Could you expand on that dismissal a little? If you could use your expertise to explain away the points raised in this short video
"The Electric Universe" particularly the points about electric comets.
I'll take a shot at it. I'm writing this as I watch (and pause) the video:
The narrator mentions the issue about the corona being hotter than the surface of the sun, and asking how that can happen if the sun is being powered by fusion at the core. He's got a point, but his conclusion is wrong. The corona is not heated by fusion at the core of the sun, or at least not directly. Some other mechanism must heat the corona.
But there are some rather critical points to keep in mind. Although the corona is fantastically high temperature, it's also almost transparent. This means that it loses heat
very slowly. So while we need some additional heating mechanism, the
power requirement for this heating mechanism are low, orders of magnitude below the total solar output. In fact, this is trivial to determine simply by the fact that the corona isn't nearly as bright as the photosphere, and can only be seen by eye when the photosphere is eclipsed, so it must be outputting far less energy.
Conclusion: we need a mechanism to transfer energy to the corona other than radiant heat from the photosphere. A model that only has fusion at the core of the sun creating radiant heat transfer won't accomplish that. But a model where fusion at the sun drives secondary processes, and those secondary processes create secondary heating of the corona, is not prohibited by this observation.
Sunspots:
He says that we can see further into the sun at sunspots, the interior of the sun is supposed to be hotter, and so sunspots should be hotter. This reasoning is seriously flawed.
Why are sunspots cooler? Because the plasma in them gets trapped by magnetic fields, so it can't convect as fast. Convective heating is a major component of heat transfer near the surface of the sun, so if you slow that down, you slow down the heating of plasma near the surface. It will still radiate heat away, but won't regain that heat as fast. So any plasma in the sunspot which can radiate into space will be colder than plasma not in the sun spot. And what plasma can we see? Why, plasma which can radiate into space.
So sunspots being cooler is exactly what we expect from the standard model. And regardless of that one might want to claim about the source of the sun's magnetic field, it's been observed. So the idea that sun spots are the result of magnetic fields isn't "warped", it's a very well-supported theory.
I skipped over much of the comet stuff, because it bores me to tears. But I will note this: comets make up an exceedingly small fraction of the mass of the solar system, and the universe. When trying to figure out what theories best describe the universe, should I start with one that explains what most of the matter is doing exceptionally well, but might have some problems with this little bit of matter on the side, or should I start with one that explains those little bits of matter, but fail spectacularly when trying to describe what's going on with most of the mass?
In other words, comets are a piss-poor way to try to figure out stellar physics or cosmology.
Then they move on to neutron stars, and simply declare without explanation that neutron stars are impossible. That doesn't cut it. Their reasoning is so absent I can't even criticize it, because there's nothing to criticize. And that's the problem.
Then they object to black holes. They complain that the jets shouldn't exist if light can't escape a black hole. But that's an incredibly ignorant assertion. Light can't escape from inside the event horizon of a black hole. But light, AND matter, can still escape from
outside the event horizon. And the accretion disk and jets all form outside the event horizon. Then they claim that the accretion disk is a hypothetical object. But it's not. Hell, Saturn has one. All the accretion disk is is a torus of matter orbiting the body. There's nothing abstract about it.
Then there's the whole redshift thing. Aarp's data is crap. He cherry picks examples of quasars in close angular proximity to galaxies, and claims that this means that they're also close in distance. But they aren't. And that picture they include with the "luminous bridge"? Absolute crap. Give me any two broadened signals with a bit of overlap, and an intensity map will make it look like there's a "bridge" between them.
Their bit on Birkeland is particularly amusing. Birkeland did a bunch of plasma experiments, including some where he tried to reproduce something equivalent to planetary rings. And he did get ring-shaped plasma glows around his sphere. But planetary rings aren't glowing plasma. They're made from solids. They don't glow. They're only visible through reflected light. On the far side of Saturn, they are dark, as the planet casts a clear shadow across them. Birkeland can be forgiven for this mistake given the limits of astronomy at the time, but the folks in this video can't be.
And then there's the whole HAARP causing earthquakes conspiracy. They note that HAARP can put "immense quantities of energy" into the ionosphere. I don't think they've got any idea of what "immense" actually entails, because the energies involved with HAARP aren't anywhere close to the energies involved in earthquakes.
I know the use of YouTube in this forum will be looked down on, but as a layman with very little time, I ask that you indulge me this once. I really think he puts across the argument very well.
It's a nice enough package, I'll agree with that, but the content is garbage.
I'd be very interested in a critical view without any ad-homs. Even if you just look at the electric comet points that start at 1min 9s