Posted on 05/03/2003 12:33:42 AM PDT by Swordmaker
STARS ESCAPE FROM ASTRONOMICAL ZOO
Don Scott
The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) site has run several discussions of the "variable star" V838 Monocerotis. Today they have another one.
Astronomy Picture of the Day - V838 Monocerotis
but also see
Astronomy Picture of the Day - V838 Light Echo: The Movie
They include comments like, "V838 Mon may be a totally new addition to the astronomical zoo."
I object to this "new" characterization. This zoo animal disproves standard fusion models. In fact this star (together with several others) simply demonstrates stellar evolution wholly NOT in keeping with thermonuclear stellar theory. To paraphrase my web page:
FG Sagittae breaks all the rules of accepted stellar evolution. FG Sagittae has changed from blue to yellow since 1955!
V605 Aquilae: Examination of old images and spectrograms reveal that V 605 Aquilae, studied by Knut Lundmark in the 1920's was a similar sort of beast,...
V4334 Sagittarii is better known as Sakurai's object, for its 1994 discoverer. It, too, changed both spectral type and surface composition very rapidly, and is now hydrogen-poor and carbon-rich, and well on its way to becoming the century's third new R CrB star.
So now there are at least four prime examples of stars that do not evolve according to the accepted thermonuclear model of how stars are powered. THESE CHANGES HAVE ALL BEEN OBSERVED DURING THE LAST FEW YEARS. These are stars that falsify the conventional understanding of stellar life cycles. All of them act in a manner predicted by the Electric Star hypothesis.
If we trust ancient observers of the sky (our group is based on doing exactly that, is it not?), then there are three additional stars that have changed ("evolved") during the last couple of millennia.
Sirius is a main sequence, brilliant white A-type star. The ancients (among them: Cicero, Horace, Ptolemy, and Seneca) called it red or "coppery" in color. Seneca, in the days of Nero, called it "redder than Mars", whereas he described Jupiter as "not at all red."
Castor is designated as the alpha star in the constellation of Gemini, but it is not as brilliant as the beta star, Pollux. Stars in constellations are always named alpha, beta, gamma, etc., in decreasing order of apparent brilliance. Castor is the 23rd brightest star in the sky while Pollux is the 17th brightest. It has been suggested therefore that since the time of the ancients, Castor has lost luminosity.
Capella was described as being a "red star" (we would call it M-type) by several ancient and medieval writers including Ptolemy and Riccioli. It has now been confirmed to be a binary - one G-type and one F-type. Not M-type.
In the Electric Star version of "stellar evolution" things can happen quickly. If the fusion model were correct, it would take hundreds of thousands of years for a star to change from one place in the HR diagram to another. It would not be observed within a "human lifetime", or have been observed over an astronomically relatively short period of a mere, say, 2000 years.
It didn't take FG Sagittae hundreds of thousands of years to "run down." The star V838 Monocerotis has moved half way across the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram in a few months. Migrating across the HR diagram can happen very rapidly - and apparently does! How many such counter-examples does it take for astrophysicists to realize their stellar fusion theory has been falsified?
Don Scott
The anomalies cited in the article have not been demonstrated to be in contradiction to the standard stellar model. We may or may not be able to account for specific behaviors of specific stars (I don't know about these phenomena in particular), but that doesn't refute the theory. It's incumbent upon the "electric universe" people to prove that the current models are inconsistent with the phenomena. Simply saying, "I don't know how you get from A to B" doesn't prove that there is no path from A to B.
We similarly can't derive tornadoes or hurricanes from molecular collisions, let far alone predict them, but the fact that these phenomena occur doesn't serve as a refutation of the notion that the atmosphere is composed of molecules.
Good question; I don't know. Perhaps it's from the shape of the solar corona, or maybe it's a neutrino equivalent of "zodiacal light".
All subatomic particles behave as both waves and particles. That alone doesn't explain why the flavors will oscillate back and forth.
The crucial fact is that there is a set of orthogonal flavor states, and a set of orthogonal mass states, but that these two sets of basis vectors don't exactly line up. If a given neutrino starts out as a pure electron neutrino, for example, it will be a superposition (a mixture) of three different mass states. The quantum wavefunctions of these different mass states, being forced to move at the same velocity, will therefore have different frequencies, and these frequencies will "beat" against each other. The beat frequency is the oscillation frequency between the flavor states.
In order to know what the flavor oscillation frequencies are, you have to know the neutrino masses (or rather, the differences in the squares of the masses). Since we don't know the masses, we have to measure the oscillation lengths as a function of energy. The next generation of neutrino experiments (NuMI, MINOS, MiniBOONE, etc.) is designed to do just that.
Interesting, but is there neutrino production in the corona? And I would not expect neutrinos to interact with much of anything in the volume portrayed.
This is baffling. Is he claiming neutron stars and black holes don't exist? And how are his "lightning bolts" generated?
As I understand it, standard astronomical theories do not allow for that, pure and simple. Something's wrong with the observation or with the theories, one way or another.
I'm just guessing. The corona is extremely hot; if it's hot enough, there would be.
And I would not expect neutrinos to interact with much of anything in the volume portrayed.
They wouldn't, but the rate wouldn't be zero, as the sun is an extremely bright source of neutrinos. But you're right; any such effect would be swamped by the neutrinos from the Milky Way galaxy, as is obvious from the fact that the galaxy is so much brighter than the zodiacal glow. Perhaps the galaxy is what we are seeing.
Another possibility is that the elongated background is due to neutrinos associated with cosmic ray showers, that just happen to have the right energy. The non-isotropic distribution could be due to detector effects (an up-down muon veto, for example) or to physics (Earth's magnetic field shielding against incident charged cosmics in the interesting energy range, but in a direction-dependent way.)
When I'm at the department on Monday I'll ask some of the SNO men. They'll know the obvious answer look at me as some kind of moron while answering, but I'll post it.
Yes.
Neutrino mass dictates the oscillation freq, and without knowing the mass we don't know the freq. So we measure the osc length (and energy?) to infer it?
Just so. We do have other handles on the neutrino mass, such as making precision recoil measurements in nuclear decays, but these are exquisitely difficult experiments. People are working on them, however.
Thanks, I appreciate your effort and the explanations you have given.
I thought, until I read this piece, that I knew something about electricity. This article makes me ask what the meaning of electricity is. I know I'll need to re-read it, but haven't we all along seen (what we have also assumed to be) "electrical" forces at significant work in the universe?
I've always assumed that the thermonuclear and the electric were joined at the hip.
I seek guidance...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.