Tom Van Flandern: Was the planet Mercury once a moon of Venus?

This is an essay written some years ago by the late Tom Van Flandern  which was included in his book ‘Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets’. Tom, who worked for many years at the U.S. Naval Observatory, was an out of the box thinker who covered a wide range of astronomical topics, many of them well outside the mainstream. His methodology was a bit similar to my old dad’s approach to cryptic crosswords. “The clue doesn’t give you the answer, but it helps confirm you got the right answer once you’ve got it”. Leif Svalgaard says he was a crank, which in my view means he’s well worth a read. I think this article, tied in with his other solar system formation concepts, deserves to be republished for the assessment and re-appraisal of the talkshop cognoscenti and the interested visitors here.

Let us examine in detail what the consequences would be of assuming that Mercury originated as a satellite of Venus. If that were so, we might presume that Mercury formed in close orbit about Venus, perhaps by fission^a. But Mercury is four and a half times more massive than the Moon. So the interchange of energy through tidal friction between Venus and Mercury would have been enormous. Mercury’s original spin would have been halted fairly rapidly by Venus, leaving Mercury spinning once per revolution around Venus, always keeping the same face toward Venus, as for our Moon.

Gabfest: Putting down the heretics Soon, Balliunas, Shaviv, Veizer

all.7z 1061565012

cc: ‘The Team’
date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 11:21:57 -0400
from: Gabi Hegerl
subject: Re: POLL ON SOON-BALIUNAS
to: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@virginia.edu>, Tom Crowley

I have seen Balliunas give a talk quite a long while ago, unfortunately, I

cannot recall what the meeting was, it was some kind of global change meeting,

more than 5 years ago.

I do recall that I was thoroughly unimpressed though. There was not much real

exchange between her and the audience. I remember that Jerry North was there

also, because we exchanged amazement in differences in style of approach between the
detection side of work he and I presented, and her – well lets say

more-qualitative style…

Gabi

At 11:07 AM -0400 8/12/03, Michael E. Mann wrote:

Thanks Tom,
The impact ratings you provided seem to be on a different scale from the ones I’ve seen,
but the relative magnitudes and ordering appear about right (in the ratings I’ve seen,
CR comes in at 0.4!).

NASA: Solar Wind Energy Source Discovered

Hat tip to Paul Vaughan [and A C Osborn on comments], who spotted this interesting new article at NASA’s website:

March 8, 2013: Using data from an aging NASA spacecraft, researchers have found signs of an energy source in the solar wind that has caught the attention of fusion researchers. NASA will be able to test the theory later this decade when it sends a new probe into the sun for a closer look.

The discovery was made by a group of astronomers trying to solve a decades-old mystery: What heats and accelerates the solar wind?

The solar wind is a hot and fast flow of magnetized gas that streams away from the sun’s upper atmosphere.  It is made of hydrogen and helium ions with a sprinkling of heavier elements.  Researchers liken it to the steam from a pot of water boiling on a stove; the sun is literally boiling itself away.

“But,” says Adam Szabo of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “solar wind does something that steam in your kitchen never does.  As steam rises from a pot, it slows and cools.  As solar wind leaves the sun, it accelerates, tripling in speed as it passes through the corona. Furthermore, something inside the solar wind continues to add heat even as it blows into the cold of space.”

Finding that “something” has been a goal of researchers for decades.  In the 1970s and 80s, observations by two German/US Helios spacecraft set the stage for early theories, which usually included some mixture of plasma instabilities, magnetohydrodynamic waves, and turbulent heating.  Narrowing down the possibilities was a challenge. The answer, it turns out, has been hiding in a dataset from one of NASA’s oldest active spacecraft, a solar probe named Wind.

Nils-Axel Morner: Solar Wind, Earth’s Rotation and Changes in Terrestrial Climate

My thanks to Nils-Axel Morner for sending me a copy of his new paper ‘Solar Wind, Earth’s Rotation and Changes in Terrestrial Climate’ published yesterday in Physical Review & Research Inernational. This is a great paper, full of interest, drawing together disparate dynamic phenomena into a comprehensible whole. Niklas is fully up to date with the latest research from Nicola Scafetta and the talkshop, incorporating planetary motion into the scheme encompassing the wider ‘frame of reference’ in which terrestrial climate change occurs. This is what will enable the new climate science to move beyond the constricted and constipated thinking of the current climate science mainstream.

 

Ismael Bullialdus: Finder but not keeper of the Inverse Square Law of Gravitation

Looking for the origin of the idea that the Sun’s gravity diminishes as distance increases, I found this on Wikipedia:

Ismaël Boulliau
Astronomer
1605-1694

Ismaël Boulliau known as Bullialdus was a friend of Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens, Marin Mersenne, and Blaise Pascal, and an active supporter of Galileo Galilei and Nicolaus Copernicus. It is for his astronomical and mathematical works that he is best known. Chief among them is his Astronomia philolaica, (published 1645). In this work he strongly supported Kepler‘s hypothesis that the planets travel in elliptical orbits around the Sun, but argued against the physical theory the latter had proposed to explain them.^[1] In particular, he objected to Kepler’s proposal that the strength of the force exerted on the planets by the Sun decreases in inverse proportion to their distance from it. He argued that if such a force existed it would instead have to follow an inverse-square law:^[2]

As for the power by which the Sun seizes or holds the planets, and which, being corporeal, functions in the manner of hands, it is emitted in straight lines throughout the whole extent of the world, and like the species of the Sun, it turns with the body of the Sun; now, seeing that it is corporeal, it becomes weaker and attenuated at a greater distance or interval, and the ratio of its decrease in strength is the same as in the case of light, namely, the duplicate proportion, but inversely, of the distances that is, 1/d².^[3]

Brilliant deduction, but then he dropped the ball. Wiki continues:

Bias in solar activity, the combination of Hale, Wolf and Wolf-Gliessberg cycles.

Figure 1

Quite often integrating data is useful.

In an odd moment I trivially integrated one of the results from a recent blog post, a casual look at Hadcrut 4. This produces a strange and unexpected result, strange because the structure of the shape is highly complex, ambiguous even though it looks fairly trivial. (I might write on this complexity later)

The data used was published as spreadsheet two of Talkshop article Met Office Hadcrut 4: solar linkage (supplemented copy linked at the end of the current blog article)

NASA: Deciphering the Mysterious Math of the Solar Wind

From Science Daily:

A constant stream of particles and electromagnetic waves streams from the sun toward Earth, which is surrounded by a protective bubble called the magnetosphere. A scientist at NASA Goddard has recently devised, for the first time, a set of equations that can help describe waves in the solar wind known as Alfven waves. (Credit: European Space Agency)

Feb. 21, 2013 — Many areas of scientific research — Earth’s weather, ocean currents, the outpouring of magnetic energy from the sun — require mapping out the large scale features of a complex system and its intricate details simultaneously.

Describing such systems accurately, relies on numerous kinds of input, beginning with observations of the system, incorporating mathematical equations to approximate those observations, running computer simulations to attempt to replicate observations, and cycling back through all the steps to refine and improve the models until they jibe with what’s seen. Ultimately, the models successfully help scientists describe, and even predict, how the system works.

Understanding the sun and how the material and energy it sends out affects the solar system is crucial, since it creates a dynamic space weather system that can disrupt human technology in space such as communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites.

Nicola Scafetta and Richard C Willson: Planetary harmonics in the historical Hungarian aurora record (1523–1960)

Congratulations! to Nicola Scafetta and Richard C Willson on the publication of their new paper: Planetary harmonics in the historical Hungarian aurora record (1523–1960). This is another excellent paper, published in Planetary and Space Science. Grabbitquick before I take it offline. Scafetta always makes papers available later if you miss this one. The Hungarian record goes back to a very early date and this makes the paper especially interesting to those of us eager to see more validation of the solar planetary theory, which is rapidly becoming the best show in town for matching paleo records. Geoff Sharp will be particularly pleased to see the strength of these Uranus-Neptune synodic correlations with solar activity levels.

NASA Balloon Mission: Detects 50 Million Cosmic Rays over Antarctica

My thanks to contributor ‘Scute’ for this interesting news, just in:

NASA can’t get enough cosmic rays. (Copied RSS feed below). First it was ATTREX kicking off last month. And now the preliminary verdict is in from ballooning across Antarctica where they found “large numbers of cosmic rays”. All very welcome but why play it all down in AR5 chapter 7 while all this was going on behind the scenes?

Stunning big photo, click for full size image. Source: NASA

Feb. 4, 2013

RELEASE: 13-037

NASA’S SUPER-TIGER BALLOON BREAKS RECORDS WHILE COLLECTING DATA

WASHINGTON — A large NASA science balloon has broken two flight
duration records while flying over Antarctica carrying an instrument
that detected 50 million cosmic rays.

Tim Cullen: Planetary Rotation – Atmospheric Corotation

Tim Cullen continues his investigation of the secret life of the solar system, and makes a very interesting discovery. To find his previous articles, use this search.

Planetary Rotation – Atmospheric Corotation
Tim Cullen – MalagaBay – January 2013

Atmospheric Corotation is one of those “dark corners” of science where mainstream scientists “fear to tread”. Physics and the Earth sciences seem to [currently] avoid the subject “like the plague”.

Generally, atmospheric corotation is relegated to the fringes of Astronomy and Astrophysics:

Corotation – Joint rotation of the atmosphere and a planet.

http://www.spaceweather.eu/en/glossary

Atmospheric corotation is a very real, everyday phenomenon.

Atmospheric corotation is probably the most [unknowingly] talked about subject on Earth because local variations in atmospheric corotation drive weather systems around the globe.

The spheroid Earth rotates around its axis every day and this causes the surface of the Earth to rotate at a speed of 1,674.4 kilometres per hour at the equator.

However, we do not experience wind speeds of 1,674.4 kilometres per hour at the equator because the atmosphere of the Earth [basically] corotates with the planet.