World’s top cosmologists convene to question conventional view of the universe

A meeting at London’s Royal Society will scrutinise the basic model first formulated in 1922 that the universe is a vast, even expanse with no notable features and ask (after 100+ years): is it wrong, and if so, what next? Competing measurements of the Hubble ‘constant’ will come under yet more scrutiny.
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If you zoomed out on the universe, well beyond the level of planets, stars or galaxies, you would eventually see a vast, evenly speckled expanse with no notable features. At least, that has been the conventional view, says The Guardian.

The principle that everything looks the same everywhere is a fundamental pillar of the standard model of cosmology, which aims to explain the big bang and how the universe has evolved in the 13.7bn years since.

But this week a meeting of some of the world’s leading cosmologists will convene at London’s Royal Society to ask the question: what if this basic assumption is wrong?

Solar protons rain down on Earth via the Parker spiral

Solar Protons Are Raining Down on Earth

Sometimes known as a Solar particle event:
These particles can penetrate the Earth’s magnetic field and cause partial ionization of the ionosphere. Energetic protons are a significant radiation hazard to spacecraft and astronauts.

Claim: the James Webb telescope ‘threatens to break cosmology as we know it’

Ye Olde Universe
[image credit: Hubble / Wikipedia]

Or did it just confirm the unhappy status of the ‘dark energy’ seekers, long after Nobel prizes were handed out for its ‘discovery’? Quote: ‘despite much searching, astronomers have no clue what dark matter or dark energy are.’ A Nobel for having no clue – where’s the physics?
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For decades, measurements of the universe’s expansion have suggested a disparity known as the Hubble tension, which threatens to break cosmology as we know it. Can it be fixed? asks Live Science.

Now, on the eve of its second anniversary, a new finding by the James Webb Space Telescope has only entrenched the mystery.

Something is awry in our expanding cosmos.

The Sun’s Rampant Activity Is Likely to Peak Really, Really Soon: Study

Variation in solar activity during a recent sunspot cycle [credit: Wikipedia]

So soon there’s barely time to read the study, if the prediction is anywhere near correct. Solar cycle 25 has already defeated the majority of pundits anyway, by being considerably more active prior to its peak than the last one. However, at least one group of researchers has already forecast a peak around now (see this April 2023 Talkshop post). The latest (i.e. just revised) Hathaway/Upton forecast graphic is here. What the value is of SC predictions of such short duration, even if they turn out to be close to correct, is not entirely clear. It seems like placing a bet when the jockeys can already see the finish line.
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A new study has found that the impending peak in the Sun’s activity cycle will likely arrive significantly sooner than previously predicted, says Science Alert.

According to an analysis by astrophysicists Priyansh Jaswal, Chitradeep Saha, and Dibyendu Nandy at the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India, solar maximum is likely to hit in January 2024.

This is much, much sooner than the initial official prediction, which found solar maximum would take place in July 2025.

Scientists discover rare six-planet system that moves in synchrony

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) [image credit: NASA]

This system looks like a prize winner for resonance. For no obvious reason Phys.org calls it ‘strange’ synchrony. Planets orbiting near their star (orbit periods from 9 to 55 days in this example) are bound to be strongly influenced by it, in the same way moons close to planets can be.
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Scientists have discovered a rare sight in a nearby star system: Six planets orbiting their central star in a rhythmic beat, says Phys.org.

The planets move in an orbital waltz that repeats itself so precisely that it can be readily set to music.

A rare case of an “in sync” gravitational lockstep, the system could offer deep insight into planet formation and evolution.

Enceladus, Previous Speedster – AAS Nova

Three of Saturn’s moons — Tethys, Enceladus and Mimas — as seen from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft [image credit: NASA/JPL]

Enceladus is in a 2:1 resonance with a moon named Dione, but Tethys – another major moon of Saturn – orbits between them and is in a 1:2 resonance with Mimas, whose orbit lies inside that of Enceladus. So the order of proximity to the planet is Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione. The study looks at how the Enceladus-Dione part of this unusual set-up could have come into being. Talking of speed, all four moons orbit their very large planet in less than three days (Mimas in less than one day).
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Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, is currently being tugged around and heated up by another moon named Dione, says AAS Nova.

How the two ended up in this arrangement is a mystery, since to get there, Enceladus must have avoided getting caught up in a resonance with another moon named Tethys.

A recent article offers a possible explanation: Enceladus may have blitzed over to its current position in a short-lived burst of speed.

Dynamic Moons
We typically imagine that moons circle their host planets with clockwork regularity, meaning that they precisely trace out the same path at the same speed for all time. However, true reality cannot be described by a system composed of rigid gears.

The Sun’s Magnetic Poles are Vanishing (again)

The Sun’s Magnetic Poles are Vanishing

The Sun usually finds ways to keep the pundits guessing.

Has the Sun’s true role in global warming been miscalculated?

Nice day

Of course the IPCC’s preferred idea is that the Sun can be ignored as a variable in climate influence, and all attention should focus on minor trace gases (mainly CO2 at 0.04%) in the atmosphere. A recent study by Spencer & Christy weighed in on a related topic: Our new climate sensitivity paper has been published, which proposes that actual observations indicate significant IPCC over-estimation of (theoretical) non-solar climate factors.
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A new international study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, by 20 climate researchers from 12 countries suggests that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) might have substantially underestimated the role of the Sun in global warming, says Ceres-Science.

The article began as a response to a 2022 commentary on an extensive review of the causes of climate change published in 2021.

The original review (Connolly and colleagues, 2021) had suggested that the IPCC reports had inadequately accounted for two major scientific concerns when they were evaluating the causes of global warming since the 1850s:

The global temperature estimates used in the IPCC reports are contaminated by urban warming biases.

The estimates of solar activity changes since the 1850s considered by the IPCC substantially downplayed a possible large role for the Sun.

On this basis, the 2021 review had concluded that it was not scientifically valid for the IPCC to rule out the possibility that global warming might be mostly natural.

Van Gogh Waves in the Magnetosphere

Van Gogh Waves in the Magnetosphere

‘A key finding of Kavosi’s paper is that the waves prefer equinoxes.’

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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