{Perplexity.ai says:} On February 15, 2013, a meteor approximately 20 meters in diameter entered Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, traveling at about 19 kilometers per second. The meteor exploded at an altitude of around 30 kilometers, generating a bright flash that outshone the sun and a shockwave equivalent to the energy of 400-500 kilotons of TNT. This powerful explosion caused significant damage, injuring approximately 1,500 people and breaking windows in over 7,200 buildings across six cities. The event was extensively documented through numerous dashboard cameras, marking it as the most significant meteor airburst since the Tunguska event in 1908 1,2,3,4.
Asteroid Too The 3rd ABC video mentioned that an asteroid came close to Earth not long after the meteor. I think they said it passed at about 17,000 km. I imagine the meteor originally came from the asteroid. They said the asteroid was only 3 times as big as the meteor. The asteroid was seen in advance and predicted to miss Earth, but the meteor wasn't seen. Electrical Sonic Booms Charles Chandler figured out that sonic booms seem to be a result of a bow shock of negative electric charge in front of objects, whether Mach 1 jets or Mach x meteors etc. The large part of the meteor that crashed through the ice of the lake must have slowed down before impact, I think. I guess the hole was about 20 feet in diameter and pretty much perfectly circular. Charles said meteor impacts seem to often produce thermonuclear explosions, but this one must have been too slow for that.
Hey Folks! Here's a link to the webpage I did recently on bolides: Meteoric Airbursts. In researching it, I found plenty of literature that certifies that there is charge separation between the bolide and the detached bow shock (including the coma). When the bolide breaks up, the separator fails, and an EMP is released, sometimes with enough power to make lights flicker. I don't know whether the EMP could have caused some of the damage, but I can definitely attest to the fact that sonic booms can break windows. I grew up in the vicinity of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, and back in the Vietnam era, it was a very active base, and we heard sonic booms on a daily basis. And lots of people had to replace windows. It helps if the window is old, and has thinned out at the top. Modern 1/8" panes aren't going to break like that. Maybe that's what the Mythbusters tested. But if you fly an F-4 Phantom at Mach 2, below 500 feet, right over a bunch of old farmhouses, you can expect broken windows.
… I think the trajectory was NE to south west and the event was at 9:26am local time, so how does that compare time-wise with the event over Cuba at 0100 GMT the same morning? We've got to find some plots for these objects. d...z. Cuba event here: http://english.cri.cn/6966/2013/02/16/189s748584.htm
justcurious wrote: The explosive sound and blowing out of windows occurs many seconds after the flashes of light.
Right. The sonic boom travels at the speed of sound. Since the meteor was 12~15 miles high, and judging from its elevation in the sky at least 3x further away horizontally, the explosion was at least 50 miles away from the observers in Chelyabinsk. At 5 seconds per mile, the sonic boom would have arrived 250 seconds, or about 4 minutes, after the closest approach of the meteor. That gave everybody plenty of time to go to their windows, to look out and see what lit up the sky. These are the people who were injured by broken glass when the sonic boom hit. On my webpage, when I'm talking about "popping" sounds that are coincident with the break-up of the meteor, that's a whole different phenomenon.
EM PULSE
justcurious wrote: There is one problem with your theory of an EMP explosion (and no shock wave).
It isn't my theory -- it’s well established fact. There is a sonic boom, but long before that hits, and coincident with the break-up of the meteor, people have heard much quieter sounds -- little crackling noises. The only form of energy that could travel virtually instantaneously from the meteor to the observer's location is an EMP.
justcurious wrote: Would you mind elaborating on "somehow converted back to mechanical energy near the observer"?
This is not well-understood, but researchers believe that the conversion could be some sort of piezo effect due to the electric field, or Faraday induction from the time-varying magnetic field, or both. Regardless, something is getting objects in the vicinity of the observers to vibrate, and that can only be from an EMP. But I didn't see any reports of this phenomenon in Chelyabinsk.
CHARGE SEPARATION
justcurious wrote: Do you mean that the meteor has one charge (for example negative) and the ionized air around it has another, or is it charge separation within the meteor itself being caused by some sort of induction?
The charge separation appears to be in the bow shock. An object moving through the air has a boundary layer of compressed air against its forward face. Normally, as speeds increase, this boundary layer gets compressed even more. But spherical objects moving at supersonic speeds develop detached bow shocks, which defy the principles of fluid dynamics, meaning that this is an EM effect. So what happens is that neutrally charged air hits the boundary layer, and the heavier nucleons penetrate deeper, while the lighter electrons are stripped off. The threshold for this effect is achieved when the inertial forces of the incoming nucleons exceed the electric forces keeping the electrons bound to the atoms. Once it forms, electrostatic repulsion inside the bow shock is what "detaches" it from the object. So everything inside the bow shock is positively charged. On the leading edge of the bow shock, there is a layer of electrons that were stripped from the nucleons that burrowed into the bow shock. The charge separation is between the inside of the bow shock and its leading edge. The air outside of the bow shock is nominally neutral, and the meteor/bow shock/coma is neutral when taken as a whole.
SONIC BOOMS
Wikipedia wrote: As the aircraft increases speed the shock cone gets tighter around the craft and becomes weaker to the point that at very high speeds and altitudes no boom is heard.
An aircraft has a somewhat different profile, compared to a bolide, where the bow shock is accentuated with speed. Also, at high altitudes, the air is thinner, so the pressure gradient isn't as steep, reducing the effect.
justcurious wrote: Perhaps the meteor flying at supersonic speeds can create a sonic boom, however common sense tells me that it had something to do with the 20X Hiroshima explosion(s).
BREAKUP & FLARE, NOT EXPLOSION
I'm not sure that "explosion" is the right word here. Certainly, the Tunguska event was an explosion, since a sonic boom simply isn't going to knock down millions of trees. So that one was definitely an explosion. Most other meteors don't really explode -- they just sorta break up into lotsa pieces. The reason why I don't think that the Chelyabinsk bolide "exploded" is just that the smoke trail is sustained over many miles, not a single spherical puff from an instantaneous explosion. So I think that this was a break-up, with a flare due to charge recombination. Note that if the entire inner region of the bow shock (including the coma) is positively charged, this will encourage the break-up of a meteor, and for two reasons. First, the absence of valence electrons weakens the crystal lattice holding the bolide together. Second, electrostatic repulsion will create an internal pressure that will push the pieces apart.
justcurious wrote: In your writeup you suggest that the shockwave is due to an EMP (electromagnetic explosion).
Actually, I made the following statements.
CharlesChandler wrote: The sonic boom travels at the speed of sound. [...] On my webpage, when I'm talking about "popping" sounds that are coincident with the break-up of the meteor, that's a whole different phenomenon. [...] There is a sonic boom, but long before that hits, and coincident with the break-up of the meteor, people have heard much quieter sounds -- little crackling noises. [...] But I didn't see any reports of this phenomenon in Chelyabinsk.
And EMP stands for "electromagnetic pulse". It doesn't necessarily mean that an explosion caused it, or that it will cause an explosion when it hits something.
justcurious wrote: The theory goes like this, there is an EMP explosion which sends out EM waves, which upon reaching the observer transform themselves to mechanical energy and become audible and break stuff.
No.
justcurious wrote: I stated that the bang occurs after the explosive flash and hence the theory has a problem (since there is a delay between the flash and the bang, like in lightning).
I should like to mention that I didn't do my write-up on bolides after the Chelyabinsk event, just to explain that one event. Rather, I did it before the Chelyabinsk event, to explain meteoric airbursts in general. My webpage explains phenomena that were not observed at Chelyabinsk, such as electrophonics. So you're thinking that it's just a "theory" that explains the bright flash, loud sound, and shockwave damage at Chelyabinsk. You see that I presented references from the scientific literature detailing the unmistakable evidence of EMPs from bolides. So you turn EMPs into explosive events, and then find a disconnect at Chelyabinsk. But there wasn't any reported evidence of an EMP at Chelyabinsk.
justcurious wrote: I really can't imagine how EM waves would transform themselves into mechanical waves just before reaching doors and windows to blast them out.
Neither can I. The "hissing" sounds that have been observed during other events are likely corona discharges. A "popping" sound could be a corona discharge, but too brief to qualify as a "hissing" sound. But there weren't any reports of such sounds at Chelyabinsk.
justcurious wrote: The other options? The sonic boom.
Yes.
justcurious wrote: Another option is that the meteor simply exploded and caused a shockwave, just like TNT or any other explosive.
The reason why I don't think that it was an "explosion" is that the smoke trail was many miles long. A sustained explosion is not what we would normally call an explosion. I think that it was an EM flare-up, as the charge separation mechanism failed. The bright light was from charge recombination, but this continued (irregularly) for over 10 seconds. Maybe the most intense brightening created a shockwave that would have contributed to the sonic boom (just from the speed of the bolide). But there were several brightenings, and in the videos, there was only one boom.
justcurious wrote: Another option might have to do with a z-pinch effect. If the meteor is a rapidly moving charge, it should create a magnetic field around it according to the right hand rule, which could squeeze the ionized air (or charges released by the meteor) around the meteor, once the meteor discharges, the magnetic field would vanish and release all that mechanical tension (z-pinch effect), this is my own quack speculation amongst others. But maybe not that crazy as we can see in the sky clearly two smoke trails at the area of most intense activity (remnants of a Birkeland current pair?).
DOUBLE SMOKE TRAIL
How do you get two smoke trails from one z-pinching bolide? I too find the symmetrical smoke trails to be telling... of something... I just don't know what that is. Have such smoke trails ever been recorded on video before? Is the symmetrical pair a common feature? Interestingly, my original epiphany (as of 2013-01-15) on bolide break-up had an answer for this. The basic idea was that a bolide would start rolling really fast, since it has higher pressure air under it than over it, and the friction would induce rotation. A bolide only 17 meters across wouldn't encounter much of a density gradient from its top to its bottom, but the detached bow shock is bigger, so maybe there's something to this? Anyway, if the bolide is charged, and spinning really fast, then it's a dynamo, with a solenoidal field, where the axis is parallel to the surface of the Earth, and perpendicular to the direction of travel. (Imagine the wheel on a car. If it was charged, it would generate a field with the same alignment.) The epiphany was that this solenoidal magnetic field would direct an electric current into one pole and out of the other, and that perhaps an electric current right through the middle of the bolide would blow it apart. I didn't consider that to be a complete explanation, so I did a little research, and on 2013-01-18, I posted my new & improved model that calls it simply a Coulomb explosion due to the positive charging. But the "rolling electrodynamic meteor" model predicted that charge recombination would definitely occur at specific points on the bolide (i.e., the poles of the solenoidal field), and thus we would expect two trails of smoke, where the current burned into the bolide. Note that the current didn't blow the bolide apart, or there would have been a singular, spherical puff of smoke. Rather, it burned its way into it, and continued until the bolide broke up. So maybe there is a little bit of truth in both models. They aren't mutually exclusive. The charging mechanism is the inertial forces of nucleons burrowing into the detached bow shock, and the break-up is a Coulomb explosion. But the poloidal burning is due to the meteoric dynamo?
So this is the official Podcast from David Talbot on the event ( posted up the page) ... I assume his assumption's still count for something around here? youtube.com/watch?v=7Ce6Pk_0TNE.
@kiwi. Relax. Talbott says that bolides are electric. We're all saying that bolides are electric. I did a little research (see the references below), and found that a number of scientists are saying that bolides are electric. They also elaborate on how bolides are electric. Then we got to hypothesizing over stuff that Talbott has never addressed, such as the twin smoke trails. Well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse meeeeeeeeeeee...
Beech, M.; Foschini, L., 1999: A space charge model for electrophonic bursters. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 345: L27-L31 Beech, M.; Foschini, L., 2000: Leonid electrophonic bursters. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 367: 1056-1060 Grigoryev, V., 2002: The Vitim Bolide, 2002-09-25. Russian Academy of Sciences Keay, C. S., 1980: Anomalous sounds from the entry of meteor fireballs. Science, 210: 11-15 Keay, C. S., 1993: Progress in Explaining the Mysterious Sounds Produced by Very Large Meteor Fireballs. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 7 (4): 337-354 Kim, H. D.; Setoguchi, T., 2007: Shock Induced Boundary Layer Separation. 8th International Symposium on Experimental and Computational Aerothermodynamics of Internal Flows, Lyon, France May, H. D., 2008: A Pervasive Electric Field in the Heliosphere. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 36 (5): 2876-2879 Serezhkin, Y. G., 2000: Formation of ordered structures of charged microparticles in near-surface cometary gas-dusty atmosphere. Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Conference Series, 4137: 1-12 Wylie, C. C., 1932: Sounds from meteors. Popular Astronomy, 40: 289 Zel'dovich, Y. B.; Raizer, Y. P., 1967: Physics of Shock Waves and High-Temperature Hydrodynamic Phenomena. New York: Academic Press
justcurious wrote: Unless I didn't understand anything about what I learned in the past week or two, I believe a sonic boom would have a sweeping effect rather than impacting only one specific area.
I agree that the sonic boom would have propagated in all directions. Did it actually only affect one area, or was it just that only one area was populated, and we're only getting reports from there?
Sparky wrote: The corkscrew trail is not necessarily an electrical signature. It could have been produced by two objects tumbling. I can not figure out why they seem to come closer together and merge.
I guess that's possible (tumbling), but tumbling or turning in a direction of a corkscrew? And two "pieces" tumbling in the same directions forming a helical shape, that seems like a bit too coincidental for my taste.
I agree. I also agree that water electrolysis isn't likely. 12~15 miles above the surface, there just isn't that much water up there. But molecular nitrogen and oxygen can be separated and recombined, with the same effect. It takes a bit more energy, but that's not a problem for a hypersonic bolide. So he had the right idea, but the wrong elements. I also find the railgun metaphor to be strained. While gunpowder can expand at the speed of sound (for itself, which is higher than the speed of sound in the surrounding air), the theoretical limit for the expansion of positive ions is the speed of light. So if you discharge a bank of capacitors into a long tube, ionizing all of the air, the expansion can accelerate a projectile to a much higher speed. (What will DoD think up next?) Coming out of the barrel is then a Coulomb explosion, and what we're seeing is the oxidation of positive ions. But a projectile accelerated by a Coulomb explosion is one thing -- a bolide leaving a trail of ions behind it is another. The difference is in the prime mover. And triboelectricity is a crude analogy for what's actually going on here. With a detached shock front, the collisions are between air and... air! Air isn't on the triboelectric series, and even if it was, air rubbing up against itself isn't going to develop any static electricity. A more mechanistic explanation is that the boundary layer gets positively charged, due to incoming atoms getting their electrons stripped off in particle collisions. That really isn't triboelectric charging.
But that doesn't explain twin smoke trails. So I'm saying that the bolide starts rolling across the density gradient. Density Gradient Induces Rotation. The rolling turns the bolide into a dynamo, and that has interesting implications... Rolling Bolide Regime
viscount aero wrote: OK then what Charles is doing is further describing more of what is going on versus excluding charge separation due to friction, i.e., triboelectric charging (and thus heat). Friction denotes heat. In simplistic terms ionization in this case is due to friction. Am I in the ballpark at least?
Yes, especially the bolded statement. I just wouldn't call it triboelectricity, which is electron transfer due to differences in binding energies of different molecules, whereas we're talking about electrons getting stripp{ed} by high-energy collisions. Is there a special name for that? Anyway, the significance is not just that the particle collisions generate heat, that converts the molecules to plasma, as if it was still quasi-neutral. The atomic nuclei, with their greater inertial forces, burrow deeper into the boundary layer. So the plasma is not quasi-neutral -- there is an organized charge separation, with positive ions forming a sheath around the bolide, and with a layer of electrons around the outside of that sheath. And these charged double-layers give the bolide a whole new set of properties.
dahlenaz wrote: The flash point does not seem to be as high as stated above,,, clouds don't form at 12-15 miles up and the time between the flash and the first concussion seems to support a low level fragmentation maybe you meant 12-15,000 feet.
No, I meant 12~15 miles. The latest estimate of the altitude of the bolide when it broke up was 27 km, based on the locations of observers, and the apparent angle of the bolide from the horizon for each observer. This is consistent with other measurements. The meteorite fragments were found about 40 km from Chelyabinsk. The hypotenuse of that 27/40 triangle is 48.25 km, giving the line-of-sight distance. With the speed of sound at the relevant altitudes being roughly 300 m/s, the sonic boom would have arrived 2.68 minutes after the point of nearest approach. I read somewhere that it was 2 minutes 50 seconds, which is 2.83 minutes. So I think that the estimates are reasonably accurate. Now, 27 km above the surface is well into the stratosphere, where there is little-to-no water vapor. So I'm still of the opinion that the "clouds" were made of smoke from arc discharges onto the surface of the bolide.
dahlenaz wrote: Upon fragmentation the dynamics change violently but the twin trails seem to indicate that forward momentum was not altered greatly by the blast. [...] The cloud which is spread along the fragmentation region takes on a life of its own, which may misrepresent the behavior of the fragments. A lot was happening in those few seconds of fragmentation and continued well after the fragments departed. This raises the requirements for the explanation of this event beyond that of a solid body at extreme altitude.
...
Indeed, that's why I'm not really thinking that the bolide "exploded" per se -- rather, it could have simply broken up. The flares were from charge recombination and molecular reformation, entirely within the nitrogen and oxygen in the stratosphere. The charge separation caused by a bolide can persist for tens of minutes in the atmosphere, so a flare that persisted for a second or two is not surprising. And clearly, the flare wasn't moving. So this was the stationary air recombining.
viscount aero wrote: NASA themselves uses that reference to describe meteor entry and charge separation.
I know. Meteorologists say that thunderstorm electrification is triboelectricity, from hail falling through the air! But that just ain't right... Anyway, I agree with your main point that friction causes ionization.
dahlenaz wrote: If the meteor cloud was as high as proposed then there must have been extra moisture provided by the meteor itself upon breakup, where else would it come from?
The meteorite fragments have been classified as chondrites, which typically contain silicon, aluminum, iron, nickel, etc. But maybe the meteoroids are actually just dirty snowballs, and the chondrite material is the dirt, and where nothing is left of the snowball except (in some cases) a cloud. I dunno... Spectral analysis on the cloud would have told the whole story, if anybody had bothered doing it, instead of running around fixing broken windows in the middle of the winter.
PARALLEL TRAILS
dahlenaz wrote: With reference to Charles' suggestion, offered earlier and drawn in two dimensional form, i have two question; Will this action hold to the twin parallel output from a sphere or would it be more toroidal as a 3D representation of the same image would offer?
I'm still trying to figure out how to draw it in 3D without getting even more confused -- it's actually a complex environment, if I have it figured correctly. My 2D drawing only shows one of the magnetic lines of force -- the one facing in the direction of travel, which I'm saying will redirect electrons into the bolide, and burn holes into the axes, producing smoke. Yet the solenoidal field would be fully toroidal, and I'm not showing the other lines of force. I "think" that these will be less effective in redirecting electrons into the bolide. In the case of the leading line of force, the particles shedding off of the shock front begin traveling in the same direction as the magnetic line of force. Once organized into a Birkeland current, I'm saying that the electrons will then follow the lines of force into the bolide, pretty much the same way charged particles from the Sun follow the Earth's lines of force into the aurora. But what about particles that wrap around the sides? I don't think that those particles are redirected toward the poles as much, because their direction is too different from the magnetic lines of force. Is that true? Anyway, whatever is true of the solar wind interacting with the Earth's magnetosphere will be true of the air impacting the magnetic field of the bolide.
COLUMBIA SPACE SHUTTLE DISASTER
viscount aero wrote: When the Space Shuttle would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere it would take several minutes and heat up to thousands of degrees. The Shuttle is also very massive and metres across in all directions. Even though it would create a sonic boom, the Shuttle's re-entry dynamics never had the effect upon the air as if a bomb exploded.
True, except in the case of the Columbia disaster. But even then, I'd disagree with the characterization of there having been an explosion. The Shuttle broke up, and there were several flare-ups. Megalightning might have been a contributing factor to the failure of the controlled re-entry, but the real problem was that without maintaining the proper angle of attack, the Shuttle was no match for the frictional heat, and it disintegrated. @viscount aero: Thanks for your kind comments. I'm just following the evidence, but what I'm finding is that it leads somewhere. Sometimes I think that some of the people in the thunderbolts crowd are scared to take a closer look, for fear that the evidence will not support their claims that the Universe is electric. Well, fear not. The Universe is actually electric!
OPTIMISM
So look closely, and the picture will come into sharp focus. Of course, not every EU claim is correct. Nor have all of my claims stood the test of time. But if we keep questioning, and keep assimilating more and more information, and keep challenging theories to match data, all will be revealed. The cool part is that with time, it gets easier. It's like putting together a puzzle. You start by fitting individual pieces together. But then you get a sense for what you're actually putting together, and then it gets a lot easier. Well, we're at that point. These aren't just epiphanies anymore, or alternative hypotheses. These are far more accurate descriptions of the phenomena, based on plausible physics. In other words, this is real science, and we are the pioneers.
SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Lloyd & I have been discussing how to move this kind of thing along. We'd like to organize workgroups, with expertise in particular topics, to gather up information, and to produce documents explaining the state of the art. Sometimes that means that there are still a number of hypotheses on the table. Well, what are they? What is the evidence? What are the anomalies in the existing theories? We'd like to see review articles that lay all of this stuff out, so that the next person can get it all in one place. And we're thinking of this as being very dynamic, where new information is going to pop up all of the time, presenting new opportunities for increases in the specificity of the theories. Currently, we use this forum for presenting new information, and hypotheses based on it. That's a great benefit to the people involved in the discussion. But after the fact, how does somebody else get the gist of what was concluded? You have to read the whole thread to understand it, and that's just impossible. So we'd like to see documents that summarize discussions. We believe that this could greatly expand the number of people contributing to this emerging scientific paradigm. A certain number of people are willing to participate in individual threads. But what if every time people get interested in something, they can find a summary document, and go right to the topic of interest, finding out what's already been done, and injecting their 2 cents? In other words, what if we could combine all of these individual efforts into a community project? So we're trying to define a process for creating and updating such documents. Basically, instead of there being a new thread when new information emerges, making it even more difficult to determine the current status of a topic, rather, a footnote should be added to the existing document, saying exactly where the new information fits in. And that's where the next discussion begins. The "summary" document might have a lot of footnotes, where possible interpretations branch off into their own respective discussions. But then the conclusions of those discussions can be woven back into the summary at some later date. It sounds like a lot of work, until you compare it to the work that we're already doing in these interminable threads. How much effort does it take to get up to speed on an issue? How much time is wasted discussing stuff, when there was already a discussion on the same topic? How much duplication of labor is actually going on here? What if we could create centralized resources for each topic, summarizing discussions, so people could build on what has gone before? We believe that we'd see a lot more value. (See Improve Science and Scientific Method for more info on this.)
So are any of you willing to be in a workgroup on bolides? We're not asking for any additional effort on anybody's part -- just that existing efforts be expended in a slightly different way. Whenever a new thread on bolides pops up on the forum, create a stub article on my site. Maybe enter a few quick comments about some of the things discussed. Later, others in the workgroup can tweak the article, little bits at a time. And be sure to post a link to the summary article back into the thunderbolts thread, so that people reading the thread will also know that there is a summary document in progress. To do a massive amount of scholarship on any particular topic is obviously a big undertaking, and that's not what we're talking about. We're just talking about people having it in the backs of their minds that for every topic, there is a central resource that briefly identifies that main points. So would any of you guys be willing to help out with this?
I was thinking that any water would have boiled off in the flare. I don't actually think that the "clouds" were water, but I'm still not sure that the meteorite fragments tell the whole story. Are the fragments typically pitted, like volcanic pumice, revealing the absence of stuff that boiled off? If not, then the ice would have to have been separate from the chondritic matter. I "think" that recent evidence from comets (e.g., Tempel 1) shows a lot less ice than previously expected. Does this apply to asteroids and meteoroids too? (As you can see, there's a lot that I don't know.)
… justcurious wrote: Boundary layers in fluid dynamics separate fluid/air of different velocities. If the air is moving around, how would it maintain a bow shock of identically charged air?
The charge is constantly being refreshed by the incoming atoms. This phenomenon only occurs at high Mach numbers, because the hydrostatic pressure plus the Coulomb force would disperse the matter.
justcurious wrote: Not a spherical meteor, but an irregularly shaped one that is tumbling.
How did you determine that it was not spherical? Objects tumbling are quickly rounded down because the friction acts on the high points more quickly.
SIMPLICITY ISN’T AUTOMATICALLY TRUTH
justcurious wrote: Not only that, but there are just too many assumptions and speculations in his theory, rolling meteor creating dynamo effect, electrons creeping in from the sides, its just over the top complex. Triboelectric is not crude, it's simple, this is good. If the answer is highly complex, it's probably the wrong answer.
The 3 metrics for a construct under consideration are scope, accuracy, and simplicity (not necessarily in that order). Sometimes we might sacrifice accuracy to get simplicity. But that doesn't make it the "correct" answer -- that just makes it the economical one. Yet sometimes it's a false economy. My attitude is that we already have quick-n-dirty answers, courtesy of the mainstream. Yet they've been at it for a while now, and you'll find in the history of science that whenever people cling to a paradigm for the convenience of it, as new information comes in, they tend to bastardize the existing framework, rather than considering any new ideas. After a while, the quick-n-dirty construct that was built and maintained purely for convenience is no longer so convenient. In fact, the mainstream constructs are abstract, and extremely complex. Every so often, people have to make new investigations, to find out what's really going on.
For example, the Ptolemaic model of the solar system started out simple enough. But as telescopes got better, they found that they had to make some fine adjustments. This continued until the math was staggering. By the time Copernicus came along, they had done all that they could do, and they still couldn't get the formulas to return exact solutions. Whatever they did to fix one problem just made something else worse. To Copernicus, this meant that there was a fundamental flaw. So he re-conceived the whole thing, and now we have a much more accurate model. The math was arguably more complex, because it required translating Earth-based observations into a heliocentric coordinate system. But this was necessary in order to make the next step. So was the Ptolemaic system actually the "correct" answer, because it didn't require coordinate transforms, and ultimately calculus, to accurately predict the motions of celestial bodies? Now you're really comparing apples to oranges. The hacks that it would have taken to assimilate modern data into the Ptolemaic system would have made it far, far more complicated. So as a rule, I go for accuracy. Those bothersome anomalies that aren't worth additional complexity right now actually represent fundamental flaws in the existing frameworks. In the end, the most accurate model doesn't need hacks and abstractions to keep pace with new data.
BOW SHOCKS V. DEBYE SHEATHS
justcurious wrote: There is nothing to indicate or suggest that an electric bow shock is created in the first place.
All of the tests with supersonic blunt objects (such as spheres) produces detached bow shocks. Since fluid dynamics has no explanation for this, it can only be evidence of electromagnetism. And since the Chelyabinsk meteoroid was hypersonic, it would have produced a detached bow shock.
justcurious wrote: But we do know of a thing called Debye sheath which is a layer between plasma and a solid due to, you guessed it, friction.
Debye sheaths form due to the difference in velocity between electrons and atomic nuclei at any given temperature, because of the difference in mass.
RAILGUN COMPARISON
justcurious wrote: The rail gun was an interesting addition to the discussion. What I found most interesting was that fire was created from a purely electrical phenomena.
The difference between a rail gun and a bolide is in the prime mover. In a rail gun, a bunch of capacitors are discharged into the chamber, creating a Coulomb explosion (i.e., expansion of positive ions due to the electrostatic repulsion of like charges). Coming out of the barrel, we see "flames" -- this is charge and molecular recombination, just like the oxidation of atomic hydrogen or carbon. In a bolide, it's the other way around. The momentum of the bolide separates charges, due to friction, which recombine when they get the chance, sometimes near the fireball itself, and sometimes in the coma, as we saw at Chelyabinsk.
MOISTURE AT 15 MILES ALTITUDE
viscount aero wrote: I'm going to have to disagree with the premise that there is a lack of sufficient moisture at 12-15 miles altitude. That region is the upper troposphere of the Earth which holds most of the moisture in the entire atmosphere, particularly if the meteor's fiery train appeared within 12 miles altitude (which is highly likely).
Actually, most of the moisture is near the surface of the Earth. The amount of water vapor that the air can hold varies directly with the temperature, which decreases with altitude. The following table shows the grams of water vapor per kg of air. -40 °C is the temperature of the tropopause, which during the winter would be less than 15 km above the surface, at least in Chelyabinsk. … As a consequence of the low temps, the water vapor condenses. While the vapor is lighter than air, condensation is heavier than air, and thus it falls. Practically none of it ever makes it up into the stratosphere, since in the tropopause, there is a temperature inversion, and surface-based updrafts lose all of their positive buoyancy when the temperature starts rising again. So while the top of the stratosphere might be room temperature, capable of holding 20 grams of water vapor per kilogram of air, there's nothing to hoist the ice crystals up there, so that they could evaporate. How much water vapor would it take to make a trail? I dunno. How bright would the re-oxidation be? I dunno. But the far more abundant molecular nitrogen and oxygen will do the same thing (i.e., get split by high temperatures, and then reform into molecules when they get the chance). So why look for the burning needle in the haystack, when the entire haystack is on fire?
viscount aero wrote: Maybe take me through it again, your premise behind the concussion (and thus the explosion). I've lost track of some things that each member has said as a lot has been said. Do you agree or disagree that there was an explosion?
I'm not really sure, actually. There was a sustained release of energy, and then there were some flare-ups, when the energy release peaked. And then we can see in the trail that at a very specific point, it appears that the mass of the bolide was drastically reduced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chelyabinsk_meteor_trace_15-02-2013.jpg. I couldn't tell from the videos whether the booms were from different events, or echos off of other buildings in the vicinity. Has anybody tried to match up the sound from the one video with the flare-ups in the others? Anyway, I think that the sounds were sonic booms. And I think that the light was from electrostatic discharges. The model that I'm using doesn't specifically address anything that would cause an explosion.
… METEOR’S EXTERNAL DOUBLE LAYER
CharlesChandler wrote: The charge is constantly being refreshed by the incoming atoms.
justcurious wrote: Has this been verified? Or is it a hypothesis? I'm referring specifically to the electric part, that a double-layer is formed in front of an incoming fireball meteor.
See: Beech, M.; Foschini, L., 1999: A space charge model for electrophonic bursters. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 345: L27-L31
When a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere it moves at hypersonic speeds, that is with Mach number greater than 5. Hence, behind the bow shock the effect of ionization becomes very important (for a brief description of hypersonic flow around a meteoroid (see Foschini, 1999a and references therein). Other effects, such as ablation, contribute to enhance the presence of charged particles in the fluid around the meteoroid (for review see Ceplecha et al., 1998). Moreover, the presence in meteoroids of alkaline and alkaline–earth metals, which easily ionize, results in the rapid formation of a plasma sheet around the meteoroid body (see Foschini, 1999b).
There are other papers on the same topic, but that one is a good place to start.
METEOR SHAPE
justcurious wrote: I never saw a recovered meteor that fell to Earth, which was spherical. I would be curious to see some pictures of these spherical meteors, or any evidence of this claim. Is this just another assumption, or is it a well known and accepted fact?
It's an assumption, but I think that it's reasonable to think that it's rounded, if not perfectly spherical. What hits the Earth after the break-up of the bolide isn't necessarily indicative of the original shape. I don't see any reason why a bolide (of any shape) would break up into spherical pieces, or that if it did, it would prove that the bolide had to be spherical. So I'm just saying that the bolide is probably tumbling, and just like a pebble in a stream, friction will round it down.
BOW SHOCK
CharlesChandler wrote: All of the tests with supersonic blunt objects (such as spheres) produces detached bow shocks. Since fluid dynamics has no explanation for this, it can only be evidence of electromagnetism.
From: Kim, H. D.; Setoguchi, T., 2007: Shock Induced Boundary Layer Separation. 8th International Symposium on Experimental and Computational Aerothermodynamics of Internal Flows, Lyon, France
Shock wave/boundary layer interaction (SBLI) appears usual in transonic or supersonic flows, and involving almost all kinds of fluid dynamic phenomena. Of many aspects of SBLI phenomena, Shock-Induced Separation (SIS) is the most important as it has deterministic influence on the overall flow characteristics. Though there have been many works on SBLI to investigate SIS, a clear and concrete idea of the onset of SIS is still lacking.
I'll take their word for it. Note that the production of waves is not the hard part to understand. It's the detached shock front. Did you happen to notice any waves preceding the motorboats by several meters?
CharlesChandler wrote: Debye sheaths form due to the difference in velocity between electrons and atomic nuclei at any given temperature, because of the difference in mass.
justcurious wrote: To me, that is a form of friction.
Is electricity a form of friction?
RAILGUN COMPARISON
justcurious wrote: I'm almost certain that you are completely wrong about how railguns work and the underlying physical principles. [...] The electric current is not discharged into a chamber, it is run through the rails and through the projectile.
There are a couple different designs. Here's the brief description of one of them:
Wikipedia wrote: A plasma armature is formed by an arc of ionised gas that is used to push a solid, non-conducting payload in a similar manner to the propellant gas pressure in a conventional gun.
The "ionized gas that is used to push a solid..." would explain the fireball coming out of the barrel. Lorentz forces do not. “NB: when reading about military technology, try to use a little common sense!” They don't always lay everything out in practical terms. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, but you might have to dig for it.
viscount aero wrote: As for me I cannot see how one would surmise from observation that there was not an explosion. There was aerial fire which denotes ignition. You don't see this? How would billowing aerial fire come into existence otherwise?
A fire doesn't guarantee that there was an explosion. Anyway, I did read somewhere today that there were 3 booms. Perhaps these corresponded with the 3 brightest flare-ups. I'm thinking that these were electrostatic discharges. So perhaps they weren't sonic booms, but just the "thunder" from the discharges? Or 1 of them was a sonic boom, and the other 2 were thunder? Regardless, there was a substantial amount of sustained energy release, which produced a steady trail of smoke, and which continued to flare after the bolide was gone. Explosions don't act like that. So it's starting to look like we have a mixed bag of phenomena, and a variety of mechanisms at work.
METEOR SHAPE
D_Archer wrote: Any meteorite pieces ever found are in no way spherical or rounded down.
Actually, this isn't an important point. The solenoidal magnetic fields would be produced by any rolling or tumbling object, if it was charged. Magnetic fields are generated by moving charged particles, not the shape of the object containing them. And the detached bow shock is not shape-dependent either -- it just has to have a relatively blunt face. Properly designed jets don't produce detached bow shocks at high mach numbers. I don't know how well-designed they have to be, but I don't think that space rocks get the benefit of design review.
D_Archer wrote: There is no tumbling either.
No, we can safely assume that it's going to tumble. When did you ever see anything falling through the air that wasn't tumbling, unless of course it was an airplane with dedicated control surfaces to prevent it? …
viscount aero wrote: It is determined that the entire train was smoke?
Even if that was water that got split into atomic hydrogen and oxygen, that's still not an "explosion". (I'm calling attention to the fact that while there were 3 or more flare-ups, and 3 or more booms, there was also a sustained energy release.) So I'll grant you that my model doesn't explain explosions. (...yet?...) But it does explain twin trails, that began at a specific point, and then stepped down in size at a specific point. These are details that aren't explained by any other model.
viscount aero wrote: If so, then, what constituted the contents of the smoke?
I think that it was burnt bolide (whatever that happened to be).
DESTROYED FACTORY ROOF
viscount aero wrote: Would a sonic boom and/or thunder--a combination of the two phenomena--be enough to cause such extensive destruction such as blowing the top of a factory off?
Let's not forget that they don't have much in the way of building codes. I've never heard of a building falling down because of a sonic boom, but we shouldn't make assumptions about how well it was built, or what kind of condition it was in.
Here we go again. Try and read the whole paraghraph in context:
A railgun is an electrically powered electromagnetic projectile launcher based on similar principles to the homopolar motor. A railgun comprises a pair of parallel conducting rails, along which a sliding armature is accelerated by the electromagnetic effects of a current that flows down one rail, into the armature and then back along the other rail.[2]
The armature may be an integral part of the projectile, but it may also be configured to accelerate a separate, electrically isolated or non-conducting projectile. Solid, metallic sliding conductors are often the preferred form of railgun armature but "plasma" or "hybrid" armatures can also be used. A plasma armature is formed by an arc of ionised gas that is used to push a solid, non-conducting payload in a similar manner to the propellant gas pressure in a conventional gun. A hybrid armature uses a pair of "plasma" contacts to interface a metallic armature to the gun rails. Solid armatures may also "transition" into hybrid armatures, typically after a particular velocity threshold is exceeded.
Maybe the main picture from the wikipedia entry can help:
F=I X B (cross product -> right hand rule) The circles are the magnetic field, like the one around the flying fireball.
OK, so maybe I'm about to learn something here! I looked at that diagram, and I didn't see any net force in it. The opposing currents (parallel to the rails) are creating opposing magnetic fields. These will cancel out, with no net field. So what is there for the cross-over field (generated by the current through the "armature") to push against, taking the superposition principle into account?
Hang on a second -- I might have answered my own question. Here are the lines of force from two opposing electric currents.
I thought that the fields cancelled out, but it looks like they just get squashed together. That would explain the magnetic pressure between them (i.e., what I sometimes call the "magnetic push" effect). But I had never done the simulation to see what the lines of force were actually doing. So the field from the cross-over current is actually parallel to those lines of force (at least in the middle), but it's trying to shove more field density in there, and that's where the magnetic pressure comes from?
justcurious wrote: If you follow the right hand rule, the b-field between the rails/wires will always point up.
No, I need to see the lines of force, and then I can visualize it. In this case, Ampère's circuital law is relevant, which has a different right-hand-rule (for the curl instead of the simplified vectors). Where I got screwed up was in never having actually examined the lines of force for this configuration. Anyway, this is how I would describe the phenomenon (just in case I'm still missing something)... Magnetic lines of force repel each other. Therefore, between two opposing currents, the circuital lines of force get compressed, and the repulsion constitutes magnetic pressure (a.k.a., the "magnetic push effect"). The same is true in a current-carrying coil -- along the axis of the coil, the magnetic lines of force are all going in the same direction, hence they do not close on themselves as they would if they were of opposite polarity, but rather, they repel each other. This creates an outward pressure on the wire. And finally, we can think of the railgun as just a different geometrical instantiation of the current-carrying coil, except that instead of the current going around in a circle, it just does two 90 degree turns. But the effect is the same, in that there is magnetic pressure between the rails, and going around the 90 degree turns, because of the concentrated field density in the interior. What makes it a "gun" is that the cross-over piece can slide, all the while having magnetic pressure exerted on it. Thus it can get accelerated down the rails. … But now I want to know what causes the huge volume of plasma getting ejected from the railgun. Can you explain that?
Sorry -- I forgot to describe the graphic that I posted. That's looking down the rails, with the circular magnetic fields around the opposing electric currents. I used Paul Falstad's magnetostatics simulator for this (for the first time).
justcurious wrote: May I suggest, an illustration of a meteor flying through the atmosphere, being stripped of electrons, the plasma tail would be compressed/filamented by the helical magnetic field surrounding it, and then the magnetic field releasing its force/pressure on the air around the meteor and trail when the meteor discharges with a big flash, releasing all that highly compressed charged air, causing a shockwave.
I totally agree that to get this thing nailed down, and to finally chase all of the ghosts and goblins out of our thinking, we need diagrams. But we have to cut the guy some slack -- illustrations are extremely labor intensive. We make off-hand suggestions, and he spends hours on a drawing? I think that we could at least come to a consensus on how we think a bolide behaves. Then, if he wanted to draw up our ideas, it might reveal problems, and then we're back to figuring out what we're missing. So, what about that compressed plasma tail? What causes the "helical magnetic field"? Is the coma actually moving, or are the particles stationary, merely showing the effects of bolide having passed through at a hypersonic speed? If the particles are stationary with respect to the surrounding air, there isn't any magnetic field. There may well be a charge separation in the coma, and in the bolide. But the magnetic field might only be associated with the bolide.
Sparky wrote: The meteor just passed through the ionosphere, is trailing electrons, and may have a charge potential differing from that of the ionosphere. Why wouldn't there be a magnetic field around the tail.?
Hey Sparky! In what sense is the meteor trailing electrons? Do you mean to say that a neutral or negative body passed through the positively charged ionosphere, where it started shedding electrons, which are now trailing behind the bolide? If so, I'd disagree, because I don't think that the drift velocity of the electrons would be up to it. In other words, I think that the electrons would get left behind.
POTENTIAL PILOT PROJECT
viscount aero wrote: We're all going to have our own pet theories.
Yes. And we need to lay them out on the table so they can be inspected by all. I'm starting to think that this could turn into a great pilot project. We have some juicy data, the likes of which have never been collected before (e.g., the twin trails). We have mainstream, classical EU, and some variant models in consideration. I "think" that it's narrowly defined enough that we "might" be able to nail it. But I'm as interested in the process as I am in the results. Lloyd and I have been having long conversations about this, and we're looking for a pilot project. He's a bit more strict than me, insisting that hypotheses be broken into individual statements, which are then individually inspected. I'm satisfied if an hypothesis is simply written up, in essay format, so that it can be critiqued. Both of us agree that bulletin board back-n-forth doesn't always produce a finished product. People chat until they get tired of it, and then they chat about something else. But seeing true scientific progress happen in real time is exhilarating. To get that out of it, a document has to be produced, detailing the understanding that was achieved. In other words, it's not enough for the last post in a thread to simply say, "Oh, OK. Now I agree." The heads of agreement have to be written up, so all of the logic is in one place, and later, people don't have to read through a long thread to share in the understanding. So I'd like to suggest that people who have horses in this race should write up their understanding of what happened in Chelyabinsk. We all have different ideas, but I think that among us, we could work this all of the way through.
Sparky wrote: You suggested that an asteroid would be "neutral"? Surely it would have a potential, relative to other bodies.
The interplanetary medium appears to be very nearly neutral, and only slightly positive in charge. So we'd expect an asteroid to have a slight positive charge if it was just sitting there. If it has a detached bow shock, and there is frictional ionization, we'd expect the asteroid itself to have a stronger positive charge, with a negative double-layer on the edge of the bow shock. So what are the implications of those moving charges? Out in deep space, the slight positive charge on the asteroid might be generating an Amperian (i.e., circular) magnetic field around it, by the right-hand rule. This will be of little significance, as there isn't much matter in deep space on which the field can operate.
As the asteroid enters the Earth's atmosphere, frictional ionization comes into play, and the charges are much stronger. Now the asteroid, and everything inside the bow shock, has a strong positive charge, and the electrons at the edge of the bow shock give it a strong negative charge. This creates a complex environment, but what I'm saying is that once the asteroid passes by, the particles in the coma are stationary with respect to their environment. The charge separation lingers, due to whatever resistance is present. But those aren't moving charges.
For example, if a motorboat passes by, it leaves a wake that spreads out in a hyperbolic form. Then there is a straight line of turbulence directly behind the motorboat. We'll call that turbulence the coma. Now, the coma appears to "follow" the motorboat, but is the water actually moving in the direction of the motorboat, or is that just a condition in the water? I'm saying that this "condition" does not involve movement of the particles in the coma. Back to asteroids, if the particles in the coma are not moving in the direction of the asteroid, they aren't generating any magnetic field. The only drift current is the electrons on the outside heading toward the positive ions on the inside. That drift will be perpendicular to the direction of the asteroid, and at a trivial velocity. So I don't see significant magnetic fields there, after the asteroid has passed by. So I'm thinking that the only relevant electrodynamics are right at the bolide itself.
justcurious wrote: This is why Alfven kept insisting that we can't just observe magnetic fields without understanding the currents in space plasma, and vice versa. Currents induce magnetic fields, which can induce secondary currents, which can induce other magnetic fields and so on. It can get quite confusing. That's why all aspects must be taken into consideration together, currents, electric fields, magnetic fields, and how one affects the other and vice versa.
Sure, but we can at least identify the prime movers, and perhaps consider some non-linear feedback from the secondary effects. No we're not going to get an exact solution accurate way past the decimal point. But if we just had a basic model that addressed the salient aspects of the phenomena, we'd have more than we have right now.
justcurious wrote: ... applying the well known and proven laws of electromagnetism (all those funny vector math/calculus equations)...
I no longer take EEs at their word, and I don't defer to elitism. I've seen enough EE constructs that were gibberish that I now insist on inspecting every piece. For example, EEs think that a vacuum is a perfect insulator. But plasma physicists will tell you that a vacuum is a perfect conductor. (That's the opposite of an insulator.) The EEs respond that sometimes electrons can tunnel through a perfect insulator, and then it just seems like it's a conductor, when really it's an insulator, but it has tunnels drilled through it. So when do tunnels form? All the time. So what are the electrons tunneling through -- is it the insulator, or just the limits of the EE paradigm?
The bottom line is that when the "experts" can disagree, so absolutely, on such a simple thing, I don't defer to the elitism of either of them. If I want to understand something, I break it down into the individual components. I'm not saying I'm smarter than anybody else -- I'm not using my brains here -- I'm using my naivete and my patience. So far so good...
NO METEOR ARC DISCHARGES
Sparky wrote: So the meteor is becoming positive? The Earth is considered negative, isn't it? At 50-400v/m? Was the flash equalization?
Not in the fair weather field. In STP air, it takes 3 MV/m to get an arc discharge. The breakdown voltage relaxes with altitude, as a direct function of the density of the air. At 15 km above the surface, it's about 1 MV/m. (BTW, this is why scientists didn't think that blue jets or red sprites were possible -- there shouldn't be enough resistance in the stratosphere to get arc discharges. Only when NASA accidentally photographed one did the evidence become inescapable.) Below the breakdown voltage, you get a corona discharge, or nothing at all. So the fair weather field is nowhere near sufficient for an arc discharge. Of course, that's potentially a bit irrelevant. The resting field between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere is not what determines whether or not the bolide will flash. Rather, the field between the bolide and the Earth is what's important. Pulses in E-fields have been measured as meteoroids passed overhead, in at least one case of sufficient strength to generate corona discharges (i.e., during the Vitim event). But I didn't find any literature citing E-fields sufficient for arc discharges, nor any reports of lightning strikes from bolides.
Sparky wrote: What about the electrons that radar sees?
{That} doesn't prove, or even imply, an electric current. EM waves bounce off of the ionosphere for the same reason, without any sustained current.
viscount aero wrote: Something is very key to understanding why the lingering fiery bulge from explosion #1 remained for so long and powerfully--something that has not yet been determined (but is staring at us in the face). Something kept the material burning and molten/oxidized. The vapor is white, not black. So if it indicates smoke then it is an oxygen rich fire. It may also be a mixture--smoke with water vapor.
"Fire" is recombination, usually both electrons recombining with atomic nuclei, and atoms recombining into molecules. The research that I've been quoting says that frictional ionization is separating charges, thus converting molecular nitrogen and oxygen into plasma. The plasma will recombine into molecules when it gets the chance, and it will produce the fire that we see in the videos, similar to the fire in the railgun videos. (@justcurious: you never answered my question on what produces the huge volume of plasma coming out of railguns, if the whole thing is just the Lorentz force.) Note that "fire" doesn't necessarily mean that something got oxidized. The reformation of molecular nitrogen (N2) will do the same thing, though we could expect the full complement of reactions to occur (N2, N2O, NO, O2). All of these will produce the "fiery" radiation observed. And yes, there could have been a little H2O up there, but I think that it was mostly N/O.
Also note that the frictional ionization model accounts for lingering charge separations, sometimes lasting for tens of minutes, in the comas of bolides. Such separations can only be evidence that some distance was put between the electrons and the atoms, and the resistance of the air then sustained the charge separation. Without such a mechanism, we can expect only a "fireball" bolide, where it is only the bolide that is on fire, not the coma continuing to flare after the bolide is long gone. But in an ionized, detached bow shock, the atoms are stripped of their electrons as they plow into the boundary layer, and this puts some distance between opposite charges, enabling a prolonged charge recombination.
… CHARLES’ BACKGROUND
justcurious wrote: What is your background Charles?
I have a GED and a broadband connection to the Internet.
COMMENTS ON IMAGES
viscount aero wrote: What are your thoughts about my points that I have illustrated with the screen grabs? What electrical events led to 2 distinct moments of brightening?
At least for now, I'm sticking with my "rolling bolide" model, with the detached ionized bow shock, and with a solenoidal magnetic field directing electrons into the bolide. The brightenings would have been flares in the detached bow shock. The reason why I don't think that they were "explosions" (in the sense that everybody else is thinking, i.e., at the bolide itself) is that there would have been evidence in the trail. Something that "exploded" doesn't produce a straight stream of vapor. So I think that the "explosion" was a flare in the detached bow shock, which didn't affect the straight vapor trail coming directly off of the bolide.
1. entry and gradual brightening 2. a sudden massive brightening: explosion #1 3. a slight but noticeable dimming then another super brightening pulse: explosion #2 4. sudden dimming and then reveal of the emerging vapor trail structure once hidden by the luminous explosions 5. 2 distinct areas of bulging in the vapor trail structure, remains of explosion #1 and #2 6. lingering massive bulge area from explosion #1, billowing aerial fire 7. a small but observable glowing tip (#3--what remains of the main projectile) is leading away from and ahead of the lingering vapor and smoke plume 8. remaning double columnar vapor trail with highly discernible pinched section that demarcates the events of explosion 1 and 2
There were three distinct flashes, be it small the third , between #4 and #7,....
May I suggest that we use the dash cam's time-stamp to identify the time of the events? (Or we could use the time from the beginning of the video.) That way, we'll all know exactly which frame we're talking about, when we refer to events. Also, I'm trying to correlate the video with still images. I "think" that the step-down in the twin trails corresponds to the brightest flare, which occurred at 31:02 dash-cam-time-stamp. Do you agree?
The still images, taken seconds/minutes after the bolide had passed, seem to show some evaporation of the trails. So in the image above, does the beginning of the trail correspond to the first large brightening?
Sparky wrote: It has been suggested at TB that a plasma trail would tend to connect the ionosphere with bodies entering Earth's stratosphere, by arc discharge.
Oh OK, I gotcha. That is possible, but it would help if the plasma trail was vertical instead of nearly horizontal. Plasma is a better conductor than gas. So if you have a plasma trail in a pre-existing electric field in a gas, you essentially have just inserted a wire into the gas. This "wire" can then carry a current that the gas wouldn't. So suppose you have a bolide approaching the Earth perpendicular to the surface. In addition to the fireball just from the bolide, you might also get a discharge in the ionosphere~to-surface electric field. Dave Smith made a good case (IMO) for megalightning striking the Columbia Shuttle, where the plasma trail provided the conductor that attracted the discharge. The same thing is crucial in the propagation of a lightning strike in a thunderstorm. The strike starts with a small flash, 100 meters long or so. That should be the end of it, but then there's this superheated plasma channel, 100 meters long, sitting there. Other charge disparities see that plasma channel as a conductor, and they head for it. When the get into the channel and arc to their destination, they re-heat the channel, and extend it. The longer channel is a longer wire that draws a third discharge, from charge disparities even further apart. In this way, the discharge channel grows at its ends until it's several or many kilometers long. This is all due to the conductivity of the plasma.
But this is only relevant to the extent that the plasma channel is parallel to the electric field (i.e., vertical in this case). If you inject a wire into an electric field, perpendicular to the field, it isn't going to carry any current, because there's no voltage drop from one end of the wire to the other. So what was the angle of the Chelyabinsk meteor? It definitely wasn't perfectly horizontal. So there "might" be something to this.
MAGNETIC FIELD CHARGE VELOCITY
Sparky wrote: BTW, how fast must a charged particle be moving, in relation to what, for electric current/magnetic field?
Any movement at all of charged particles will generate a magnetic field. The average drift velocity of electrons that drives electric motors is a couple of inches per hour, relative to the stationary magnets. But when comparing electric and magnetic forces, the drift velocity has to be relativistic (i.e., some substantial percentage of the speed of light) for the magnetic force to modulate the drift vector. So in that current-carrying wire going through the motor, the dominant force is the voltage from one end of the wire to the other. The magnetic pressure driving the motor doesn't alter the path of the electrons much.
METEOR IONIZATION
Sparky wrote: How much of our local environment is composed of dark discharge plasma.
I don't know, but this reminded me of something that was reported at Chelyabinsk, and which is worth noting. I read somewhere that people said that the air smelled like gunpowder. Obviously, they weren't smelling anything from the "explosions". Rather, they were smelling the effects of ionization. Ozone is generally the first by-product around high voltages, but because it is so highly reactive, it doesn't last long, and then you get all kinds of other chemicals (e.g., HO, SO2, etc.) where the ozone leached elements out of compounds exposed to the ionized air. The ionization could have been just from the charge on the bolide (which I don't consider to be likely, since I think that the bolide/coma was net neutral), or more likely, it was from the EMP generated by the break-up.
CUBAN IMAGES
Sparky wrote: check out how the flashes start and stop with the Cuban meteor...
This is very interesting! Correct me if I'm wrong, but now we have videos of two meteors that were sputtering, and before, we had none, is that correct?
LABELING IMAGES
viscount aero wrote: The various dash cams all … have different times on them.
I was thinking that we were all going by the same video (i.e., the guy whose cam tracked the bolide perfectly as he took the right turn). Should we come up with names for these videos, to distinguish between them? Anyway, I agree that we should get all of this synchronized with the audio as well, so we can map the sounds to the flashes that produced them.
Sparky wrote: When I saw the Cuban meteor, whoa ... what is going on? It ignites, then pauses!
Yes, I mean 1) the Chelyabinsk and 2) the Cuban meteor. I didn't know that fireballs acted like that! Thermodynamics can't touch that with a ten foot pole. So this has to be EM sputtering.
justcurious wrote: And won't get annoyed that he doesn't know the fundamentals of electricity or how to do vector math.
Vector math isn't the problem -- this is something that most CAD software developers (like myself) are pretty comfortable with. As concerns the fundamentals of electricity, my whole problem with "educated" folks is that I'm self-educated, which means that I didn't learn all of the same things, all in the same order. If there is something that I missed, that somebody else learned as a freshman in college, then I must not know anything at all. And yet this uneducated know-nothing has ongoing correspondences with research scientists who are encouraging him to continue with his work -- how could that be? So don't dismiss me just yet. There are things that I should know that I don't. Then again, there are things that I shouldn't know that I do. I realize that this makes communicating difficult, but I should like to point out that you can't judge everybody by the highest grade level that they completed, as if it's one-dimensional. Like Sparky said, especially in a multi-disciplinary topic, you're likely to find odd combinations of intelligence and ignorance. To understand plasma, you have to know all disciplines, including fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, particle physics, and electromagnetism, to name a few. Nobody is an expert on all of that stuff. The only way to proceed is simply to take as little for granted as possible, and to insist on clear statements of all positions. Expect people to be wrong on a regular basis. This is scientific research. If we already understood it, it wouldn't be research. But we're not going to wait for the experts to work it out, and then we can get it all from a textbook, never needing to risk making fools of ourselves by venturing opinions before the experts weighed in. Rather, the experts aren't competing, because they've locked down on the standard approach (i.e., quantum mechanics, general relativity, and MHD), where the only redeeming value is that the constructs are so obtuse that it's hard to tell that scientists actually don't understand what's going on. So we're the ones who are pushing the envelope. Lurk & learn if you don't want to risk making a fool of yourself, but this is the frontier, where we keep trying new things until we find what works.
OK folks, I did a bit of photogrammetry, to determine where, exactly, the brightest flash occurred, relative to the trail that is visible after the bolide has passed. Turns out that viscount was exactly right -- the brightest flash occurs as the bolide is at the very end of the fattest part of the trail. The following image is one frame from the series that I used. It's a high-contrast reduction of frame #630 (dash-cam time of 31:01), when nearly the entire image was whited out. The red dashed line represents the path of the bolide, interpolated from the earlier and later frames. The light blue lines are construct lines projected back from successive frames, and which represent the beginning and end of the "fat trail". And the green line is a fitted curve through previous and successive locations of the bolide. So where the red dashed line intersects the green line is where the bolide should actually be in the image. As we can see, they intersect at the latter blue line, meaning that the brightest flare was at the end of the fattest part of the trail.
2013-02-15_Chelyabinsk_explosion.png
The screen caps have been aligned to a common reference point. This should have gotten the location of the bolide from one frame to the next to fall into a nice straight line, except for the fact that the car was moving, it went around a turn, and the dashcam had a fish-eye lens. But I'm satisfied that the curve fitting made up for such irregularities. I'll explain more if anybody is interested. Now we just have to figure out what made it act like that!
viscount aero wrote: The flashes and their corresponding locations within the vapor trail appear counter-intuitive.
I totally agree. I'm of the opinion at this point that it wasn't the flashes that left the trails. Rather, the process that left the trails terminated catastrophically, issuing the flashes. The first time it did this (i.e., frame #630, time 31:01.5), the whole thing got scaled way down, from the large to the small twin trails. The second time it did this (i.e., frame #673, time 31:03.0), the twin trails ceased to exist. A couple of remnants of the bolide continued on, the largest of which becoming visible in frame #725, time 31:05.0. But at that point, the bolide no longer had the where-with-all to flash and to leave a trail.
METEOR EXPLOSIONS
So I'm not thinking of the flaming trails as part of the explosions per se. Rather, whatever left the trails also caused the explosions. I also think that there had to be a physical separation between the aspect of the process that left the trails, and the aspect that produced the flare-ups. The reason is that at the point of the explosions, it just doesn't look like explosions happened there. Rather, it looks like the fire simply went out. So I keep going back to the Coulomb explosion inside a detached bow shock. The bolide itself was leaving the trails (perhaps because of the "rolling bolide dynamo" thing?). But when the Coulomb forces became too great, the thing disintegrated. Mass loss in the bolide itself reduced the size of the trails. And the positively charged matter that was pushed away from the bolide by the Coulomb force then recombined with the negative sheath, producing a huge flash. But the charge recombination out at the edge of the bow shock wouldn't have disrupted the trail being left by the bolide.
In other words, if you light a stick of dynamite and throw it through the air, and then quickly grab your super-slow-motion camera to get it all on film, you'll record a trail of smoke from the fuse, and then ba-boom you'll get a huge cloud from the explosion, thoroughly dispersing the trail from the fuse. But what if it's like fireworks, where there is a propellant to get the explosive up into the air, and then there is a small explosion to disperse the components, and then the components explode elsewhere, for their own reasons? The big oh-ah display never disrupted the trail from the launching propellant, because they were a long ways away from there when they exploded.
So I'm thinking that the bolide disintegrated due to the Coulomb force, and after the matter had radiated outward, to the edge of the detached bow shock, it ran into negative charges, where charge recombination produced a huge flash. Mass loss due to the disintegration reduced or eliminated the trails, but that's because all of the matter was busy elsewhere partaking in a flare up.
ANTI-MHD
justcurious wrote: I was under the impression that Charles was some sort of Big Banger doing a Masters in "magnetic reconnection" LOL.
At first I didn't understand how you could have gotten that impression. Then I got to thinking that it was because of the way I (sometimes) integrate fluid dynamics and electromagnetism. Yet I consider MHD to be fighting words! Mainstream scientists are infatuated with MHD, because the way they do it, it's an abstraction, and they really like abstractions, and because it sounds really complicated, which makes them sound smart. but what I'm doing, and what they're doing, have never been in the same zip code. I'm attempting to identify the actual physical forces, and to sum up all of the effects. So just because mainstream MHD is all fairy dust doesn't mean that any consideration of the interplay between such forces is gibberish.
justcurious wrote: I did mention earlier that a lot of the footage of fiereballs out on the net shows flaring and also flashing (like a camera flash).
Oh, I didn't see that. I thought that fireballs were generally steady-state -- my bad.
justcurious wrote: And check out this transformer exploding, and the toroid cloud it creates. Explain that!
OK. That has nothing to do with electricity, except as the heat source. An internal short overheated the hydraulic fluid used to insulate the high-voltage switches inside the transformer, to the point that the hydrostatic pressure caused the failure of the containment. Past that point, it's just a fluid above its flash point that was exposed to air, and erupted in flames. The updraft so created encountered friction on its outside, slowing its ascent, while the interior of the updraft was buffered from such friction. The speed difference induced a standard boundary layer vortex. In the case of a cylindrical updraft, the "boundary layer" wraps all of the way around the cylinder, forming a toroidal vortex. Once the angular momentum is established, the toroidal vortex will generally stay organized, until the hot air has reached its equilibrium level in the atmosphere. The same sort of toroidal vortex sometimes forms in the steam rising from Mt. Aetna, and no, that's not a toroidal plasmoid. It's just a standard fluid dynamic phenomenon.
dahlenaz wrote: I would put these videos up on the web but...
I'll take your word for it. I agree that there wasn't a bolide-to-ground discharge. I think that the flashes and the glowing trails were evidence of ionization and charge recombination having to do just with the bolide's movement through the air (i.e., the so-called "frictional charging", or what others loosely refer to as triboelectrics). The bolide broke up due to the failed covalent bonding, and due to electrostatic repulsion, both of which resulted from the core becoming positively charged (with a negative double-layer around the outside). So EM is still central to an accurate description of the event. But it wasn't EU-style megalightning from the bolide down to the ground.
meemoe_uk wrote:> But it wasn't EU-style megalightning from the bolide down to the ground. Why not? For months I haven't seen a speck of evidence or reason to suggest anything other than this most simple and intuitive explanation.
Analysis of fragments that fell to the Earth indicate that the bolide was an ordinary chondrite, made up of iron and olivine, making it at least a good (if not excellent) conductor. In a good conductor, any net electric charge will always be found at the surface. If there was enough potential for lightning, it would have discharged only the surface potentials -- it wouldn't have drilled through the bolide. Hence the disintegration of the bolide cannot be attributed to bolide-to-ground lightning, which at best would have been just a surface flare. In the more general sense, a lot of bolides have been captured on film, but none of the film shows any lightning strikes. The apparent flare-up between the bolide and the ground in the Chelyabinsk video was demonstrated to be an artifact of the digital camera that was used. So the physics isn't there, and the observational evidence isn't there. That doesn't mean that the bolide wasn't electromagnetically active. It is well-known that bolides separate charges. But the charge separation is entirely within the context of the bolide and its coma, not between the bolide and the atmosphere above it, below it, or the Earth below it.
justcurious wrote: The fact that there is no lighting does not mean that there is no current through the meteor. As the footage shows, there is corona/glow discharge hence the circuit completes in the surrounding air, as opposed to a filament-like lightning structure. In other words, the lack of lightning does not prove that there is not a circuit forming from the ionosphere (or whatever atmospheric layer marked the beginning of the plasma tail) to the air surrounding the meteor.
It's true that the high-temp plasma in the coma could serve as a conduit for a current, and that there is a fair weather field of 100 V/m through the ionosphere, mesosphere, and stratosphere (where the bolide finally disintegrated). But what effect would a discharge from the ionosphere to the stratosphere have on the bolide? It sounds like you're suggesting that the bolide simply got in the way of an atmospheric discharge. But I don't see why that would cause the disintegration of the bolide. When a conductor in the air (such as an airplane) gets struck by lightning, the current doesn't go through the conductor -- it goes around the outside, generally having little effect on the conductor itself. This is why airplanes keep flying after getting struck. It's also why many people have survived getting struck by lightning -- the current traveled across the surface of the skin, instead of taking the more direct path through the excellent conductivity of the human body, resulting in skin burns, but not bodily disintegration. This is because the valence electrons on the surface of an object are freer to move than electrons in the same band in the interior of the object. So we can say with confidence that an atmospheric discharge going past a bolide would not have had a significant effect on the bolide itself.
OK, now you guys have enough pieces on the table to build a model. I still don't agree, but it's worth laying out anyway:
The fair weather field, through the ionosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere is 100 V/m.
The bolide disintegrated at an altitude of about 23.3 km, which is in the stratosphere. From there up to the ionosphere is roughly 300 km.
300 km * 100 V/m = 30 MV
The plasma in the coma of the bolide reduced the resistance of the air. We don't know by how much, but let's just assume that it was sufficient for the 100 V/m to be above the breakdown voltage, enabling a discharge.
The absence of a visible lightning-like discharge through the coma is explained by the fact that it was shielded from us by the visible particles in the coma.
If a discharge occurred, it would have dropped the resistance down to nothing, meaning that the entire voltage in that 300 km would have been exposed to the ground.
The contention is that the potential then arced the rest of the way through the atmosphere (i.e., the last 23.3 km).
The bolide just happened to be at the leading edge of the plasma trail, and was disintegrated by pulsed electric fields in the discharge as it propagated down to the ground.
The problems that I have with this are:
30 MV isn't enough to arc through 23.3 km of air. The potential between the anvil of a thunderstorm and the ground can exceed 100 MV without a discharge occurring.
There weren't any eye-witness reports, or photographs, of a bolide-to-ground lightning strike. (This isn't a huge problem, since it's possible that the strike was obscured by the disintegration of the bolide.)
Nothing on the ground was blown up by the proposed lightning. (It might have struck in the woods somewhere?)
Lightning has never blown up any rocks, ever.
In numerous video captures of bolides, a bolide-to-ground discharge has never been observed.
No one observed a red sprite at the upper end of the channel. (Perhaps it was there, but was too fleeting?)
Most of this is circumstantial, but I think that the first point is legitimate. It would take a lot more than 30 MV to arc through 23.3 km of air. It is possible that it wouldn't have been an instantaneous arc, but rather, a propagated discharge, like a real lightning strike, which grows by stepped leaders, 100 m at a time. But then the problem is that strikes like that take several seconds to propagate all of the way to the ground, and this increases the chances of being visually observed and/or photographed, which it was not, and has not ever been. So I still disagree, but it's still worth considering. And I don't believe in the exclusivity principle, where right/wrong is a winner-take-all scenario. The conductivity of the coma needs to be taken into account, even if it isn't the whole story.
CharlesChandler wrote: Lightning has never blown up any rocks, ever.
Juergens wrote: And, just as one example of the excavating prowess of electricity, A. W. Grabau cites this occurrence: "In Fetlar, one of the Shetland Islands, a solid mass of rock 105 feet long, 10 feet broad, and in some places more than 4 feet high, was in an instant torn from its bed by lightning and broken into three large and several small fragments... [One fragment], 28 feet long, 17 feet broad, and 5 feet in thickness, was hurled across a high point of rock to a distance of 50 yards. Another broken mass, about 40 feet long, was thrown still farther, but in the same direction, and quite into the sea...." (41).------http://saturniancosmology.org/juergensa.htm
OK, I stand corrected on that one. (As a sidenote, this is an interesting factoid for my earthquake model, which has electric currents running through microfractures in continental plates, creating explosive effects known as fault ruptures. The model is well-founded already, but it's nice to have surface-level observations as evidence of the same phenomenon.) But I'm still not convinced that an atmospheric discharge made it all of the way to the ground, and thereby could have disintegrated the bolide in the process.
ELVES & SPRITES
Don Scott wrote: Given what we now know, it seems likely that electric charge is transferred from the solar plasma to the Van Allen Belts and thence onto the upper atmosphere. The ELVES and Sprites continue the path downward, and the familiar lightning stroke to earth completes the path. All of this in addition to the auroral current path discovered by Birkeland. Therefore, ionised paths, some almost permanently in place and others that come and go, provide a direct link from the Earth’s surface to the "Electric Sky" (Scott, The Electric Sky, 2006, p 135).------http://fgservices1947.wordpress.com/200 ... d-weather/
What we actually now know is that blue jets and red sprites are indeed closely associated with cloud-to-ground lightning, but the relationship is the other way around from the way Scott has it. The +CG lightning occurs first, elevating dozens of coulombs, in the form of free electrons, up to the anvil of the thunderstorm. The electrons then are drawn further by the electrostatic attraction to the positively charged ionosphere, with little resistance in the thin stratosphere to slow them down. So the prime mover is the +CG lightning. If solar plasma increases the positive charge of the ionosphere, that will help, by increasing the fair weather field above the thunderstorm. But the sequence of events starts in the thunderstorm.
Sparky wrote: Electric current, flowing through an object, and grounding omni-directionally would probably flash as a corona and be dispersed over a huge area, ie, the fog.
Ah, but a corona discharge would have been violet, deep blue, or possibly orange, and it would have been faint, and tough to see in daylight, especially if facing more-or-less in the direction of the Sun, as was the case in the Korolev video that we all studied. There is a limit to how much current you can pump through a corona discharge before you actually get some real ohmic heating, which affects the transition to an arc discharge. In daylight, they're tough to see. So the extremely bright, white flashes were definitely arc discharges, because of their intensity, and because of their color. And the "fog" between the bolide and the ground was just an artifact of the camera's inability to handle such a wide range of luminosities. Look at the very beginning of the video -- you see the same fog long before the bolide arrives. That's just a sort of lens flare from the sunrise.
Sparky wrote: I don't remember what you said about the flashes, but will check on that again.
I think that the flashes were Coulomb explosions, where the excessive positive charge developed in the bolide weakened the crystal lattice, and introduced electrostatic repulsion, to the point that large volumes of individual ions were liberated. The proposed charge separation mechanism has the bolide surrounded by a cloud of positive charge, with a negative double-layer on the outside. So the charge recombination would have been the ions meeting up with the electrons in the double-layer around the outside. This explains why there was a huge "explosion", and yet the smoke trails don't show any evidence of an explosion -- the trails are more or less continuous, with a distinct step-down in size at the point of the largest explosion (i.e., frame #630 in the Korolev video), and then the smaller trails terminate at the point where there was a smaller "explosion" (i.e., frame #673). If the explosion was right at the bolide, the trails would look like something exploded there, not like something was burning as it flew through the air, leaving trails. If the "explosion" was charge recombination at the outer edge of a detached shock front, it wouldn't have made fireworks out of the bolide itself, with a spherical ejecta pattern. So the bolide would have just kept going, burning away for a different set of reasons, and leaving smoke trails as it went. The step-down, from thick trails to thin ones, occurs because of mass loss in the Coulomb explosion, but obviously, the structure of the bolide persisted, as the twin pattern continued. So whatever caused the explosions was distinctly different from whatever caused the smoke trails. BTW, frames 660~739 do show the distinctive violet color of a corona discharge, but only around the outside of the trails -- this doesn't project to the ground. Here's the photogrammetry that I did, to determine where exactly the explosions occurred relative to the beginning, end, and the step-down in the smoke trails {no longer available}.
Here's another fireball, this time over Cusco, Peru, 2011-08-25, that is close enough to see details of the tail, and which is also symmetrically bipolar.
According to scientists, the huge chunk, weighting hundreds of metric tons, is buried under a 2.5-meter (8.2-foot) layer of silt.
How did the "meteorite" get buried under 2.5 meters of silt? And I agree with Gary about the hole in the ice. The high-velocity impact of a meteorite "weighing several hundreds of metric tons" would have created waves that would have fractured the ice across the entire lake. This sounds like a science funding scam to me.
While the biggest prize so far eluded the divers, they have found eight smaller fragments of the meteorite, the biggest one weighing just under 5kg, which is currently the largest fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite found.
My guess is that the smaller fragments will be showing up on e-bay soon, while the larger fragments will be going into private collections. And the London-based marketing firm that is managing this told the divers to not find the big one yet -- it will go for a lot more money at auction if they have to dig really deep for it. Are any of these things actually from the meteorite? Here's the marketing plan: buy a boulder cheap, and if you can get a scientist to certify that it's a meteorite, it will instantly double in value. If not, carve it up into pieces, give them names, and sell them as pet rocks. And where did the Ruskies learn such free market tactics? From us!
