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THOTH 
A Catastrophics Newsletter

VOL III, No. 1
Jan 15, 1999

EDITOR:  Amy Acheson
PUBLISHER:  Michael Armstrong
LIST MANAGER:  Brian Stewart 

CONTENTS
STATE OF THE UNIVERSE: 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . by Mel Acheson
MARS ROCKS IN ANCIENT MYTH AND MODERN SCIENCE:  Part I of II
By Ev Cochrane
MERCURY IN MYTHOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Dave Talbott
SUPERFLARES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Wal Thornhill
DID THEY REALLY SAY THAT?. . . . . . . . . . . . by Wal Thornhill
ELECTRIC UNIVERSE PREDICTION CONFIRMED . . . . . by Wal Thornhill
----------------------------------------------

STATE OF THE UNIVERSE: 1999 
by Mel Acheson

Uniformism is dead.  It exhausted itself fighting Velikovsky.  
The Gould-Eldredge saltationism punctured holes in it.  The 
Alvarez asteroid blew it away.  In its vacant territory roam a 
multitude of catastrophist ideas:  Clube and Napier's comet, to 
mention only one, which, significantly, accepts myths as 
evidence.  And the worms of revisionist theories are digesting 
the corpse: for example, Prigogine's demonstration of the 
uncertainty at the heart of dynamics.

On the larger, public stage, the image of authority long 
associated with uniformist theories has faded.  Kuhn discovered 
that science progresses by way of a succession of paradigms.  
Foucault articulated the pervasiveness of politics which the 
Velikovsky affair, among others, revealed.

And on the smaller stage of evidence, the flood of surprising, 
difficult-to-explain, or downright anomalous observations in 
recent decades is carving out a wider and deeper theoretical 
channel:  Arp's quantised quasars and Thornhill's plasma-machined 
planets, to name only two.

The uniformist paradigm has already shifted.  A market in 
paradigms has developed.  A multiplicity of meanings, each with 
its domain of validity, allows a choice of appropriate truths for 
particular conditions.

The uniformist ideal was a Theory of Everything, which, in 
practice, would have been imposed on everything and on everyone.  
It has simply been overwhelmed by a huge and complex universe and 
by the organic connection of scientific truth to the human 
necessity for many viewpoints.

Mel Acheson
thoth at whidbey.com

----------------------------------------------

MARS ROCKS IN ANCIENT MYTH AND MODERN SCIENCE:  Part I of II
By Ev Cochrane

[ed note:  this article was originally printed in AEON: Vol IV No 2, pg 57-73.
Footnotes are available there.]

On June 28th, 1911, the inhabitants of Nakhla, Egypt, were 
treated to a spectacular meteor shower.  As it turns out, one of 
these rocks almost certainly came from the planet Mars, nearly 50 
million miles away.  The difficulty in dislodging a meteorite 
from the red planet, much less transporting one to Earth, has 
prompted several noted authorities to doubt their Martian origin.  
The meteorite's chemical imprint, however, not unlike the DNA-
evidence in a murder trial, leaves little doubt about its place 
of origin.  Nor did this rock alone make the journey.  To date, 
ten Martian meteorites have been identified, half of them being 
observed falls.  The recognition that these rocks hail from Mars 
has been called one of the most important findings of the space 
age.

Meteorites have long aroused interest, being objects of worship 
in numerous ancient cultures, their heavenly origin no doubt 
contributing to their numinous appeal.  That meteorites were 
extraterrestrial in nature was certainly known to the skywatchers 
of Mesopotamia, China, and Greece.  At some point, however, this 
knowledge became lost.  Thomas Jefferson, for example, was in the 
majority in rejecting the possibility that rocks could fall from 
the sky.  Confronted with a report of a meteorite-fall in 
Connecticut, Jefferson is said to have quipped: "It is easier to 
believe that Yankee professors would lie than that stones would 

fall from heaven."  And this was in 1807!

Reviewing the history of meteoritics, Dodd commented upon this 
strange turn of events:

"That meteorites came from beyond the Earth is both a very old 
and a new idea…The ancient Greeks and Chinese also regarded 
meteorites as objects from the heavens, but this perception, like 
so much else of value, was lost to Western culture during the 
long intellectual night that we call the Dark Ages…Although 
several important meteorite falls were recovered and described 
during the second half of the eighteenth century, the few men who 
suggested that they came from beyond the Earth were either 
ridiculed or ignored."

It is not surprising, perhaps, given this history, that disbelief 
and hostility originally greeted the proposal that meteorites 
could make their way to Earth from Mars.

The idea that meteorites from Mars could impact Earth is not new.  
Several decades prior to these relatively recent and wholly 
unexpected developments, Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that rocks 
from Mars had only recently menaced the Earth.  Velikovsky drew 
this conclusion upon the basis of ancient testimony, which 
described Mars as participating in spectacular cataclysms 
involving the Earth and various neighboring bodies.  In Worlds in 
Collision, Velikovsky described the events associated with the 
near passage of Venus and Mars as follows:

"When Mars clashed with Venus, asteroids, meteorites, and gases 
were torn from [Venus' comet-like tail], and began a semi-
independent existence, some following the orbit of Mars, some 
other paths.  These swarms of meteorites with their gaseous 
appendages were newborn comets; flying in bands and taking 
various shapes, they made an uncanny impression.  Those which 
followed Mars closely looked like a troop following their leader.  
They also ran along different orbits, grew quickly from small to 
giant size, and terrorized the peoples of the earth."

Velikovsky's thesis, needless to say, met with nearly unanimous 
hostility and disbelief among astronomers.  A reappraisal of the 
evidence bearing on the question, however, suggests that 
Velikovsky deserves great credit for anticipating the Martian 
origin of certain meteorites.  And if the author of Worlds in 
Collision was on the right track with regards to the spectacular 
circumstances behind the arrival of these meteorites, their 
significance for a proper understanding of the evolution of the 
solar system far surpasses anything imagined by conventional 
astronomers.

In what follows, we will first review the evidence which suggests 
that these meteorites are actually from Mars.  We will then 
summarize and briefly examine the various theories as to how the 
rocks came to be expelled from the red planet and make their way 
to the Earth.  Then we will return to Velikovsky's thesis of 
planetary catastrophism, offering further support for the idea 
that Mars only recently moved in very close proximity to the 
Earth, raining forth extraterrestrial debris of one form or 
another, including fiery bolides.

THE SNC-METEORITES

The SNC-meteorites take their name from Shergotty, Nakhla and 
Chassigny, three different but closely related achondritic 
classes of igneous rock.  The basaltic shergottites resemble 
eucrites in mineralogy and are regarded as the product of 
volcanic flows (lavas).  Their name derives from Shergotty, 
India, the scene in 1865 of the fall of several meteorites.  
Included in this class are the following meteorites: Shergotty, 
Zagami, EET79001, ALH77005, and LEW88516, the latter two bodies 
being Lherzolites.

The nakhlites, on the other hand, are pyroxenites consisting 
mainly of augite.  They received their name from an Egyptian 
site-El Nakhla el Baharia-where over 40 stones fell in 1911.  
Included in this class are the following rocks: Nakhla, 
Lafayette, and Governador Valadares.

The lone Chassigny meteorite is a dunite consisting mainly of 
iron-rich olivine.  It fell in France in 1815.  The tenth Martian 
rock, ALH84001, has only recently been identified as Martian in 
nature.  It is a cataclastic, coarse-grained orthopyroxenite and 
is thought to have properties unique among these bodies.   

Although visually dissimilar, the three classes of meteorites 
share numerous features in common.  Most of these rocks contain 
iron-rich silicates and iron oxides, clear evidence that they 
were created in a rather iron-rich environment.  And all of the 
SNCs show very similar oxygen-isotope compositions, these 
abundances being distinct from those characteristic of the Earth 
or Moon.

The SNCs are also similar in their relatively young ages.  By 
measuring the decay products of various radioactive isotopes in 
igneous rocks, it is thought to be possible to determine how long 
ago the rocks solidifed.  Known as the crystallization age, the 
measures obtained for the Nahklites and Chassigny were on the 
order of ~1.3 billion years, compared to the 4.4 to 4.6 Gyr 
typical of meteorites of the igneous variety.  This age is unique 
among all meteorites-the youngest lunar meteorites are > 3.0 Gyr-
and clearly marks these particular rocks as anomalous.  Inasmuch 
as it is commonly believed that only planets could retain the 
high internal temperatures necessary to produce magmas billions 
of years after accretion, a planet was sought as the parent of 
these particular meteorites.  According to Dodd, these 
crystallization age analyses have "shown beyond reasonable doubt 
that all of them [the SNCs] come from the same body, certainly a 
planet and probably Mars."

The SNCs also share high volatile contents.  This feature 
likewise supports the hypothesis that these bodies originated on 
a large body with a gravitational field great enough to retain 
volatiles.  For various reasons, a body larger than the Moon is 
believed to be required.

Rare earth element analysis can also be brought to bear on the 
question of the meteorites' place of origin.  It indicates the 
presence of garnet materials in the source region of the 
shergottites, which suggests a source region pressure of >40 
kbars, consistent with the view that the SNC parent body was 
likely larger than the Moon.

Several other characteristics of these rocks are of interest.  
The individual minerals show some disturbance at ~180 million 
years in the U-Pb, Rb-Sr, and Ar-Ar clocks.  This is thought by 
some to represent the date of impact which ejected the SNCs from 
their parent body.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, analysis of the noble 
gases trapped in some of the shergottites (EETA79001 and 
ALHA77005) has revealed the clear signature of Mars.  According 
to McSween, "the measured abundances and isotopic compositions of 
Ar, Kr, Xe, and N are unique among meteorites and closely 
resemble the composition of the Martian atmosphere analyzed by 
Viking."  Dodd likewise acknowledges the probable Martian 
character of these noble gases, adding that "the only plausible 
explanation for this observation is that the meteorite trapped 
these atmospheric gases during shock melting." 

In addition to the noble gases, one of the meteorites in question 
shows traces of nitrogen with an unusual isotopic composition 
consistent with a Martian origin.  Here Pepin and Carr report: 
"Subsequent laboratory work on EETA 79001 revealed a pronounced 
enrichment of 15N, consistent with the isotopically heavy 
nitrogen that distinguishes the atmosphere of Mars from virtually 
all other volatile reservoirs in the solar system."  This last 
finding was deemed particularly significant by McSween.

Several other characteristics of these meteorites are also 
consistent with a Martian origin.  One of the SNCs-Nakhla-shows 
traces of water, for example (Mars is known to have once had 
large amounts of water, now apparently gone).  Iron-bearing 
minerals in various shergottites, similarly, are just barely 
magnetized, implying that the parent body had a weak magnetic 
field (recent measurements of Mars' magnetic field suggest that 
it is most probably quite weak).

SCENARIOS OF EJECTION AND TRANSPORT

If it is generally agreed that the SNCs are indeed from Mars, the 
means of their ejection off our red neighbor and transport to 
Earth has been a subject of much speculation and controversy.  As 
noted earlier, leading authorities question whether it is 
possible for an impact to dislodge appropriate-sized rocks with 
enough force to overcome the gravity of the planet.  Here Wasson 
offered the following observation:  "The key unresolved question 
is whether an impact could eject >10-m blocks from Mars with 
velocities in excess of the escape velocity of 5 km times s^-1." 

McSween, similarly, with reference to the prevailing view that 
the SNCs originated from Mars, observes that "this particular 
consensus is not universally held, however, because of the 
serious (some would say insurmountable) problems in removing 
rocks of a suitable size from the Martian surface."

McSween summarizes the problem as follows:

"It has generally been supposed that any smaller fragments that 
could be ejected from planets by impact mechanisms would have 
experienced such a high degree of shock that they would be 
pulverized, melted, or even vaporized.  Yet no other natural 
means of meteoroid ejection seems possible.  The energy of 
rapidly expanding gases during volcanic eruptions is too small to 
accelerate fragments to planetary escape velocities, and other 
geologic phenomena are even less capable launching mechanisms."

The conventional view is that a meteorite impact released the 
rocks from Mars millions of years ago.  Vickery and Melosh, for 
example, offered the following opinion: "The dynamically most 
plausible explanation for the martian origin of the SNC 
meteorites is that they were ejected from Mars in a single, very 
large magnitude event ~200 Ma ago."

Others, however, have criticized this view.  Pointing to various 
discrepancies in the cosmic ray exposure ages of the respective 
meteorites [this measure is thought to represent the time spent 
as small bodies orbiting in space and exposed to cosmic 
radiation], McSween argues that it is unlikely that such data can 
be reconciled with a single impact scenario.  Shergotty and ALHA 
77005, for example, have exposure values of 2.6 million years, 
while that of EETA 79001 is only 0.5 m.y.  The nakhlites and 
Chassigny, on the other hand, have exposure ages of 11 million 
years.  How are we to explain these findings if the meteorites 
were all ejected in one impact-event 200 million years ago?

Various scenarios have been advanced to account for the exposure-
data.  One possibility-discussed by Vickery and Melosh-is to 
assume that the various SNCs were originally part of a much 
larger body which subsequently became fragmented in space at 
times corresponding to their cosmic-ray exposure ages.  
Dissenting from the chronology of Vickery and Melosh, McSween 
elaborated upon this hypothesis as follows:

"[In the most likely scenario] one event at 11 m.y. ago could 
eject a number of small to moderately sized fragments from 
various locations around the crater perimeter.  The smaller ones 
immediately recorded cosmic ray exposure, but the larger ones 
were unaffected until subsequent breakup in space at 2.5 and 0.5 
m.y. ago.  In this model, ejected fragments would be in the size 
range of approximately 1-20 m, and the major impact that caused 
shock metamorphism in the shergottites would not have been the 
ejection event."

More recent attempts to accommodate the data from cosmic ray 
analyses have held that three different impact events were 
involved.  A. Banin et al., for example, argue as follows:

"Using rare gas data for SNC meteorites, Ott (1988) argued that 
the introduction of the (Martian) atmosphere component by shock 
must have occurred rather recently and cannot be ascribed to a 
180 Myr event.  This contradicts the model originally proposed by 
Nyquist et al. (1979) according to which the SNC meteorites were 
ejected from the parent body in a single major impact event 180 
Myr ago in fragments large enough to be shielded from cosmic-ray 
exposure since that time.  The new evidence suggests that it is 
more likely that SNC meteorites were ejected from Mars in three 
considerably smaller impact events at times corresponding to the 
three groups of cosmic ray exposure ages, i.e., 0.5 Myr ejection 
of EETA 79001, 2.6 Myr ago ejection of Shergotty, Zagami and ALHA 
77005, and 11-Myr ago ejection of the nakhlites and Chassigny 
(Bogard et al. 1984)."

It is noteworthy, however, that this scenario involving three 
separate events was discarded by Vickery and Melosh in no 
uncertain terms.   

Other problems arise from the fact that the various SNCs 
experienced different degrees of shock.  The shergottites, for 
example, show clear evidence of intense shock, yet the nakhlites 
and Chassigny do not. This is hardly what would be expected if 
these rocks were dislodged from Mars as a result of a single 
major impact.  Warren summarized this objection as follows:

"The main argument against a Mars-SNC connection has always been 
that ejection off a planet is expected to entail extremely high 
shock pressures.  Yet these meteorites, which are up to 40 kg in 
mass, show only low to moderate degrees of shock."

According to Dodd, the finding of lightly shocked lunar 
meteorites in Antarctica alleviates-but does not entirely remove-
the objection that meteorites could make their way from Mars to 
Earth:

"The Antarctic finds indicate that recognizable meteoritic 
material can make its way from the moon to the Earth, but they do 
not prove that virtually unshocked samples could make a longer 
trip from a bigger body.  The problem of delivering SNC 
meteorites remains a serious objection to a planetary source for 
such meteorites."

How then did these meteorites come to be ejected and make their 
way to the Earth?  One proposal suggested that oblique impacts-
upon ricocheting-could eject large fragments and accelerate them 
to escape velocity.  Another model held that impacts on Mars 
would vaporize permafrost thereby providing additional 
acceleration to the ejecting fragments.  For various reasons, 
these models have since been abandoned.  

H. Melosh, an early critic of the idea that the SNCs could be 
Martian in origin, offered a model whereby it is possible for 
planetary impacts to eject a requisite amount of near-surface 
material without significant shocking through a process known as 
spallation.  This hypothesis has since been supported by various 
experimental tests and is currently regarded as the most likely 
explanation for the ejection of the SNCs from Mars.  Briefly, it 
is known that upon meteorite-impact the surface of a planetary 
body is subject to varying degrees of stress.  At the site of the 
impact, the impacting body would be pulverized and/or vaporized, 
producing a wave of stress whose force drops off sharply with 
distance.  Rocks close to the site of impact are melted or 
pulverized.  At a certain distance, however, the various shock 
waves act so as to cancel out each other to some extent.  McSween 
summarizes this phenomenon as follows: 

"Rocks very near the ground surface experience several kinds of 
shock waves that partially cancel each other.  This area of wave 
interference offers a shelter from the full force of the shock 
wave.  Calculations indicate that some of this near-surface 
material will spall off as relatively unshocked fragments and can 
be accelerated to high speeds."

Alas, there are problems with this theory as well.  According to 
the spallation model, the size of the ejecta fragments is 
directly dependent on the size of the impact and thus on the size 
of the resulting crater.  As we have seen, Melosh himself favored 
a single impact event at ~180 million years involving an ejection 
of all SNC bodies in pieces on the order of 6-7 meters, the 
latter constraint being required in order to account for the 
shielding from cosmic rays.  In order to eject this much rock a 
fairly large impact is necessary, and thus Melosh sought a crater 
on the order of 100 km in diameter.  Craters of this size, 
however, are exceedingly rare in areas of recent volcanic 
activity (datable to ~200 million years).

If, on the other hand, one favors the ejection of modestly sized 
rocks (meter or submeter-sized) from much younger sites (10-12 
million years old)-the view currently defended by McSween-the 
dynamical problems associated with large impacts are diminished, 
as is the necessity of finding craters 100 km in diameter (one 30 
km in diameter would do, although this represents the largest 
crater known to be included in the "young" terrane of Mars).  
Here, however, one is presented with a question as to why SNCs 
resulting from such relatively minor impacts would be over-
represented compared with those expected from major impacts 
observable elsewhere on Mars (i.e., if spallation is directly 
dependent upon the size of the impact, one would expect SNCs 
resulting from larger impacts in older terrane to predominate)?  
Stated another way, if most of the Martian terrane is known to be 
much older than ~180 million years, and it is known to be the 
site of the largest impacts, where are the SNCs from those 
regions?

McSween admitted the theoretical difficulty presented by the 
predominance of younger rocks in a recent review:

"It is perplexing that all of the martian geological units from 
which we have samples are very young…because geological units of 
these ages constitute only a small portion of the surface of 
Mars…The problem of having so many young meteorites is especially 
acute, particularly if multiple impact events are postulated to 
explain the groupings of cosmic-ray exposure ages.  Areas 
volcanically resurfaced during the Amazonian period (which is 
thought to encompass rocks of 1.3 Ga and younger) amount to only 
16% of the martian surface, and late Amazonian (corresponding to 
180-Ma old rocks) volcanic activity constitutes a mere 2%."

In short, the currently favored theory as to the origin of the 
SNCs requires that three (or four) separate impacts somehow 
managed to strike a mere 16% of the Martian surface, all within a 
geologically short period of time (some eleven million years).  
Probability alone would appear to argue against this view.  

Other problems arise regarding the meteorites' means and time of 
transport to Earth.  For example, if one is to believe the 
currently prevailing view that three separate impact events are 
required to explain the rocks' ejection from Mars, one is greeted 
with the remarkable coincidence that meteorites originating from 
events millions of years ago-and millions of years apart-managed 
to descend upon Earth within a period of about a century or so in 
order to be observed by man.  

It must be admitted, however, that very little is known about the 
amount of time required to get the SNCs to the Earth.  According 
to McSween, who cites Wetherill's model, roughly one third of the 
ejected material would reach Earth within 10 million years.

Granted the difficulties of accounting for the ejection and 
transport of these odd meteorites, Dodd, perhaps, summarized the 
opinion of many astronomers when he wrote as follows: "Just how 
these meteorites escaped from Mars remains unclear, but most 
meteoriticists are now quite sure that they did." 

Ev Cochrane

----------------------------------------------

MERCURY IN MYTHOLOGY
By Dave Talbott

Harold Tresman asked:

As a non-expert in mythology can somebody tell me the role of 
Mercury, 'Messenger of the Gods' was in all these events.

DAVE TALBOTT replied:
For years I tried to find the distinction between "Mercury" as 
messenger and the "warrior-hero" (Mars) as messenger.  I could 
never find a basis for separating the two. Eventually, I 
concluded that the effort was misplaced, that there is no 
distinction between the stories. It's a bit like Sol and Saturn, 
or Helios and Kronos.  They hold the same story and are in fact 
the same gods.  But why is one story or identity attached to two 
different celestial bodies?  It's simply the way symbolism 
evolved.

When the ancient celestial order dissolved, every body seen in 
the sky was asked to play a role as SYMBOL of what was remembered 
but no longer present.  Our Sun became the natural symbol of the 
former central luminary, Saturn, thus receiving Saturn's name as 
well.  The Moon took its name from the primeval crescent on 
Saturn.  The star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, took its 
name from the radiant Venus, the "prototype" of stars visible in 
the sky before any stars were seen (while the very words for 
"star" descended from the Venus-goddess as well).  All of the 
constellations received their names from the gods (or attributes 
of gods) in the former epoch.  While Heracles was a Greek name of 
Mars, it also became the name of a constellation.  There was a 
Bull of Heaven (pillar and crescent) long before the Bull gave 
its name to the vaguely-defined star group now called Taurus.

It was only natural that a little star eventually discovered as a 
companion to our Sun should be assigned those attributes of the 
warrior hero relating to the hero's role as tiny companion 
(messenger, scribe, servant, assistant) to the primeval sun, 
Saturn.  As a general rule, in the progressive elaboration of 
symbolism, the attributes of the symbolic object will tend to 
scale down the original story.  Aspects of the original story 
which cannot be meaningfully expressed by the familiar symbolic 
object will tend to be shed over time.  The world mountain was 
also the "underworld" river and the luminous nether "wind".  But 
once its name was attached to a sacred, commemorative, local 
mountain, the idea that THAT mountain could be a river or a wind 
would make no sense.

Though the history of the warrior hero included much more than 
his role as "little companion" to the primeval sun, the unique 
position of Mercury tended to highlight that role in its relation 
to our Sun.  The planet can be viewed as one of many natural 
symbols in our world pointing back to attributes of the warrior-
hero in the myth-making epoch.

----------------------------------------------

SUPERFLARES
By Wal Thornhill

The following news item should be of interest.

It supports the idea, first proposed by Velikovsky I think, that
proto-Saturn as a minor star suffered a brilliant flare-up.  [The 
usual meaningless magnetic model of the cause of a solar flare is 
invoked in the article: "magnetic fields between a star and a 
large planet, or another star, can wrap around each other until 
they snap, erupting in a superflare."]

In the Electric Universe model, what we are seeing is simply a 
violent stellar electrical discharge. It is a normal response of 
a star (or a gas giant) to a strong gravitational disturbance 
and/or rapid change in the electrical environment. It is the usual birth
notice of a new planet.

In proto-Saturn's case, the entry into the solar plasmasphere 
would have required rapid adjustment to the new electrical 
environment where the Sun was the main focus of electrical 
activity. As I have mentioned before, this would have resulted in 
a massive cometary coma, centred on proto-Saturn.  And in the 
same way that comets have material machined electrically from 
their nucleus in the form of "jets", so Saturn would have begun 
spewing matter into space like a spinning garden sprinkler.  The 
article also mentions the expected powerful auroral effects. 
These too I would expect in the proto-Saturn system.

In my opinion the massive flare-up that Velikovsky identified 
would more than likely have occurred when proto-Saturn 
encountered the plasmasphere of one of the gas giant planets in 
the Sun's entourage at the time. Like Dwardu, I think that the 
simplest and most likely candidate was Jupiter.  Such an 
encounter would allow a cataclysmic charge exchange (superflare) 
followed by a drastic modification of orbits.

If our own Sun had been observed by distant alien scientists when 
Saturn flared, would they too have attributed the outburst to the 
Sun because Saturn was too close to the Sun to be distinguished 
as a separate body?  The following report is based on historical 
records of flare-ups and it has only been possible in the last 
few years to resolve a few objects the size of hypothesised 
proto-Saturn, close to a nearby star.

If I'm not mistaken, the 9 superflares identified over the past 
100 years suggest that the catastrophic recent history of our own 
planetary system is not unusual.  So the complacency of 
scientists about our situation is based largely on ignorance.

Wal Thornhill
...............................................................

Superflares Can Zap Planets - Astronomers Puzzle over Other Stars

By Kenneth Chang  ABCNEWS. com
6 January 1999

AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 6-Why are we confident the sun will burn 
reliably for a few billion more years?  Some sun-like stars have 
hiccuped, occasionally spewing out a burst of light so bright it 
would melt ice on the moons of Saturn. "They are very huge 
flares," says Yale University astronomer Bradley Schaefer. "I'm 
calling them superflares. You start looking at the underlying 
star and you find they are really disturbingly similar to our 
sun."

While our sun seems a constant of light, it isn't. Huge magnetic 
fields pulse out of the surface and darken the regions we call 
sunspots. Arcs of superhot gas rise off its surface and race into 
space. There's no evidence that our sun has ever suffered a 
superflare, and if Schaefer and fellow Yale astronomer Eric 
Rubenstein are right about what creates them, we have nothing to 
worry about.

Sifting through observations as far back as 1899, Schaefer found 
nine instances of superflares by sun-like stars. In each case, 
the star brightened by 10 percent to 1,000 percent for a period 
lasting about an hour. The smallest of the nine superflares was 
100 times larger than the largest flare that's been seen shooting 
out of our sun.

Extremely young stars, fast rotating ones or ones with close-
orbiting companion stars can create such outpourings of energy, 
but in these instances, the stars were run-of-the-mill sun-like, 
single stars. "Our sun would fit right in," Schaefer says. He and 
Rubenstein presented their results today at the American 
Astronomical Society meeting in Austin.

DELIGHTFUL TO DISASTROUS

If the sun ever threw out a superflare, the results on Earth 
could range from pretty to devastating. The superflare would 
accelerate protons and other particles speeding toward Earth, 
brightening the auroras from a near-the-poles sight to one 
filling the world's night skies. On the downside, "Kiss our 
satellite fleet goodbye," Schaefer says. The high-speed 
particles, even from a small superflare, would fry the 
satellites' electronics. The surge of electricity from the 
charged particles would also likely blow out electrical power 
grids around the world.

A midsize or large flare would prove deadly. Earth's upper 
atmosphere would prevent the flare radiation from reaching the 
ground, but it would trigger reactions that create compounds 
called nitrous oxides, which in turn would destroy the ozone 
layer that shields the planet from ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet 
light would kill bacteria and plankton. If bacteria and plankton 
die, other animals up the food chain begin to die, too. "But," 
Schaefer says, '`all this isn't going to happen."

OUR SUN REMAINS CALM

Scientific measurements would have picked up any superflare that 
occurred in the past century and a half. Historical documents 
probably would have recorded the fantastic aurora caused by any 
superflare in the past millennium. And the moons of Saturn aren't 
covered with vast plains of melted, then refrozen ice. "We see 
nothing like that," Schaefer says. "Our sun does not have 
superflares as far as we can tell." According to Rubenstein, 
here's why: Mercury is not Jupiter.

Some binary stars-pairs that revolve around a common center-
routinely erupt much like superflares as their magnetic fields 
get wrapped around each other like rubber bands until they snap. 
In the superflaring stars, there's no companion star, but there 
could be a planet. A planet with a magnetic field as strong as 
Jupiter's or Saturn's in Mercury's orbit could be sufficient. 
Several of the extrasolar planets discovered in the past few 
years circle in such star-hugging orbits.

The other necessary ingredient is for the star to have a strong 
magnetic field itself. Two of the superflare stars are known to 
have fields hundreds of times stronger than our sun's.

Fortunately, Mercury is not Jupiter, so there's probably nothing 
to worry about.

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DID THEY REALLY SAY THAT?
By Wal Thornhill

NASA on Galileo's current mission:

"The plasma sheet, which lies along Jupiter's magnetic equator, 
is an area that exhibits a high concentration of plasma, or 
ionized gases.   This allows relatively strong electrical 
currents to flow, and creates dynamic interactions between the 
plasma and Jupiter's magnetic field."

Wal Thornhill comments:

Pay particular note to the last sentence where the usual suspect, 
the planet's magnetic field, is held responsible for any 
electrical effects and we can therefore ignore the possibility 
that Jupiter may be part of a larger electrical circuit.

I would expect that when the results of Galileo's sweep through 
Jupiter's magnetotail are published we will find that it is not 
as neat as expected and depicted in the models of planetary 
magnetotails. They should detect a rapidly varying field as they 
cut through Birkeland current "ropes" trailing away from the 
planet in the magnetotail.

That can then be added to the plasma ropes detected from Venus 
and in the tail of a comet as proof of the larger electrical 
circuitry in space.

----------------------------------------------

ELECTRIC UNIVERSE PREDICTION CONFIRMED
by Wal Thornhill

Last year in May I was embroiled in a defence of the electric sun 
model.  I wrote: "The problem for the theorists is that, if the 
photosphere is an anode phenomenon, the boundary conditions 
defined by the photospheric temperature and apparent radius of 
the sun is no longer applicable as used in the standard solar 
model. So, yes, I am suggesting that the sun is a different size 
than that suggested by the photosphere."

The following undated news item supports my argument and, if 
confirmed, throws yet another huge spanner in the works of the 
standard solar model.

One of the key characteristics of an electric star, first noted 
by Ralph Juergens in relation to red giants, is that its apparent 
size is determined by its electrical environment. In fact, it was 
Ralph who identified the granulation seen in the solar 
photosphere as "anode tufting". Anode tufting occurs ABOVE an 
anode surface to effectively increase the surface area of the 
anode to meet the imposed current load. In other words, "the sun 
is a different size than that suggested by the photosphere."

In the electric sun model, cyclic changes in the electrical 
stress on the Sun impinging from our arm of the galaxy are 
responsible for the sunspot cycle. So it is natural to expect 
that the apparent size of the sun will vary in step to match the 
changing current load. It is not necessary to look inside the sun 
for the "enormous" energy involved in such a phenomenon 
(according to the standard solar model).

Wal Thornhill
................................................................

A Baffling New Finding - Sun Shrinks, Then Puffs

By Kenneth Chang
ABCNEWS.com

You're not supposed to look at the sun, so you probably didn't 
notice.  The yellow ball in the sky, that light of our lives, has 
apparently shrunk.

The person who has been looking, through camera images taken at 
the San Fernando Observatory in California, can't believe his 
eyes. Since 1991, the sun has apparently shed about 400 miles off 
its 865,000-mile-wide girth. "I was both happily surprised," says 
San Fernando astronomer Gary Chapman, "and somewhat dismayed."

Examining images taken between May 1986 and August 1997, Chapman 
plotted the sun's average diameter over that 11-year period. The 
line squiggles up and down on a yearly basis. That's expected, 
and has nothing to do with what's happening inside the sun. The 
Earth's elliptical orbit takes it closer to the sun in January 
and farther away in July. Closer objects look bigger, so the sun 
appears slightly bigger in winter. Changing temperatures also 
expand and contract the telescope itself, making it an unwanted 
zoom lens and further distorting the data.

GETTING BUFFED
However, underlying these annual variations was an 11-year-long 
undulation.  The size grew as the sun emerged from its last quiet 
period, peaking around 1990, then shrunk as its activity mellowed 
out.  "This is not what I was expecting," Chapman told a meeting 
of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. last 
week. "I was hoping for nothing. To me, it's a fly in the 
ointment."

The variation in the sun's size coincides with its sunspot cycle. 
Magnetic fields within the sun drive an 11-year cycle of sunspots 
on its surface, first observed three centuries ago. The sun's 
brightness and number of solar flares also vary, last reaching a 
minimum in 1996. But most astronomers, including Chapman, 
believed the sun's size stayed the same.  As the sun awakens from 
its quiet phase, the sunspots and solar flares will return-and, 
if Chapman's observations are correct, the sun will puff out 
again.

"Very interesting, if true," comments Tim Brown, a senior 
scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 
Boulder. "Gary is a careful guy. I think you have to take the 
suggestion seriously." Brown tried similar measurements through a 
different technique a decade ago-and found no change. "The energy 
involved in increasing the sun's radius by (200 miles) is 
enormous," Brown says. "It's hard to understand where that would 
come from."

SUN STILL A MYSTERY
Brown acknowledges that it's not impossible, "because we don't 
understand how the sun works as well as we might like to think. 
But I don't think anyone knows a mechanism by which that can be 
done."

Roger Ulrich, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, 
reported results a couple of years (sic) that hinted at a change 
of size similar to what Chapman found. But Ulrich didn't believe 
the sun was actually changing size. "In my case, all I'm saying 
is the material is more or less where it was before," Ulrich 
says, "but it's hotter." And the brighter sun just looked bigger.

Chapman says his technique tries to take into account the changes 
in brightness, and yet the 11-year puffing and slimming cycle 
remained.

The sun remains slim, according to the latest data. But unless 
something really strange is going on, its diameter will grow as 
the sun's activity perks up toward its next peak early in the 
21st century. "We can't confirm that yet," Chapman says. "Get 
back to us in a couple of years. One has to be patient in these 
sort of things.

----------------------------------------------

PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE:

http://www.kronia.com

Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about 
Catastrophics:

[Ed note:  the SIS Website address has
changed to: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/ ]

Subscriptions to AEON, a journal of myth and science, may be 
ordered at the I-net address below:
http://www.ames.net/aeon/

http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/
http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/
http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/
http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/Catastrophism.html
http://www.grazian-archive.com/

Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered, 10 Pensée Journals may be 
ordered at the I-net address below:
http://www.e-z.net/~mikamar/default.html
-----------------------------------------------

The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of scientific and 
scholarly discussions in the emerging field of astral 
catastrophics.  Our focus is on a reconstruction of ancient 
astral myths and symbols in relation to a new theory of planetary 
history.  Serious readers must allow some time for these 
radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for the relevant 
background to be developed.  The general tenor of the ideas and 
information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and 
publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for 
differences of interpretation.

We welcome your comments and responses.

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double click on the image of Thoth, the Egyptian God of 
Knowledge, to access the back issues.
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