Reply To: Investment risk

[jjohnson]

Using moons of gas giant planets could be an interesting way of putting focused plasma phenomena together with real life data, photos and observations, as well as a lot of papers, on charged bodies that move within the magnetospheres and plasma toruses (I don’t like ‘torii’), creating polar electric currents that close the circuit between moon and planet, light up the atmospheric gases in the auroral ovals, and produce electric discharge machining and Joule heating via telluric currents at the moons’ discharge locales.

Peratt’s text, Physics of the Plasma Universe, Springer Verlag, 1992, in discussing domains of cosmic plasmas, in 1.2.3 Plasmas in the Solar System, discussed the magnetospheres around Jupiter and Saturn well before Cassini visited Saturn. The Jupiter-Io plasma torus is discussed. In Chapter 4, Electric Fields in Cosmic Plasma, 4.6.2 Plasma Gun Arc Discharges is pertinent and useful to someone who knows little about how a dense plasma focus is created. It is well documented and referenced with good diagrams and photos. This phenomenon is then presented in Example 4.1 Electric Arcs on the Jovian satellite, Io, with worked examples of the electric field due to the co-rotation of its plasma torus. Illustrations of Prometheus’s plume, both obliquely from above and silhouetted above Io’s limb, noting that the current flow is outward from “volcano” or the vent known as Prometheus – i.e., Prometheus is an anode.

Cassini’s observations of Enceladus and its “icy geysers” around the south pole region, and just as important, its measurements of a “magnetic flux tube” constituting the northern half of the electric circuit between this little moon and Saturn’s northern auroral oval (with “hot spots” or “footprints” seen in X-ray light where the flux tube isincident upon the planet. Anomalously warm temperatures were reported around the “Tiger Stripes” near Enceladus’s south pole. While some papers have argued for tidal heating, that appears to be a stretch becasue the predicted heating by that method was found to be far less than actual, so the exploration of Joule heating via telluric or sub-surface electric current flows should at least be considered as a reasonable heating explanation, given the failure of the tidal heating hypothesis. Even today, Carolyn Porco is characterizing Enceladus’s ionized discharge as consisting of icy particles, water vapor and molecules”, when in fact it is all this matter in an ionized state, as the plasma instrumentation has clearly recorded.

The outer 2 gas giants also have active magnetospheres, polar aurors and unusual activity photographed on their moons’ surfaces by the Voyager spacecraft as it flew by. Very little else has been measured out there, due to deficiencies in budget and the extreme range represented by these planets. Neptune is 4 and a quarter light hours out. I think an interesting case study of any of these might be a good intro to plasma dense focus phenomena and real life applicability to a series of electrical events right here in our solar system, with on-going studies by NASA and ESA. Best of luck with your project.

Jim