Rotten Egg nebula

DYING STAR, OR SERIOUS ELECTRICAL FAULT?


Comment on NASA News of October 24, 1999.

Rotten Egg nebula

“The object shown in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a remarkable example of a star going through death throes just as it dramatically transforms itself from a normal red giant star into a planetary nebula. This process happens so quickly that such objects are quite rare, even though astronomers believe that most stars like the Sun will eventually go through such a phase.”

How can astronomers expect us to accept that this object is a dying star and predict the future of our Sun when it is reported later that the object poses “a serious challenge to astrophysical theorists”? Red giant stars themselves are not well understood.

The star is jetting gas and dust in two opposite directions at speeds up to 450,000 mph (700,000 km/h). This odd behaviour requires a total about face from the usual notion that the gravity of a star draws matter toward it. The speeding matter forms thin streamers on the right and a jet-like structure on the left. On the right, wisps of material in the jets appear to strike some dense blobs of gas.

“These Hubble Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer data pose a serious challenge to astrophysical theorists: How can a star generate such tightly collimated streams of gas and dust and accelerate them to such very high velocities?”

Ask the plasma physicists and electrical engineers! For decades some have been publishing details of how such features are formed. Electrical current naturally flows through space in “thin streamers”. It can accelerate matter over vast distances and form high velocity jets. It can light up “blobs” of gas far from any star. The late Dr. Charles Bruce of the Electrical Research Association in England and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society identified planetary nebulae as catastrophic stellar electric discharges as long ago as the 1960’s. His insight has been ignored.

The news report continues:

“William B. Latter from the California Institute of Technology and his group are using these data to obtain a better understanding of the detailed structure in the outflowing material, look for evidence for the origin of the thin streamers and jets, and learn more about the star itself. This information will give astronomers a more complete understanding of the final stages in the lives of stars like our Sun.”

On the contrary, experts demonstrate little grasp of how our own Sun works so any attempt at “a more complete understanding” of the fate of our Sun by looking at other stars will be faulty. And until the electrical engineers are called in there will be no fix for the fault.

At present we restrict ourselves to a simplistic century old model of stars as isolated balls of gas heated internally. However, we live in an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® so challenges to that model will prove increasingly serious, and in the end – fatal. It is the old model, not the star, that is dying.

Credit for the original report and image: NASA, ESA, William B. Latter (SIRTF Science Center/California Institute of Technology), John H. Bieging (University of Arizona), Casey Meakin (University of Arizona), A.G.G.M. Tielens (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute), Aditya Dayal (IPAC/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Joseph L. Hora (Center for Astrophysics), and Douglas M. Kelly (University of Arizona).

Image Credit: NASA, ESA and W B Latter (SIRTF Science Center/Caltech)

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