Originally Posted by BeAChooser
Hence the fact that we measure a magnetic field around the sun might suggest the sun is charged. Right?
Wrong. It suggests local variations.
No, you are ASSUMING that. The observed magnetic fields and other phenomena could also be consistent with the model of the sun proposed by Alfven, the electric sun model or some combination of the two.
nor would a net charge contribute to the current configuration required to produce a dipole magnetic field, which is what the sun has.
Actually,
http://www.onr.navy.mil/Focus/spacesciences/research/sun.htm "The Earth has a simple magnetic field, called a dipole, with one north (positive) and one south (negative) magnetic pole, like a bar magnet. Magnetic field lines run from a dipole's north pole to its south pole.
The Sun, on the other hand, has a very complex magnetic field. During times of little sunspot activity, the Sun's magnetic field resembles the Earth's simple dipole. However, sunspot activity increases and decreases on an 11-year cycle. During times of great sunspot activity, the Sun's magnetic field lines get twisted and pulled in ways that cause regions of north and south polarity to appear far from the geographical poles of the star."
And this magnetic field ... how is it produced? By some unseen dynamo? That is what the mainstream says. Right? So I assume you believe that too. Perhaps that's true. But perhaps that's just another gnome. Because the dynamo theory so far does not explain a lot of phenomena and mainstream astrophysicists have had to invent bogus physics like "magnetic reconnection" and "tangled field lines" to explain observations like the sudden increase in temperature in the Corona.
And tell us ... if the dynamo theory is such a done deal, why have so many different dynamo models been offered over time? And despite the many proposed models, why are there still so many, many problems with matching observations?
http://soi.stanford.edu/results/agu96.html "Pinning Down the Position of the Solar Dynamo ... snip ... a team of Stanford scientists has narrowed the search for this region to a layer 38,000 miles thick and centered at a depth of about 135,000 miles below the solar surface. ... snip ... "With these new data we can look forward to a rapid increase in our understanding of this key feature," said Philip H. Scherrer, the principal investigator of Stanford's Solar Oscillations Investigation team. ... snip ... Dec. 17, 1996."
But more than a decade later, it clearly hasn't been pinned down, has it.
"The Current Status of Kinematic Solar Dynamo Models, Arnab Rai Choudhuri, J. Astrophys. Astr. (2000) 21, 373-377 ... snip ... We are, however,
still far from developing a model which can explain all the different aspects of observation in detail."
"Current status and future directions of large-scale solar dynamo models, M. Dikpati, ... snip ... But
there is no unified solar dynamo model yet to explain hierarchical magnetic field patterns."
"Solar dynamo; Understanding the solar dynamo, Paul Bushby and Joanne Mason, 2004, ... snip ... the solar dynamo model that we have now bears little resemblance to the model studied just 30 years ago and, furthermore, it is likely to be modified in the near future. Solar dynamo theorists have learnt much over recent years, however
we are still far from a complete understanding of how the Sun generates its magnetic field."
http://www.cora.nwra.com/~werne/eos/text/dynamo.html "28-Nov-2000 ... snip ...
Many aspects concerning the solar dynamo are not well understood even today. Here are just a few problems that scientists are working on at the moment: 1 It is still not totally clear where the solar dynamo is located. Is it sitting in the convection zone or in the overshoot zone? 2 Does the alpha-effect work or does it not work. This is a very hotly debated question. 3 What causes the differential rotation of the Sun?"
And here is more uncertainty expressed by the mainstream:
http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sun3mag.htm "We now know that sunspots are darker than their surroundings because they are moderately cooler, since their intense magnetic fields
somehow slow down the local flow of heat from the Sun's interior.
The process which causes this is still unclear."
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=14346 "June 4, 2004 ... snip ...
Scientists still do not understand how active regions are formed, why they vary with a roughly 11-year period, or how and when flares and mass ejections occur. ... snip ...
Scientists are uncertain of the origin of the small-scale magnetic structures on the Sun."
Maybe the reason they are having such trouble and have so many unanswered questions is that MHD (which they are trying to use to model the dynamo) does not model many very important phenomena related to plasmas. Alfven wrote "As neither double layer nor circuit can be derived from magnetofluid models of a plasma, such models are useless for treating energy transfer by means of double layers. They must be replaced by particle models and circuit theory." Likewise, they ignore Birkeland currents, another fundamental phenomena in plasmas.
Furthermore, MHD models of the sun depend on convection. But apparently there are problems in that modeling that are simply being ignored:
http://malvernmessages.free-forums.org/malvernmessages-about752.html "It is true that classical studies of convection in fluids can reproduce the structure of rising cells separated by descending flows said to be responsible for solar granularity. But assuming the validity of terrestrial laboratory physics under the conditions at the solar surface seems questionable, especially when no account is taken of the plasma's electrical nature. If such an assumption is granted, applying it then fails by its own criteria. A quantity known as the Reynolds Number, combining several physical parameters, exhibits a critical value beyond which ordered motion gives way to highly complex turbulence that precludes orderly flows. Analysis of data from the photosphere points to a Reynolds Number greater than critical by a factor of 100 billion. This discrepancy is not trivial. Similarly, the critical value of a quantity designated the Rayleigh Number, specifically devised as a criterion for the formation of convection cells, is exceeded by a factor of 100,000. ... snip ... It seems that the granulations can be explained by convection only by disregarding everything that is known about convection."
This is G o o g l e's cache of
http://www2.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/5/1 as retrieved on Dec 18, 2007 20:23:24 GMT. "The Australian Space Weather Agency ... snip ...
The bottom line is that at this stage in solar physics we do not really know what produces a flare nor what produces a CME. There are competing theories, but all tend to have deficiencies with respect to matching the observational evidence. We certainly believe that they all depend on the reconfiguration of magnetic fields as their primary energy source, but in the final analysis, we really only believe this because we can conceive of no other solar energy source of sufficient magnitude."
The only reason the mainstream can't conceive of another source is because it ignores what the Electric Universe community has been trying to point out to them for the last 30 years.
Let me give you an example:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20021030solar.html "A second CME, also seen with LASCO, erupted October 25 and vaguely resembles a corkscrew, with twisted lines bursting from the Sun. According to SOHO scientists, its unusual appearance is due to twisted solar magnetic fields, which steer the flow of the CME plasma. Part of the Sun’s interior magnetic field becomes twisted from activity deep inside the Sun. It is eventually ejected from the Sun following an explosive energy release process. Details regarding how the fields become twisted and the exact mechanisms that propel CMEs into space are the focus of intense research activity."
What they are witnessing are exploding double layers and birkeland currents (that twisted corkscrew shape is a dead giveaway) but since their motto is *anything but electricity*, they never even consider that possibility. Instead they theorize some gnome in the interior of the sun that twists the magnetic field.
Here is more nonsense from the mainstream:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3226844.stm "The sun is like a snake that sheds its skin," says Nat Gopalswamy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, author of a report in the Astrophysical Journal. "In this case, it's a magnetic skin. The process is long, drawn-out and it's pretty violent. More than a thousand coronal mass ejections, each carrying billions of tons of gas from the polar regions, are needed to clear the old magnetism away."
"Clear away the old magnetism"? ROTFLOL! Do these folks understand at all what produces magnetic fields.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm "Solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science & Technology Center (NSSTC) explains: "First, remember what sunspots are--tangled knots of magnetism generated by the sun's inner dynamo. A typical sunspot exists for just a few weeks. Then it decays, leaving behind a 'corpse' of weak magnetic fields." Enter the conveyor belt. "The top of the conveyor belt skims the surface of the sun, sweeping up the magnetic fields of old, dead sunspots. The 'corpses' are dragged down at the poles to a depth of 200,000 km where the sun's magnetic dynamo can amplify them. Once the corpses (magnetic knots) are reincarnated (amplified), they become buoyant and float back to the surface." Presto—new sunspots!"
Is that really the theory you believe in, Ziggurat? ROTFLOL!
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2000/sunmagfield.html "We now know that the Sun's magnetic field has a memory and returns to approximately the same configuration in each 11- year solar cycle," said Dr. Marcia Neugebauer, a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Current theories imply that the field is generated by random, churning motions within the Sun and should have no long- term memory. Despite this expectation, the underlying magnetic structure remains fixed at the same solar longitude." ... snip ... Fluids conducting electricity under the Sun's surface generate the magnetic field, Neugebauer explained, and the field's apparent memory is most likely caused by a structure and process occurring deeper inside the Sun than previously believed. "There may be something asymmetric about the Sun's interior, perhaps a deep-seated lump of old magnetic field," she said.
"lump of old magnetic field"? Do these *scientists* ever listen to themselves, Ziggurat? After 30 years astrophysicists still haven't learned Alfvén's lesson that it is not possible to "freeze" magnetic fields into a plasma.
And growing desperate with the same gnomes they use to try and make sense of observations attributed to black holes, they invent even wilder gnomes:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-03/ns-tce030806.php "Dark energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology. The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara, California, Chapline suggested that the objects that till now have been thought of as black holes could in fact be dead stars that form as a result of an obscure quantum phenomenon. These stars could explain both dark energy and dark matter. ... snip ... Black hole expert Marek Abramowicz at Gothenburg University in Sweden agrees that the idea of dark energy stars is worth pursuing. "We really don't have proof that black holes exist," he says.* "This is a very interesting alternative."
Dark Energy Stars indeed. And no proof black holes exist. Now that one I can certainly agree with.
Potential differences can exist in charge-free regions
Yes, but then you have to talk about electric fields, which curiously you almost never see astrophysicists or proponents of their theories doing.

Also, there can be no electric field in a charge-free region. And we know there are electric fields all over the sun and around it. Everywhere there is a magnetic field. Hence, there can be no charge-free regions in or around the sun. Therefore, I'm not sure what point you were trying to make.
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How do you know? You or anyone else ever been to the sun?
It's a plasma.
But magnetic fields can confine charged particles ... right?
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You assume they enter and exit the sun at the same location.
Considering that the field lines attracting electrons would be the same ones repelling protons, I think that's a damned safe assumption.
So why aren't these inflows colliding?
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=28996 "SOHO's latest surprise: gas near the Sun heading the wrong way, 20 Nov 2001,
Mysterious clouds of gas falling towards the Sun have been spotted with the ESA-NASA SOHO spacecraft. They go against the fast-moving streams of gas that pour out continuously into space, in the solar wind. ... snip ... About 8000 inflow events have now been logged - most of them since 1998 while the Sun has been at its most active, as judged by the high count of sunspots. The inflows can start at an altitude of up to 2700000 kilometres above the visible surface, a distance equal to twice the Sun's diameter. Here the accelerating solar wind, leaving the Sun, has reached a speed of about 120 kilometres per second. Fighting against it, the gas clouds travel in at 50-100 kilometres per second. Typically they appear to come to rest about 700000 kilometres out. "I was stunned when I saw the first movies showing these inflows," says Bernhard Fleck, ESA's project scientist for the space mission. "Before this discovery by SOHO no one had any idea that gas could travel the wrong way, and be pushed back towards the Sun."
Of course, what Fleck says isn't true at all. Electric Universe theorists had an idea.
Later the above source states "Although the gas feels a very strong pull from the Sun's gravity, this is not the decisive force acting on the inflows. The high rate at which they gather speed initially, and their eventual slowdown, suggest instead that they are firmly under the control of a magnetic force."
Gas?
Another gem from the source: "We are seeing something opposite to what we expected," says Sheeley. "Normally, when this happens, we initially doubt the observation - suspecting, for example, that the movie is running backwards. But when we confirm that the observation is really correct, we are forced to change our way of thinking."
Yeah, that sure is the way it works in astrophysics. (sarcasm)
Here's one of the videos of infalling material:
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=29023
And how do the mainstream scientists explain this?
http://www.onr.navy.mil/Focus/spacesciences/research/sun.htm "Naval Research: The Sun - Inflows ... snip ... If gravity were causing the inflows to fall, they would have sped up and traveled much faster-and they would not have stopped falling. ... snip ...
As material is sent out from the Sun, it carries with it a magnetic field. Large loops of magnetic field lines form, towering high above the Sun's surface. Scientists now believe that these lines sometimes cross, then snap to form new connections which collapse toward the Sun, carrying with them clouds of charged particles."
Material "carries" with it a magnetic field? Crossing magnetic field lines? Alfven is probably rolling over in his grave.
More from the above "The inflow regions seem to have staying power, and researchers have been able to follow them over the course of many months. Some of the inflows first appear on the left side of the Sun, then rotate out of view as the Sun turns. The inflows reappear two weeks later on the right side of the Sun, then pass out of view and reappear on the Sun's left side after two more weeks."
Any explanation, Ziggurat? Because this infalling material is now being ignored as with every observation the mainstream has trouble explaining. (Still waiting for your and the mainstream's explanation of comet observations, by the way.

)
If we know what the voltage of the sun is
But we don't. At best we can make an estimate. Because for the most part, NASA has ignored eveything but "magnetic fields".
And considering that positive charges coming in to the sun would require a current and produce a significant magnetic field which is not dipole, yes, we would notice.
Then isn't it curious that at solar max the field is not very "dipole" (see earlier citation).
We can SEE what the magnetic field of the sun is. You can see the basic shape with your naked eye if you ever watch an eclipse - just look at my avatar.
Then maybe your avatar should look like this:
http://www.esotericastrologer.org/EA Essays/EAessaysEG1_files/parker.gif
And maybe mine should be this:
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/graphics.simulations/cicumBgal2.jpg 
(that's a galactic magnetic field compared to Peratt's simulation results from interacting Birkeland currents)
My guess is you treated the voltage like it was 10x10^^10 instead of 10^^10, but I don't actually really care where you screwed up.
You are right. My mistake. I got sloppy when I read the original source. But regardless of the magnitude, it doesn't change the rest of what I noted. Surely you don't think the sun's charge is evenly distributed throughout the sun?
The numbers from the model you are advocating don't indicate "boiling". They indicate that the entire excess charge on the sun should explode off of it.
Like CME's do?
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Maybe you are wrong about your underlying assumptions concerning the distribution of that charge? For example, even Eddington proposed back in 1925 that the solar surface will be basically negative, the solar core positive.
That makes the problem worse, not better, because that would require an even greater charge confined to an even smaller space, producing far more outward force on that charge.
Not sure how you arrive at that conclusion.
And since plasmas conduct, what would keep that charge confined to the core?
So now you've decided to simply forget about magnetic fields and homopolar motors?
Through plasma, the electric forces seemingly cannot act.
Nope. You can't shield a net electric charge in a body by ANY means. It is not possible.
Fair enough. How do z-pinches form and override the repulsion of charges?
Oh, that's just too funny. You're trying to support the idea of a positively charged sun by refering to a paper claiming the sun has a negative net charge.
I don't know whether its a positive or a negative net charge and I'm not supporting one or the other at this point. There are different flavors of alternative (electric) sun models that theorize different mechanisms. I'm not trying to defend a specific one just illustrate that there are other ideas floating about that might explain some of the phenomena that right now have the mainstream community flummoxed. Like coronal temperatures and solar wind. Perhaps the sun does have fusion as the source of it's energy. But how can any reasonable model of the sun not include phenomena like double layers and Birkeland currents which we KNOW for a fact are naturally occurring in bodies of plasma? And I'll ask again ... how do you and the mainstream explain recent comet observations. The fact that NASA doesn't even mention the electric comet theory on their website despite the fact that it's theorists made a host of accurate predictions (where NASA's model completely failed) and have explained observations that NASA calls mysterious or surprises should tell you that my mindset is not the problem here.
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The issue of whether the sun is charged is by no means settled.
I wouldn't be surpised at all if the sun had a net charge. But you're not merely claiming it's got some net charge. You're claiming it's got such a big net charge that protons on the surface of the sun will feel orders of magnitude greater repulsive force than gravitational attraction.
Am I? How large is the repulsion from 8x10^8 coulombs spread over the surface area of the sun? The sun's diameter is 1.4x10^6 km or 1.4x10^9 meters. The surface area is PI d^2 = 6.2x10^18 m^2 . So the density is 1.3x10^-10 coulombs per m^2. Now wikipedia says that "if two point charges of +1 C are held one meter away from each other, the repulsive force they will feel is given by Coulomb's Law as 8.988×109 N. So with a density of 1.3x10^-10 C / m^2 assuming a grid of 8 such charges about one meter distant from a central charge suggests a repulsive force on the central charge of about 8*11.7x10^-1 N or 9.6 N on the central charge. Now how big is 10 N of force? Well, one Newton is the amount of force required to give a 1-kg mass an acceleration of 1 m/s^2. So 10 would give it an acceleration of 10 m/s^2 ... about the same as the acceleration of gravity on the surface of the earth. And what's the density of a meter of plasma in the top layer of the sun? Wikipedia indicates it has a density of about 1% of Earth's atmosphere at sea level. Dry air at sea level has a mass of about 1.3 kg/m3, so that means the density of a meter of plasma in the photosphere is about .01 kg. Thus, 10 N would accelerate it at 10*100 = 1000 m/s^2 ... 100 gs. But what is the force due to gravity on plasma in the top layer of the sun? Sources on the web say its 273.8 m/s^2 ... about 28 gs. But of course the rate at which the repulsive force will drop off is faster than the attractive gravity force will drop off. Hey ... that might explain why the surface of the sun appears to be boiling.
But not having it all figured out is rather different than having the fundamentals completely wrong, which is what you're claiming is the case.
Well let's talk about comets and see if the *fundamentals* are right.
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Well if that's true, then tell us what causes the solar wind to continue to accelerate out to the edge of the solar system? That should be a pretty simple question to answer. And electric star advocates have an answer. Do you?
I have a hypothesis. It's probably the same reason that the sun has only a small fraction of the angular momentum of the solar system.
Funny you should mention that. Turns out that plasma cosmologists like Alfven and Arrhenius had that figured out long before the mainstream science community came around to thinking in terms of magnetic fields (see
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u2528145p6253145/ ). And now most in the mainstream community don't even acknowledge that Alfven beat them to it.
Magnetic field lines sweep solar wind along with them as they rotate, and the farther out you go, the faster those field lines are rotating. That dumps angular momentum from the sun into the solar wind.
Somehow I suspect that if that logic were all there is to it, someone in the mainstream would have suggested it by now. Instead, I stlll read in mainstream literature that the continued acceleration of the solar wind is not well understood or at least not understood along those lines.
http://www.obspm.fr/actual/nouvelle/jun05/solarw.en.shtml "It has been more than four decades since the existence of the solar wind has been confirmed by the measurements of the Mariner 2 spacecraft. However, the solar wind's acceleration at supersonic speeds of about 700-800 km/s still remains unexplained. Parker's theory, based on thermal conduction, results into a very low speed; this led most of the scientists to look for an additional form of energy in order to explain this acceleration. A team of astronomers working at LESIA at the Paris Observatory has proposed an alternative theory based on the role of electrons that are not in thermodynamic equilibrium; these electrons would be the main driving force of the acceleration. This approach explains, for the first time, the fast solar wind without any assumption of additional energy."
But maybe you are right.
