© 2016 Michael Clarage
Our understanding of our solar system has changed so much in the past few decades, that I am standing back and more often asking myself, well, what is the solar system? What are all these planets? And what about all these other planetary systems that the Kepler telescope has discovered? Thousands of star systems, each with their own planets. Many of those star systems are a surprise to contemporary astrophysics because a lot of them do not look very much like our solar system. Before we had any idea what other star systems looked like, we assumed, as is reasonable, that other solar systems would all look like ours. That turns out to not be the case. Some stars have giant planets orbiting very close to them. Binary star systems have planets, which, when I was in school was explained to us how that would be impossible. One system discovered has a planet that takes tens of thousands of years to orbit. As we collect more data about star systems we need to open our minds to what the data is telling us.
Many astronomers were actually surprised that other stars are surrounded by planets. Myself, and many others, had the opposite response: I would have been very surprised if we found that the other stars were not also surrounded by planets. I am not surprised because of my understanding of what is a star, what is a solar system.
Consider this diagram. I did not invent this diagram, it is part of very old cosmological systems. It is a factual diagram. We all know about the existence of: cells, people, planets, stellar systems, galaxies. But the diagram is more than facts. It conveys relationship. It conveys an emotional knowledge. The facts are arranged, so to speak, underneath a larger idea. Each of these entities on the diagram is part of a larger world, and is composed of smaller worlds. When facts are arranged under a larger truth, then we can understand the facts. One meaning of “understanding” is when facts stand under a larger truth.
If we are going to understand the data we are gathering about different kinds of planetary systems, we will need to also understand the functions of such systems in the larger world of the galaxy. If we don’t understand the various roles star systems can play in the galactic world, then we will never be able to understand what is a solar system.
To explore that statement further, we can look the other direction in the diagram, and ask about cells. You and I have the benefit of knowing a lot about cells. But in 1860, when the leading naturalist of the day, Ernst Heakel, was asked should young naturalists study cells, he answered, “absolutely not – they are uninteresting blobs of protoplasm. There is nothing useful to be learned.” He said that in part because in his cosmology cells played no part, so he had no way of understanding what he was looking at. A lot has been learned since 1860, and now we know so much about cells that it takes years of study to get a grasp of how many different kinds of cells there are, and all the different functions they play in the body of an animal. Each cell in your body performs very important functions. There are no cells your body that have no function.
Coming back to this diagram, if one starts with a proper cosmology, then one can ask about function, and then one stands a chance of understanding what one is looking at. If we are not asking about function, we will never really know what we are looking at.
One of the functions of planets is to transform solar energy. And every planet does it differently. One aspect of such transformation is weather. Every planet has weather. But every planet has very different weather. On Earth, all the solar influences interact with our atmosphere, magnetosphere, lithosphere. That interaction results in lightning
Rain, blue skies, white clouds, soft dew that covers your grass in the morning.
The weather on Jupiter is different.
But do not think for a moment that the weather on Jupiter is any less intricate than here on Earth. Just as here on Earth weather encompasses the delicate opening of a flower and also the violent explosion of lightning, so also there must be as much variety of gentleness and strength on Jupiter. And Saturn. And Venus. So even though all the planets share the same Sun, the uniqueness of each planet results in different types of transformations of Solar energy.
Let us take this idea, of planets transforming a sun’s energy, and look at just the electrical aspect of that. Let us look at the entire solar system as an electrical transformer.
This is a beautiful sketch of our solar system. The Sun is in the center. The entire body of the system is moving through the galaxy. And each planet is revolving around the Sun at a different speed. This picture is not to scale, but it gives you a good feeling for the solar system as coils within coils. Think of the planets not as points in space, but think of what their orbits look like over the span of hundreds, or thousands of years. Picture not the planet, but the orbit of the planet. And picture that orbit as a wire, which is electrically conductive, and can be part of an electrical circuit. This is not so far from what we know, as each planet is surrounded by highly conductive plasmas. Most of the planets in our solar system have strong magnetic fields, which means there are strong electric currents flowing in and out of planets. We know that the Earth has regularly about ten million amperes flowing in and out at the poles at any given time.
Here is the same sketch of our solar system from a different point of view. Video version = very cool
]
As centuries of our Earth years go by, the inner planets will make many turns around the Sun, the outer planets will make fewer turns. In our solar system, seen as coils of wire, the inner planets make many turns around the Sun, while the outer planets are wound fewer times. Taking the planets Mercury through Neptune (sorry Pluto) we see there are eight coils around the central, primary of the Sun. The outer coil of Neptune goes round the Sun every 165 Earth years. In that time the other planets will orbit the Sun these number of times:
The image I am describing is well known to every electrical engineer – that of a center-core alternating current electrical transformer. The solar system as electrical transformer is an idea that we need to explore if we are going to understand functions. Since Faraday’s time we have learned much about electrical transformers. Electrical transformers is an idea that everyone should try to know something about. It will change the way you see the world.
In 1830, Michael Faraday discovered something that has completely changed our world. He showed the first examples of electromagnetic induction. This picture is one of the Faraday’s original coils. This is an iron ring. You can see the black iron underneath the coils. Around that soft iron ring he wound wire, in two sections. On the left, covering a little more than half the ring, is one section of a wire coming in on the upper left, then winding around the iron ring about a hundred times, then leaving. On the right of the ring there is another wire coming in, winding around the ring, then leaving. The surprise, the magic that changed all human history, was the finding that if you quickly surge current through the left wire, that induced a surge of current in the wire on the right. In the world of electricity and magnetism, changes that take place in one location will cause changes in another location, by “induction”. Changes in one place “induce” changes in another place.
We will look at just one more idea from transformer theory, then we will turn our attention back to stars and planets. This is the idea of “step up” or “step down” transformation of electrical activity.
Here is a more schematic drawing of Faraday’s induction experiment. Notice that on the left, the wire wraps around the core twice as much as on the right. Because of this, voltage changes on the left will induce voltages on the right that are only half as strong. Because the induced voltage changes on the right side are only half those driving from the left, this is called a step down transformer. Voltages are stepped down because there are fewer turns of the coil on the right.
The ratio of the voltage fluctuations on each side is the ratio of the number of turns the wires make around the core. If the left hand side had 100 times the number of turns on the right, then what ever voltage fluctuations came in on the left would induce 1/100 the size fluctuations on the right.
I know that the electrical engineers in the audience are miles ahead of my explanation, so thanks for sitting through that, but now we are hopefully all at a similar starting point.
We now take the idea of electrical transformer and bring it to the level of stars and planets. In this picture the Sun is the driving force, the primary coil. The Sun is constantly sending out voltage and current fluctuations. These induce voltage and current fluctuations around the Earth and each planet. This is an observed fact, not some fanciful theory.
For example, planets with strong magnetic fields, like Jupiter and Earth, take X-Ray emissions on the surface of the Sun and transform those into radio emissions around their equator. Here are low frequency radio emissions around Jupiter resulting from different fluxes of very high frequency X-Rays emitted from the Sun.
Now let us return to our image of the solar system, as a collection of nested coils of wire. We will apply the very basic idea of the electrical transformer with different numbers of turns for different coils. Planets that go many times around will transform solar influences to higher voltages. Planets that go fewer times around will transform solar influences into lower voltages. From a very simple analysis, looking at the relative times each planet’s orbit turns around the Sun, we get these numbers for the voltages transformed by each planet. The first column is the number of times each planet goes round the Sun in the time it takes Neptune to go around once. You see that the Earth coils round the Sun 165 times, Jupiter only 14 times. We are taking this as the relative number of times the wire wraps around the transformer core.
The second column of numbers gives the relative voltages transformed by each planet. Those planets that have more turns should have higher electrical tensions. For the sake of argument, we will assign 250,000 volts to the Earth, as this is roughly the voltage difference on Earth between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere. Then Jupiter, with its fewer number of turns round the Sun should only be sustaining 20,000 volts. You can take this as a prediction, but so far we only have measurements for Earth. Maybe when the Cassini space probe dives into Saturn’s atmosphere we might get some measurements there.
Of course things in the solar system are much more complicated. I have said it before – the solar system is just as complex as the human body. So all of this is certainly a vast simplification. But it is in the right direction. It will get us thinking about things in the right way to make new understanding about all planetary systems.
One of the main characteristics of electrical transformers is their oscillation. Most transformers only work with alternating current. It is the electromagnetic breathing in and out of the primary coil that drives the breathing in and out of the secondary coils. Here is a graph of the pulsations of the solar magnetic field. The larger cycle is the 22-year sunspot cycle. The smaller wiggles are the yearly rotation period of the Earth around the Sun. And, as you can see, there are smaller wiggles still.
In alternating current electrical transformers, oscillations from the primary coil induce predictable oscillations in all the secondary coils. If the Sun is sending out this oscillating pattern, then what is being induced in each of the planets?
I was getting motivated to start experimenting with some of this, so I started building my solar system.
Here are three “planets”, represented by coils of wire. The very center is my primary-Sun coil, into which I will push a driving alternating current. The next coil out is about 2 inches across, and has magnet wire wrapped about 20 times round. The relative sizes of the rings obeys Bode’s Law, where the diameter of the next orbit is roughly twice the diameter of the one inside. The number of turns of wire in each planet-coil obeys Kepler’s Law. In other words, this little wire setup mimics Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus over about 240 years.
Now hook up an alternating current to the center “Sun” coil, and measure what sort of signal is induced in our “Jupiter”, “Saturn”, and “Uranus” coils. Here is a picture of the full setup.
Here is the voltage trace for two of the planets. I am driving the inner, Sun-coil with an alternating current, and then displaying the induced voltage oscillations inside the outer planet-coils.
This system had many strong resonances. Just me moving around close to the coils would cause large changes in the voltages.
I was surprised when the voltage measured in each “planet” coil was roughly the same. The inner planet, with its much larger number of turns, I thought, should have a much larger voltage – because voltage is proportional to the number of turns.
Looking again at Faraday’s law of induction, I was reminded that induced voltage also involves the total magnetic flux through the area in question. The size of the voltage step-up or step-down also depends upon the size of the orbit. Interesting, the area of the planets orbit increases in a way that the decreasing number of turns just about cancel out. Kepler’s Law plus Bode’s Law means that the inner planets, even though they take many more trips around the Sun, have proportionately smaller orbital areas for the Sun’s magnetic flux to fill. In other words, I might modify my original statement and now say that each planet experiences roughly the same induced voltage.
That was as far as I got with the experiment. The next stage would require factoring in the size and conductivities of the planets ionospheres. And maybe someone else would like to take this whole idea furnter.
Thank you for letting me share some of my thoughts and explorations. I know that seeing the solar system as a center-core electrical transformer is a huge simplification. But I also know that it is the right way to look at things. If we are going to understand solar systems, or planets, or galaxies, we have to be more flexible with our sense of time. What our eyes and instruments tell us is enormously biased by the speed at which we experience the flow of time. Just because you and I think it takes a long time for Jupiter to go round the Sun, does not mean that the Sun experiences it that way. To the Sun, a thousand years of our time passes in the blink of an eye. What to us appears a tiny point moving slowly in a circle, will to the Sun appear a continuous, shimmering, conductive sheath. The solar system actually is an alternating current electrical transformer. It’s just that so far it is much too complicated for us to make sense of. But we will get there.
I also want to convey how important it is to look for function. Our universe is quite economical. Very little is wasted. Systems of great complexity are nested within each other. That nesting is never random. Each citizen of the smaller worlds plays very specific roles within the larger world it inhabits. Two hundred years ago many scientists thought cells were unstructured blobs that had no specific purposes. Now we know every cell type performs many unique, and completely necessary functions for the body. Every few months, cellular biologists discover a new type of cell in our body, that performs a new, previously unknown function. At present, no scientist would dare say that cells in your body have no purpose. This is a very big change from 1860 and the words of Haeckel. Astrophysics is lagging behind biology in this regard. If astronomy is going to catch up, we must begin cultivating the idea that different kinds of solar systems have different functions within a galaxy.
Thank you.
Hi Michael, I’m afraid orbiting planets cannot be compared with a number of turns of a transformer. The issue is that Faraday requires that a coil should cover a closed surface through which a magnetic field passes (‘an included magnetic flux’). If a current would flow in the same orbit circle as the planet and only in one direction, than the magnetic field due to that current can interact with e/m fields of the sun (when comparing with your selfmade test coils). But maybe I did not fully understand your reasoning.
I would also assume that the rotation of the earth (not its orbit) may cause somehow the large currents at the poles.
Further, in your table you are assuming the same current goes to each of the planets. I would think that Mercury gets a much larger current (electron-ion flow from the sun) than e.g. Neptune.