Funding appeal: Mike McCulloch needs your help to make interstellar travel possible.

Dr Mike McCulloch has been making truly remarkable discoveries about some of the mysteries of the cosmos over the last two decades. He has answers to fundamental questions such as ‘what causes the force that resists the change in speed and direction of any mass?’, ‘why do observations indicate that the inertial force varies with acceleration in the outer reaches of galaxies?’ and ‘how can we tap into the implicated energy fields to generate propellant-less thrust, and potentially generate electrical energy to power our homes, industries and vehicles?’. His published papers cover the first two of these questions, and touch on the third, although there’s plenty more to be teased out of the implications of his Quantised Inertia theory. The third question is the acid test.

Mike believes science has to have practical, applicable results, and for the last few years, he has been successfully generating those at his lab in Plymouth University, funded by DARPA. He has been getting measurable thrust from purely electrical input. Other collaborating labs have similar results. Exciting times indeed.

But like many scientists who threaten the established and accepted theory in their field, his work has been largely ignored because it falsifies mainstream ‘dark matter’ theory, or dismissed because it ‘must be impossible’. Although he has got measurable results, DARPA funding is ending, and he has no more teaching work to return to at Plymouth University. Mike wants, as far as possible, to keep the ongoing developments of QI publicly accessible, by crowdfunding. He needs our help to fund and equip a new lab, and set up a ‘Horizon Institute’, online initially, to enable the collaboration of academics and citizen scientists. Please read his message below, and then I’ll let you know how you can help.

Mysterious “Aurora Blobs” Explained

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Earth’s rings ‘are made of electricity–a donut-shaped circuit carrying millions of amps around our planet.’ But proton auroras are ‘still mysterious’.

Spaceweather.com

May 15, 2023: Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened after sunset on April 23, 2023. Everyone knew that a CME was coming; photographers were already outside waiting for auroras. But when the auroras appeared, they were very strange.

“I had never seen anything quite like it,” says Heiko Ulbricht of Saxony, Germany. “The auroras began to tear themselves apart, pulsating as they formed individual blobs that floated high in the sky.”

“It literally took my breath away,” he says. “My pulse was still racing hours later!” The same blobs were sighted in France and Poland, and in Denmark they were caught flashing like a disco strobe light.

Ordinary auroras don’t act like this.

Indeed, “these were not ordinary auroras,” confirms space physicist Toshi Nishimura of Boston University. “They are called ‘proton auroras,’ and they come from Earth’s ring current system.”

Most people don’t…

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Jupiter, Earth and Venus’ tropical alignments point to the mean solar cycle length

Precession of Earth’s axis [image credit: NASA, Mysid @ Wikipedia]

Introduction:
A number of researchers have hypothesised that the relative motions of Jupiter, Earth and Venus are connected to the length of solar cycles. In this post we will show that cyclic periods of 83 years (Gleissberg), 166 years (Landscheidt, Wilson), and 996 years (Eddy, Stefani et al) are found not just in the syzygies and synodic periods between these planets, but also in their heliocentric orientations with respect to a frame of reference rotating at the rate of Earth’s axial precession. This discovery has implications for our understanding of the forces driving that axial precession, and opens some new avenues for hypothesising about the links between planetary motion and solar activity variations.

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We propose that not only amplitude, but the mean period of the solar cycle itself derives from planetary influence in a specific manner.

Solar maximum may arrive later this year, say researchers

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

Nothing better than actual observations to make a forecast change. The sun may have put one over the pundits again.
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Solar Maximum is coming–maybe this year, says Spaceweather.com.

New research by a leading group of solar physicists predicts maximum sunspot activity in late 2023 or early 2024, a full year earlier than other forecasts.

“This is based on our work with the Termination Event,” explains Scott McIntosh, lead author of a paper describing the prediction, published in the January 2023 edition of Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

Severe Geomagnetic Storm: March 23-24, 2023

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A few days earlier a ‘colossal solar tornado‘ (14x Earth size) was observed over the Sun’s surface.

Spaceweather.com

March 24, 2023: Forecasters did not see this one coming. On March 23-24, auroras spread into the United States as far south as New Mexico (+32.8N) during a severe (category G4) geomagnetic storm–the most intense in nearly 6 years. The cause of the storm is still unclear; it may have been the ripple effect of a near-miss CME on March 23rd.

“Aurora pillars were visible from Shenandoah National Park in Central Virginia,” says Peter Forister, who photographed the light show at latitude +38.7 degrees:

“Beautiful red and green colors were visible to the naked eye around 11 pm local time,” he says. Other notable low-latitude sightings were made in Colorado (+38.7N), Missouri (+40.2N), Colorado again (+38.3N), Nebraska (+41N) and North Carolina (+36.2N). More than half of all US states were in range of the display.

Not every light in the sky was the aurora borealis, however. There was also

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‘Unexpected’ space traveler defies theories about origin of solar system

Solar system cartoon [NASA]

The theorised Oort Cloud in the outer solar system seems not to consist entirely of what was theorised to be there. This is described by one researcher as ‘a complete game changer’.
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Researchers from Western have shown that a fireball that originated at the edge of the solar system was likely made of rock, not ice, challenging long-held beliefs about how the solar system was formed, says Phys.org.

Just at the edge of our solar system and halfway to the nearest stars is a collection of icy objects sailing through space, known as the Oort Cloud.

Passing stars sometimes nudge these icy travelers towards the sun, and we see them as comets with long tails.

Scientists have yet to observe any objects in the Oort Cloud directly, but everything detected so far coming from its direction has been made of ice.

A New Paradigm for Solar Activity: The Extended Solar Cycle

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“It poses significant challenges to prevalent dynamo theories of the solar cycle.” — Indeed, but such theories were always speculative anyway.
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Spaceweather.com

Dec. 12, 2022: So you thought you knew the solar cycle? Think again. A new paper published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences confirms that there is more to solar activity than the well-known 11-year sunspot cycle. Data from Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) reveal two solar cycles happening at the same time, and neither is 11 years long.

“We call it ‘the Extended Solar Cycle,'” says lead author Scott McIntosh of NCAR. “There are two overlapping patterns of activity on the sun, each lasting about 17 years.”

Solar physicists have long suspected this might be true. References to “overlapping solar cycles” can be found in research literature as far back as 1903. A figure from the new Frontiers paper seems to clinch the case:

The top panel shows sunspot counts since 1976. The curve goes up and down every 11 years, which explains why everyone thinks the…

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Major Cryovolcanic Eruption on a Comet

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One of an average 7.3 outbursts a year according to Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/29P/Schwassmann%E2%80%93Wachmann

Spaceweather.com

Nov. 25, 2022: The British Astronomical Association (BAA) is reporting a new outburst of cryovolcanic comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann. On Nov. 22nd, the comet’s nucleus suddenly brightened by more than 4 magnitudes–a sign that a major eruption was underway. Cryomagmatic debris is now expanding in a shell shaped like Pac-Man:

Cai Stoddard-Jones took the picture on Nov. 23rd using the Faulkes Telescope North in Hawaii. At the time, the shell was already more than 100,000 km in diameter.

The Pac-Man shape of the ejecta shows that this is not a uniform global eruption. Instead, it is coming from one or more discrete sources on the comet’s surface.

This fits a leading model of the comet developed by Dr. Richard Miles of the British Astronomical Association. Miles believes that 29P is festooned with ice volcanoes. There is no lava. The “magma” is a cold mixture of liquid hydrocarbons (e.g., CH4, C2H4, C2H6 and…

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Miyake event radiation deluges still unexplained as solar flare theory questioned

When they say ‘sudden’ they don’t mean short-lived. The report notes that ‘some of the events, unlike the brief flashes we recognize as solar flares, lasted for one or two years’. Only a handful of these so-called ‘cosmic barrages’ have occurred in the last 9000 years or so, according to the data.
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One of the events was 80 times more powerful than the strongest solar flare ever recorded, says LiveScience.

A series of sudden and colossal spikes in radiation levels across Earth’s history could have come from a series of unknown, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cosmic events, a new study has revealed.

Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or so and are recorded as sudden increases in the radiocarbon levels of ancient tree rings.

The exact cause of the sudden deluges of radiation, which periodically transform an extra chunk of the atmosphere’s nitrogen into carbon sucked up by trees, remains unknown.

Powerful Gamma-Ray Burst Made Currents Flow in the Earth

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‘It came from a dusty galaxy 2.4 billion light years away’ – sounds like an old sci-fi movie!

Spaceweather.com

Oct. 17, 2022: Astronomers have never seen anything quite like it. On Oct. 9, 2022, Earth-orbiting satellites detected the strongest gamma-ray burst (GRB) in modern history: GRB221009A. How strong was it? It caused electrical currents to flow through the surface of our planet. Dr. Andrew Klekociuk in Tasmania recorded the effect using an Earth Probe Antenna:

Note: Data from STIX have been flipped (increasing counts go down) to ease comparison of the two waveforms. NWC is a VLF transmitter in Australia.

The blue curve is a signal from Klekociuk’s antenna, which was sensing VLF (very low frequency) currents in the soil at the time of the blast. The orange curve shows the gamma-ray burst recorded by the high-energy STIX telescope on Europe’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft, one of many spacecraft that detected the event. The waveforms are a nearly perfect match.

“I am a climate scientist at the…

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A New Form of Space Weather on Betelgeuse

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“We’re watching stellar evolution in real time.”

Spaceweather.com

August 12, 2022: You’ve heard of a CME, a “coronal mass ejection.” They happen all the time. A piece of the sun’s tenuous outer atmosphere (corona) blows off and sometimes hits Earth. Something far more terrible has happened to Betegeuse. The red giant star produced an SME, or “surface mass ejection.”

Above: An artist’s concept of an SME on Betelgeuse. Credit: Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)

Astronomers believe that in 2019 a colossal piece of Betelgeuse’s surface blew off the star. The mass of the SME was 400 billion times greater than a CME or several times the mass of Earth’s Moon. Data from multiple telescopes, especially Hubble, suggest that a convective plume more than a million miles across bubbled up from deep inside the star, producing shocks and pulsations that blasted a chunk off the surface.

“We’ve never before seen such a huge mass ejection from the surface of a…

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The Sun Is Being Weird. It Could Be Because We’re Looking at It All Wrong

Solar flare erupting from a sunspot [image credit: space.com]

Who knew!? – asks ScienceAlert. The article links to an interesting new paper on solar cycles, which makes some predictions for the current SC 25 (see section 3.2: Forecasting Using the Solar Unit Cycle). One of those is that it should end in October 2031 ± 9 months, and the authors go on to suggest forthcoming NASA and ESA missions make it probable that ‘Cycle 25 will be the last solar activity cycle that is not fully understood.’
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Something weird is going on with the Sun.

So far, almost every day in 2022 it has erupted in flares and coronal mass ejections, some of which were the most powerful eruptions our star is capable of.

By itself, an erupting Sun is not weird. It erupts regularly as it goes through periods of high and low activity, in cycles that last roughly 11 years.

The current activity is significantly higher than the official NASA and NOAA predictions for the current solar cycle, and solar activity has consistently exceeded predictions as far back as September 2020.

But a solar scientist will tell you that even this isn’t all that weird.

Reply to Eschenbach’s Meander Through Sun and Wind

Over at WUWT, Willis has been up to his usual trick of mangling data in a vain attempt to discredit scientists who find strong links between the Sun’s variation and Earth’s weather and climatic patterns. This time it’s Le Mouel et al who get the treatment in his ‘analysis’ of their 2010 paper “Solar forcing of the semi‐annual variation of length‐of‐day”

As usual, Willis gets things upside down and then sets up a straw-man argument. He asks: “So … is there a correlation between sunspots and zonal wind speeds?” The answer to which is no, and the paper’s authors never claimed there was. However, as Fig 1 of Le Mouel et al’s paper shows, there is a strong anti-correlation between solar variation and the semi-annual variation of Length of Day (LOD) which is itself well correlated with changes in zonal wind speeds. For obvious reasons, Willis doesn’t show his readers Fig 1, reproduced here for your academic study.

Figure 1. Long‐term variations in the amplitude a of the semiannual oscillation in lod (in blue). A 4‐yr centered sliding
window is used. (a) Comparison of the semiannual amplitude of lod with the sunspot number WN (red); WN is both
reversed in sign and offset by one year (see text). (b) Comparison of the detrended semiannual amplitude of lod (blue) with
the sunspot number WN (red); WN is reversed in sign and offset by one year. (c) Comparison of the semiannual amplitude
of lod (blue) with galactic cosmic ray flux GCR (red); GCR is neither reversed in sign nor offset (see text).

Orbital resonance and the celestial origins of Earth’s climatic changes – Why Phi?

A year after I wrote the original ‘Why Phi’ post explaining my discovery of the Fibonacci sequence links between solar system orbits and planetary synodic periods here at the Talkshop in 2013, my time and effort got diverted into politics. The majority of ongoing research into this important topic has been furthered by my co-blogger Stuart ‘Oldbrew’ Graham. Over the last eight years he has published many articles here using the ‘Why Phi’ tag looking at various subsystems of planetary and solar interaction periodicities, resonances, and their relationships with well known climatic periodicities such as the De Vries, Hallstatt, Hale and Jose cycles, as well as exoplanetary systems exhibiting the same Fibonacci-resonant arrangements.

Recently, Stuart contacted me with news of a major breakthrough in his investigations. In the space of a few hours spent making his calculator hot, major pieces of the giant jigsaw had all come together and brought ‘the big picture’ into focus. In fact, so much progress has been made that we’re not going to try to put it all into a single post. Instead, we’ll provide an overview here, and follow it up with further articles getting into greater detail.

A Volcanic Comet Blows its Top

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But what kind of volcanoes? One researcher has a theory.

Spaceweather.com

Oct. 14, 2021: So you think you know what a comet is? Think again. Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is challenging old ideas. Astronomers call it a comet, but, really, “giant space volcano” might be a better description. It’s a 60-km-wide ball of ice orbiting the Sun beyond Jupiter, and it appears to be one of the most volcanically active bodies in the entire Solar System.

Comet 29P just blew its top … again. In late September 2021, 29P erupted 4 times in quick succession, blowing shells of “cryomagma” into space. Arizona amateur astronomer Eliot Herman has been monitoring the debris:

“Initially it looked like a bright compact object,” says Herman. “Now the expanding cloud is 1.3 arcminutes wide (bigger than Jupiter) and sufficiently transparent for background stars to shine through.”

When this object was discovered in 1927, astronomers thought they had found a fairly run-of-the-mill comet, unusual mainly because it was trapped…

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‘Giant arc’ stretching 3.3 billion light-years across the cosmos shouldn’t exist

The Milky Way in the night sky over Black Rock Desert, Nevada [image credit: Steve Jurvetson / Wikipedia]

Not only that, but it’s likely ‘rotating on a scale never seen before’, says Phys.org. ‘How the angular momentum responsible for the rotation is generated in a cosmological context is one of the key unsolved problems of cosmology.’
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How big is too big? – asks Space.com.

A newly discovered crescent of galaxies spanning 3.3 billion light-years is among the largest known structures in the universe and challenges some of astronomers’ most basic assumptions about the cosmos.

The epic arrangement, called the Giant Arc, consists of galaxies, galactic clusters, and lots of gas and dust.

It is located 9.2 billion light-years away and stretches across roughly a 15th of the observable universe.

Einstein’s Eclipse

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Some real science to remember.

Spaceweather.com

March 22, 2021: On May 29, 1919, the Moon slid in front of the sun and forever altered our understanding of spacetime. It’s known as “Einstein’s Eclipse.” Using his newly-developed theory of relativity, the young German physicist predicted that the sun’s gravity should bend starlight–an effect which could only be seen during a total eclipse. More than 100 years later, Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador) and Miloslav Druckmüller (Brno University of Technology) have just released a stunning restoration of the photo that proved Einstein right:

The original picture was taken in May 1919 by astronomers Andrew Crommelin and Charles Rundle Davidson, who traveled from the Greenwich Observatory in London to the path of totality in Sobral, Brazil. They were part of a global expedition organized by Sir Arthur Eddington, who wanted to test Einstein’s strange ideas. Glass photographic plates from the expedition were typical of early 20th century astrophotography, colorless…

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Ned Nikolov: What Can NASA Planetary Data Tell Us about Drivers of Earth’s Climate?

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. Has written to me with news of the presentations he made at this years AMS meeting. It’s vital we get people to understand the implications of the discoveries he and Karl Zeller have made. With our western governments jumping aboard the ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘NetZero’ bandwagons, we will need to work hard to rise awareness of viable alternative hypotheses for ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ which better explain the phenomena we can measure around us. Ned and Karl’s work should be given proper attention, because it strives for universality and general application of physics solar system wide, rather then treating Earth as a ‘special case’.

Two studies presented at the American Meteorological Society’s 34^th Conference on Climate Variability and Change in January 2021 employed a novel approach to identify the forcing of Earth’s climate at various time scales. The new method, never attempted in climate science before, relies on the fundamental premise that the laws of nature are invariant across spacetime.

Solar Cycle 25 update: Sun takes a post-minimum nap.

Data courtesy of Solen.info

Back in November it looked like solar cycle 25 was finally getting underway, with daily sunspot numbers peaking up to 80, and the 30 day Wolf number climbing over 30 in early December. Since then though, the Sun has relapsed into a low activity state.

This won’t come as any surprise to Talkshop followers, we’ve been saying that cycle 25 would be very low for most of the last decade. Our group research culminated in late 2013 with publication of Rick Salvador’s orbital resonance model in the journal ‘Pattern Recognition in Physics’. We provided an update on the validation of the model a while back, showing it has remained on track since publication.

The Canterbury Swarm and the Taurids

John Michael Godier: An exploration of the concept of the Canterbury meteor swarm and its links to the annual Taurid meteor shower and how these sometimes produce very large impacts on the moon and earth.