Venus' Tail of the Unexpected

Thunderbolts.info ^ | 02/20/2008 | by Rens Van der Sluijs

[Swordmaker]

The ion tail of Venus. Credit: Jeff Hecht, New Scientist Magazine May 31, 1997.
 

Feb 20, 2008

Venus' Tail of the Unexpected

Ancient peoples report that the planet Venus once had visible "ropes" stretching out to the Earth. Could a plasma glow discharge have been the cause?

The "induced magnetotail" that points away from Venus in the direction of the earth is a teardrop-shaped plasma structure filled with “a lot of little stringy things” that was first detected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Orbiter in the late 1970s. In 1997, Europe’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Satellite showed that the tail stretched some 45,000,000 kilometres into space, more than 600 times as far as anyone had realized and almost far enough to “tickle” the earth when the two planets are in line with the sun.

“In this sense”, scientists write, “Venus can be likened to a comet, which has an induced magnetotail of similar origin.”

Intriguingly, as has been abundantly documented on this forum, human societies outside the mainstream of western science have long associated the morning or evening star with just such a conspicuous “rope” or “string”. Particularly explicit are some examples drawn from the near-contemporary cosmology of native Australian communities.

The Ringu-Ringu people of central Queensland, “call the star Venus mimungoona or big eye” and assert that “no water exists in the star, but there are ropes which hang from its surface to the earth, by means of which the dwellers visit our planet from time to time, and assuage their thirst.”

And Manoowa Wongupali, a spokesman of the Jumbapoingo people of Milingimbi, to the northeast of Darwin, gave an explanation of the rising of the morning star in which a string of feathers features prominently: “When the two spirits Naikala and Birrowarr want to speak with spirits in other countries, they throw the pul pul, the tuft of white feathers, which is the morning star, into the sky and, when it is daylight, they pull the morning star, on the end of its string, down again to Buralku, the island of the spirits of the dead. The morning star on the end of its string lies coiled up in the dilly bag of one old man spirit. This dilly bag, called Battee, is the mother of the morning star. It is the womb. The tuft of white feathers, the morning star, is the child looking out of the dilly bag. And the string, coiled in the dilly bag, is the cord by which the child is joined to its mother.”

It goes without saying that “traditional” societies can only have learned about Venus’ plasma tail if the latter has at one time been visible to the unaided human eye. Certainly, the modern scientific understanding of the tail allows for the possibility that it plasma discharged, attaining a visible glow mode, at a time when the sun produced an extremely enhanced outflow of ions.

[Swordmaker]

What do you know... Venus still has a cometary tail... a 45 million Kilometer tail... PING!

If you want on or off the Electric Universe Ping List, Freepmail me.

[muawiyah]

Of course it has a "tail" ~ why else would it be "the goddess of love".

Now, as far as that being a "cometary tail", that's not exactly what the article stated. It's just that comets have such tails, Venus has a tail, other things have tails ~ e.g. a pet dog, wild cattle, kitty cats ~ but they remain different. "Tails" are quite secondary to the primary nature of the object to which they are attached.

[NonValueAdded]

Men are from Mars. You have to go to Venus for the tail.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Swordmaker.

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[BenLurkin]

Was Venus ejected from the Great Red Spot on Jupiter?

[Judith Anne]

Oh, I keep thinking of Velikovsky, here, and his contention that Venus was a comet that thoroughly disrupted the earth when it joined the solar system...

This tail business actually makes sense.

[SunkenCiv]

New Molecule Found In Comet May Unlock Solar System Origins
Space.com
Oct 15 1999 12:46:25 ET

The discovery of nitrogen sulfide (NS), a molecule known to exist within dense interstellar clouds, but previously unseen in a comet, may offer new clues to the origin of the solar system... The compound is the only known molecule in comets that contains both nitrogen and sulfur. The molecule is a "radical," which means that chemically, it is highly reactive... The discovery raises the question of whether the NS in comet Hale-Bopp (pictured here in a timed exposure with the moon) has existed since the start of the solar system, or if it was produced as a result of other compounds in the comet breaking apart... The way in which the abundance of NS varies in the comet's atmosphere -- or coma -- would indicate whether the molecule is the result of other compounds breaking apart due to the effect of sunlight, or whether it was produced by chemical reactions. To make such a determination, the NS molecule must be found in other comets.

(from a previously unused file on the hard drive)

[SunkenCiv]

Sodium Tail

On 1997 April 16, astronomers at the La Palma Observatory used a dedicated comet camera, CoCAM, to discover a previously unobserved type of cometary tail, the sodium tail, visible here as the straight line from bottom right to top left, consisting of neutral atoms.

Sodium gas trail discovered behind the Hale-Bopp comet
Update 4/20/97

Astronomers say the have found a third tail trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet - a thin straight jet of sodium gas unlike any other seen before, The Boston Globe reported yesterday. The discovery was made Friday by a team of astronomers at the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes in the Canary Islands. The scientists were at a loss to explain how the sodium tail was created. The astronomers used a filter over a telescope that allowed them to detect the light given off by sodium gas, the same yellow glow seen in ordinary sodium-vapor street lamps. Astronomers have long known that comets have two types of tails - one made of dust and the other of electrically charged gas called plasma. They have also known that comets contain sodium, but had never seen it before in the form of a tail.

[SunkenCiv]

Carbon clue implies comets orbit other stars
by Maggie McKee
15:15 12 December 03

Carbon ions have been seen for the first time in a comet's tail by US scientists. The finding suggests that comets, so far seen only in our own Solar System, might well orbit other stars. This conclusion stems from the fact that similar charged particles have been measured in the light from a nearby star, Beta Pictoris, which is surrounded by a dusty disk... The new discovery represents the first strong evidence that dust contributes to a comet's plasma tail, rather than only evaporating ices. Comet Kudo-Fujikawa was discovered in December 2002 and is thought to orbit the Sun once every 50,000 to 100,000 years... The comet passed five times closer to the Sun than the Earth does, experiencing 25 times the radiation. A spectrometer on SOHO allowed the team to deduce which ions were present in the comet... The tail contained about 700 million kilograms of carbon ions. The sheer mass of carbon ions - equivalent to 25 per cent of the comet's water - took the researchers by surprise. It meant the source of the ions could not be the usual suspect, carbon monoxide ice, as this made up less than 10 per cent of the comet relative to water... Some scientists have suggested that the chemical building blocks of life may have arrived on Earth on impacting comets. Povich says their study does not directly address that question, but adds "it is reassuring to see these materials reappearing".

[SunkenCiv]

Discovery of Vast Tail on Dying Star Promises Clues to Solar Birth
The Washington Post via Drudge Report | August 16, 2007 | Marc Kaufman
Posted on 08/15/2007 10:42:32 PM EDT by RDTF
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1881836/posts

[SunkenCiv]

Physics News
Phillip F. Schew
November 27, 1990

A sodium nebula around Jupiter may be the largest object ever recorded on film. A group of astronomers at Boston University, working at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, have detected a neutral cloud of sodium out to distances beyond 400 Jovian radii. The Boston astronomers believe that the shape of the nebula will provide information about Jupiter's magnetosphere and that their technique of measuring non-spherical neutral clouds may be applicable to the study of other planetary magnetospheres.

Physics News
Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
November 9, 1999

Astronomers have previously known of a sodium cloud which precedes the moon Io in its orbit around Jupiter. The cloud is believed to arise from slow escape of sodium from Io. Now the Galileo spacecraft is providing details of another sodium feature at Io, more of a fast-escaping spray or jet, thought to come about when Io plows through Jupiter's potent magnetic field, a process which induces mega-amp currents through Io's atmosphere... New pictures, reported by scientists at the University of Colorado... and Boston University (Jody Wilson), localize the source of the sodium to a region smaller than Io's diameter, suggesting that Io's atmosphere might not be global; that is, the atmosphere might be patchy and not extend all the way to the poles.

[SunkenCiv]

Joint News Release
Boston University
Center for Space Physics
and American Geophysical Union
1 June 1999

Boston University astronomers announced today the discovery of an enormous tail of sodium gas stretching to great distances from the moon. The observations were made at the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas, on nights following the Leonid meteor shower of November 1998. The tail of sodium gas was seen to distances of at least 500,000 miles from the moon, changing its appearance over three consecutive nights... Ten years ago, groundbased telescopes revealed that sodium gas (Na) was in the lunar atmosphere, an element that can be used to trace the shape and behavior of such a thin atmosphere... The BU team considered several theories that could explain these unusual features, ruling out a comet, the impact of Leonid meteors upon dust in the solar system, and even possible instrumentation problems... [T]he August observations without meteors and the November observations with meteors imply that the daily flux of micrometeors that strikes the moon's surface creates an extended tail at all times; it was just so enhanced during the strong Leonid storm that it was observed rather easily.

[SunkenCiv]

[Swordmaker]

Science : Planet's tail of the unexpected

31 May 1997

From New Scientist Print Edition.

by Jeff Hecht

The giant ion tail of Venus.

ONE of our neighbouring planets can still pack a few surprises, it seems. Using satellite data, an international team of researchers has found that Venus sports a giant, ion-packed tail that stretches almost far enough to tickle the Earth when the two planets are in line with the Sun.

"I didn't expect to find it," says team member Marcia Neugebauer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It's a really strong signal, and there's no doubt it's real."

NASA's Pioneer Venus Orbiter first found the tail in the late 1970s. Around 70 000 kilometres from the planet, the spacecraft detected bursts of hot, energetic ions, or plasma. The tail exists because ions in Venus's upper atmosphere are bombarded by the solar wind, a stream of plasma that blows out from the Sun.

But now Europe's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a project partly sponsored by NASA, has shown that the tail stretches some 45 million kilometres into space, more than 600 times as far as anyone realised. This satellite, which sits about 1.5 million kilometres away from the Earth, passed through the tail last July, when it was roughly in line with Venus and the Sun.

Over a period of five hours, SOHO detected three unexpected bursts of between 35 and 60 oxygen and carbon ions. Each burst lasted less than 45 seconds. In the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters (vol 24, p 1163), the team concludes that the satellite may have passed through three separate streams in the ion tail. Alternatively, it may have been a single filament that was "flapping" in the solar wind. "We don't know if we saw the same ray three times, or three different ones," Neugebauer says.

Neugebauer suspects the tail is "a lot of little stringy things" like those of some comets, which can have several ion tails. If so, says Neugebauer, "the theorists are going to have fun trying to explain why they're as narrow as we saw them". Standard physics says that narrow plasma streams are unstable and should dissipate fast. No one can yet explain how they hold together over tens of millions of kilometres.

The Earth and Jupiter are well shielded from the solar wind because they have magnetics fields, which deflect the ions. But because Venus has no magnetic field, the solar wind may have stripped away a significant amount of the ions in the planet's upper atmosphere over its lifetime of about 4.5 billion years. Janet Luhmann of the University of California at Berkeley says that this effect would have been strongest early in the life of the Solar System, when the Sun was more active. "It's likely the escape rate was much higher," she says.

Scientists believe that interactions between sunlight and the surface of Venus were most important in shaping the composition of the planet's corrosive atmosphere, which is laden with sulphuric acid. Luhmann now speculates that the ion loss may also have played a role.

[mozarky2]

I think Venus was ejected from Uranus...

..I apologize for that...really...

[muawiyah]

Makes more sense to figure out why Venus has no carbonate shell around it, like Earth.

My own private thesis is that it was mined early in the history of the Solar System as a source of carbonates, phosphates and sulfides for use by a now distant spacefaring civilization.

They used Venus' moon (now the planet Mercury) as a source of orbital energy to catapult the "goodies" out to the vicinity of Venus. Eventually Mercury lost so much energy it dropped into an orbit closer to the Sun and was of no more use.

Then they turned to Earth (or maybe did it at the same time), and used the Moon. It lost energy and receded from the Earth.

The space elevator systems used by the miners were built from local materials, e.g. hydrocarbons from Saturn's moon Titan. Billions of years after they were abandoned they finally fell to Earth along the Equator or evaporated into Venus' atmosphere.

The "sling shot" devices on both Mercury and the Moon rested on a pivot point constructed at what were, at the time, the Southernmost pole of each body. Mercury has "tilted" so the pivot point has moved from that position. Earth's Moon hasn't budged a bit and the hole for the pivot is right there at the Southpole ~ it's the deepest crater in the Solar System and may well have some sort of semi-solid lubricant left at the bottom.

The hydrocarbon space elevators on Earth fell to the location of the Equator about 600,000,000 years ago and today make up serious hydrocarbon deposits ~ some shale deposits involve secondary deposition of earlier liquid oil of course.

Whereas there's absolutely no evidence at all for Venus having popped out of Jupiter, there is at least the pivot point on Mercury (at http://a52.g.akamaitech.net/f/52/827/1d/www.space.com/images/080130-mercury-spider-02.jpg ) and the pivot point on the Moon (at http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:3a3hVF4KrMrPOM:http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov ) to consider.

If Velikovsky had the sort of photographic material we have today he wouldn't have made that mistake with Venus Fur Shur.

[onedoug]

</sarc> off, eh?

[BenLurkin]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=venus+ejected+jupiter+red+spot+velikovsky&spell=1

[zeugma]

ONE of our neighbouring planets can still pack a few surprises, it seems.

I would like to point out that it seems to me that every where you turn in the solar system you find "surprises". For as long as I can remember, every time a spacecraft made an initial pass of a body, or we get significantly better telemetry from a probe than we'd had before, they find new and wonderful things that no one had expected. I'm amazed that scientists speak with the kind of certainty they do when speaking of what we actually know about space and our own little solar system considering they don't expect a heck of a lot what they find.