Posted on 12/05/2019 6:32:25 AM PST by BenLurkin
Outbursts of energetic particles that hurtle out from the sun and can disrupt space communications may be even more varied and numerous than previously thought, according to results from the closest-ever flyby of the sun.
The finding that these energetic particle events are more varied and numerous than previously known was one of several discoveries made by the instrument suite known as the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (ISOIS), a project led by Princeton University that involves multiple institutions as well as NASA.
ISOIS seeks to find out how the particles become so fast moving, and what is pushing them to accelerate.
Highly energetic particles can disrupt communications and global positioning systems (GPS) satellites. These streams of particles, made up primarily of protons, have two sources. The first is from outside our solar system, generated when exploding stars release streams of particles known as cosmic rays. The other is our sun. Both can damage the electrical systems of spacecraft and are forms of radiation that can harm astronauts' health.
These energetic particles fly much faster than the solar wind, which is the roughly million mile-per-hour flow of hot electrically charged gas that whips off the sun. If the solar wind were a stream, the energetic particles would be fish that leap out and jump ahead of the flow. The particles travel along pathways—called magnetic flux tubes—that extend from the corona out into the solar wind.
Due to their speed, the particles act as an early warning signal for space weather, said Jamey Szalay, an associate research scholar in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton who leads the data visualization efforts for ISOIS. "These particles are moving fast, so if there is a big solar storm on its way, these particles are the first indicators."
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Next they will tell us that peanut butter is sticky.
We ought to find out what great studies, if any, have been done investigating what direct affect these particles have on the atmosphere generally, on clouds specifically, and on atmospheric temperature.
*ping*
Interesting things still available to discover. Most of all one must ask the correct questions. Good work by the lab that sponsored this investigation. Now to digress...
How many know that a Muon is a charged particle very similar in properties to an electron, a particle often mentioned in passing upon introduction to electrical circuitry? The Muon cousin is a few hundred times more heavy than the more familiar electron, has a short lifetime of a mere fraction of a second, and presents the quandary of a missed opportunity for exploiting an energy source.
A Muon can cause nuclear fusion just by it’s introduction to Deuterium. It plays a substitution game within an atom of fusion fuel, taking the place of the more common electron. As it has more mass, the heavy Muon reduces the effective distance at which the positive charge of two fuel atoms would repel the other below a threshold distance. Under this close approach, the two atoms can coalesce and in turn give up a part of their combined energy to reach a new stable configuration.
For various reasons such as too short a lifetime, time wasted traveling from one atom to the next atom, a tendency to become unavailable immediately after promoting a fusion, it was not practical as a nuclear fusion catalyst. It was not economical to manufacture Muons relative to energy invested versus energy recovered from the fusion produced. That problem may now go away, given that a proposed new way of mass production of Muons is valid.
A well respected Norwegian researcher (in a dire health prompted retirement) has passed on his research as the basis of a catalyst of a pulsed fusion reaction. His research delved in to the formation of ordered clusters of atoms from both light hydrogen and deuterium under certain conditions. (Either to a point will work in a similar fashion, though with notable differences in final results.) A crude analogy would be to consider formation of a crystal from a bulk material, with the unusual property of it’s shrinking to microscopic dimensions upon formation.
The clusters have the property of very tight spacing of individual atoms, such that the material achieves a greatly enhanced density. It is asserted that particular sub-variants of the clusters can be stimulated by low average energy laser light pulses to become unstable, the result of which is a pocket of high electrical potential, which serves to accelerate the remnant particle debris into the surrounding undisturbed clusters. This is an electrically driven explosion at a very small scale.
The density increase (reduction in particle spacing) within the surrounding cluster material from the explosion, serves to promote certain (proton interaction?) processes, which have at points have been described as disintegration of protons in favor of production of Meson decay chains, which ultimately result in Muons. This release of fast charged particles exceeds the combined energy expended in generating the clusters and the laser trigger input.
This is the proposed route toward production of an economical catalyst to trigger a fusion pulse reaction. The catalyzed fusion reaction further serves to amplify by a factor of a hundred or more, the initial Muon catalyst energy.
https://www.guventures.com/news/2019/4/9/zqm6oyks4jnvobjy031hl4buzt2qfc
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15361055.2018.1546090
Thanks fieldmarshaldj.
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