring plane and the twisted and interlaced structure of the F-ring.
Voyager 2's higher resolution camera found five separate strands in a region with no braiding and one small section where the F-ring was twisted. Additional polarized light images of the brightest F-ring filaments proved them to be subdivided into at least ten smaller strands. The twists in the ring are theorized to be gravitational perturbations caused by one of two "shepherd moons," Prometheus.
The Cassini-Huygens mission placed an observation platform in orbit around Saturn, designed to last until mid-2008. Several images of the F-ring seem to indicate a helical structure that twists around a central cylinder, rather than a braid. There are what look like three toroidal shapes visible in the image at the top of the page, with the tips of many others visible along the strand. In the center of the three helical filaments is a bright, rotating tube that shows where the forces have become concentrated.
In previous Thunderbolts Picture of the Day articles about the plasmasphere around Saturn, it was noted that planets and moons do not exist in an electrically neutral environment. Saturn, in particular, has a family of moons that exhibit electric discharge machining on a vast scale, as well as features within its atmosphere that could be characterized as lightning discharges. Its aurora are an intense radio-emitter and the planet is surrounded by a torus of plasma that emits x-rays and extreme ultra-violet light. Saturn seems to display many aspects that are predicted by the Electric Universe theory, including the shape of its rings.
Bodies immersed in plasma aren't isolated, they are connected by circuits. Most of the time they are not in equilibrium because they are in unstable conditions. The majority of them are moving across the plasma filaments that exist in the solar system and in the plasmaspheres around planets. Currents in plasma contract into filaments (which are really sheets of double-layers folded into tubes) and the force between filaments is linear, so the electromagnetic fields created by the filaments are the most powerful long-range attractor in the universe.
In 1913, Kristian Birkeland conducted his now-famous experiment where a small, magnetized iron globe was placed in a vacuum and used as the cathode in electric discharges. As he wrote about Saturn's rings: "It seems almost incredible that such a ring of cosmic dust should be able to exist for ever, so to speak, without other governing forces than gravitation..."
Plasma physics experimenter, author and theorist Wal Thornhill wrote in agreement with Birkeland's work:
"As shown in [Birkeland's] laboratory experiments, the inflowing [conventionally] electric current forms a plasma donut where the electrical energy is stored. It is that energy that drives the winds and lightning on Saturn...In fact, Saturn has two plasmoids. One is outside the rings, the other inside the rings. Discharges to Saturn must cross the rings."
Rather than relying on the gravity-only model of the solar system and its insistence that Saturn's rings can only be created, held and shaped by the activity of "shepherd moons" and angular momentum, we should look to a force that is orders of magnitude more powerful: electricity.
If you want on or off the Electric Universe Ping List, Freepmail me.
But what do I know.
Would this qualify as kinky?
That doesn’t look like Ray Davies in that picture.
Squint.
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No, it’s all Bush’s fault! It’s global warming causing the kinks! I can hear obwankenobe, “the farce is strong with this one...”
It’s a gas ping!
Are these rings singing...LOLA?
Countdown to Richard Hoagland’s claiming a link to Hyperdimensional Physics....
At least they weren’t on Uranus.
you really got me
No. Magnetism works over extended distances, electricity is basically gone almost immediately.
Not if there is a conductive medium... and plasmas are conductive.
Maybe not "Lola"... but apparently the theme from "Forbidden Planet"...
All you will get from electric is dipoles, while magnetism will project all the way out to interstellar space.
One interesting thing I observe... there is a haze or glow below the ring on the left side
of the discontinuity or kink... and the haze or glow is above the ring on the right side.
It is almost as if the charge of the ring had changed from one side to the other
with the change taking place at the chaotic area.
Magnetism and electricism are two faces of the same thing. Magnetic is rotary, electric is translational. Photons are the two phenomena changing back and forth a few brazillion times a second. It’s hard to say which is doing this since they are both present, but electric forces cancel and drop off right away while the magnetic forces go on and on. The electric field in space is next to nothing so charged particles can fly from the sun to earth at their chosen speed without being accelerated or decelerated; the path of the charged particles is forced in directions, but this is magnetism or rotation.
I disagree.
And what creates magnetic fields? Electrons in motion.
... but they also form into Field Aligned Birkeland Currents...
A Birkeland current generally refers to any electric current in a space plasma, but more specifically when charged particles in the current follow magnetic field lines (hence, Birkeland currents are also known as field-aligned currents). They are caused by the movement of a plasma perpendicular to a magnetic field. Birkeland currents often show filamentary, or twisted "rope-like" magnetic structure...For examples of intersteller Birkeland currents, check out Herbig-Haro objects... some of the strangest astronomical objects ever seen....Birkeland currents can carry about 1 million amperes.[2] They can heat up the upper atmosphere which results in increased drag on low-altitude satellites.
Birkeland currents can also be created in the laboratory with multi-terawatt pulsed power generators. The resulting cross-section pattern indicates a hollow beam of electron in the form of a circle of vortices, a formation called the diocotron instability[3] (similar, but different to the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability), that subsequently leads to filamentation. Such vortices can be seen in aurora as "auroral curls".[4]
Birkeland currents are also one of a class of plasma phenonena called a z-pinch, so named because the azimuthal magnetic fields produced by the current pinches the current into a filamentary cable. This can also twist, producing a helical pinch that spirals like a twisted or braided rope, and this most closely corresponds to a Birkeland current. Pairs of parallel Birkeland currents can also interact; parallel Birkeland currents moving in the same direction will attract with an electromagnetic force inversely proportional to their distance apart (Note that the electromagnetic force between the individual particles is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, just like the gravitational force); parallel Birkeland currents moving in opposite directions will repel with an electromagnetic force inversely proportional to their distance apart. There is also a short-range circular component to the force between two Birkeland currents that is opposite to the longer-range parallel forces.[5]
Electrons moving along a Birkeland current may be accelerated by a plasma double layer. If the resulting electrons approach relativistic velocities (ie. the speed of light) they may subsequently produce a Bennett pinch, which in a magnetic field will spiral and emit synchrotron radiation that includes radio, optical (ie. light), x-rays, and gamma rays.
The only known force that can prevent a stream of gas from rapidly dispersing in the vacuum of space is magnetism, and only electric currents can generate a magnetic field. Yet here we have a gas remaining collimated over light years of distance... ergo, there must be a magnetic force keeping it constrained... and to create the magnetic force there must be an electrical current flowing... over vast interstellar distances.
Birkeland Currents can be replicated in the laboratory and result in some very interesting structures that are seen duplicated in space in an extreme macro sense.
That's a magnetized ball, acting as a highly electrically charged cathode. Look familiar?
Here's another example of what can be seen in the laboratory and a corresponding example in the macro cosmos.
"To see the connection between plasma experiments and plasma formations in space, it is essential to understand the scalability of plasma phenomena. Under similar conditions, plasma discharge will produce the same formations irrespective of the size of the event. The same basic patterns will be seen at laboratory, planetary, stellar, and galactic levels. Duration is proportional to size as well. A spark that lasts for microseconds in the laboratory may continue for years at planetary or stellar scales, or for millions of years at galactic or intergalactic scales."
Kristian Birkeland was nominated no less than 7 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics. It was he who discovered and defined the Solar Wind
"It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds." — Kristian Birkeland
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