Browsing twitter recently I ran across this short video of a solar flare shot a few days ago.
After asking for some clarification on frame rate I was really intrigued.
I made a rough calculation of the height the “Earth sized gob of plasma” descended between 2 frames of the video. It’s over 18,000km if I got my trigonometry right.
I consulted an online tool which calculates gravity from freefall parameters. The answer it provided implies the surface gravity on the Sun, assuming the plasma blob was in freefall under gravity rather than being pulled to surface by a mighty EM force, is in excess of the traditional estimate of 274m/s-2 by 4000m/s-2. I’m sure my calcs must be in error, because a 1.4 million km diameter hunk of Uranium wouldn’t generate that much gravity!
So I’ve made a huge computational error, or the framerate isn’t what Andrew said it was, or the Sun’s core is a superdense white dwarf and Oliver Manuel was right all along that the Sun’s matter has been re-accreted after a previous supernova event and that’s why the distribution of heavy elements in the solar system is what it is.
Oldbrew tells me he ran across a 2008 NASA article saying they were aware that something about the Sun’s gravity was anomalous and they were looking into it. Since then, radio silence.
Speculations on a postcard to the usual address.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
May 13, 2020 at 05:18PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 