January 2003

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In This Issue:

Mysteries of Sunspots

Sunspots are another in the pantheon of currently unexplained solar system phenomena. They appear spontaneously, often in pairs, and their numbers increase and decrease with a frequency of about eleven years. They are dark relative to the ‘normal’ solar surface (10,000 F or 5300 K), but are still very hot (typically 3200 Kelvins), often attain sizes as large as the Earth and typically last a few weeks. (The Sun’s rotation period is approximately 28 days.) Interest of scientists has been tweaked in recent decades with the realization that they constitute sources of great solar flares producing waves of high energy particles which strike the Earth, disrupting communications and power grids, and threatening the lives of astronauts exposed in space.

The eleven year cycle involves some intriguing structure. It is best illustrated by a plot of daily sunspot area versus solar latitude over a number of eleven year cycles, known as a butterfly diagram shown below. In the early part of each cycle the sunspots usually appear at north and south latitudes as high as 30 degrees but then move closer to the solar equator as the cycle continues. Then after a short period of almost no activity, the cycle begins again. They often occur in pairs or clusters.

Water should be completely dissociated into H and OH radicals and ultimately to O and H atoms at the surface temperature of the Sun (5800 Kelvins). Yet large amounts of water have been reported inside sunspots by several research groups. In one paper, (Water on the Sun: Molecules Everywhere, by Takeshi Oka, Science, vol. 277, 18 July 1997) the spectrum of water was unequivocally measured in a sunspot at a temperature of 3200 degrees Fahrenheit. Although initially surprised at the finding, the author tries to explain the finding within the current paradigm. That is, when the temperature is reduced to 3200 K, we should not be surprised that the atoms quickly go out and find mates to form massive numbers of water molecules - difficult to believe. Measurements by chemist Peter Bernath and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo indicated that there were enough water molecules in one 12,000 mile-wide sunspot to fill a lake four square miles in area and 300 feet deep.

Another unsolved mystery of the Sun, not directly linked to sunspots, is the fact that its ‘atmosphere’ attains temperatures above 1,000,000 degrees while the visible surface is only at 5800 Kelvins. This ‘corona’ is thought to supply the energy which powers the solar wind. It is also thought to be associated with the magnetic field of the Sun, because the corona attains its highest temperatures in areas surrounding sunspots, where the magnetic field is distorted. However, the coronal regions with the strongest magnetic fields are directly above the sunspots where the corona is coolest.

Current Hypotheses

An article (Inside Sunspots: New View Solves Old Puzzle by Robert Roy Britt) in the Nov. 6, 2002 edition of Space.com gives some results of the most recent sunspot measurements, made by the SOHO satellite and explanations of the observations by a few of the involved scientists.

As stated in the Space.com article, “The new view inside sunspots, provided by a spacecraft called the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), shows a previously unseen process that seems to resolve this puzzle. Plasma in the middle of a sunspot zooms toward the center of the Sun at 3,000 mph, creating a siphon of sorts that reins in the magnetic fields.”

The explanation offered by Alexander Kosovichev, a member of the research team, is as follows: “Magnetic fields in sunspots are known to prevent the heat that's generated deep within the Sun from rising to the surface. So the plasma in a sunspot is cooler than plasma on the surrounding surface of the Sun. Since the sunspot plasma is cooler, it is heavier, and it plunges downward. That draws the surrounding plasma and magnetic field inward toward the sunspot's center ... The concentrated field promotes further cooling and sinking flow and draws in still more material. This sets up a self-maintaining cycle of material circulation."

“But the roots of sunspots are still a mystery”, Duvall said. “And it's not clear whether or how the downward flow of plasma might trigger solar flares.” “Flares usually occur when strong magnetic fields of two opposite polarities come close to each other and reconnect”, Kosovichev said. “The flows beneath the sunspots may have something to do with bringing these opposite polarities together, he said, but that is still being investigated. Though sunspots typically appear in clusters, the new study applies only to how individual sunspots are held together.”

“The study involved about a dozen sunspots but most of the data was collected on a single 1998 sunspot. NASA scientists have used the data to make a 3-D animation of a typical sunspot that shows a cluster of "magnetic flux tubes" held together by the downflows. About 3,000 miles down, the mechanism gives way and the tubes spread out.”

"The descending flow is readily able to extract the heat that accumulates beneath the spot," said Douglas Gough, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Cambridge in England and another member of the research team. "It then spreads the heat away from the sunspot and eventually brings it to the surface of the Sun far from the spot, from where it is radiated into space. The study could also lead to clues that might one day explain why the Sun has an 11-year cycle of activity.”

The V/A Hypothesis

Long before the latest SOHO finding, it always seemed logical to me that sunspots were caused by the impacts of large bodies into the Sun’s surface. Naively, one can imagine a stream of large bodies in a Sun-grazing orbit with a period of 11 years, and an inclination that would result in their striking the Sun between 30 degrees north and south latitude. Some of their orbits would decay on each pass and cause them to impact the Sun. Also they would be expected to break up on approach, creating pairs or clusters of sunspots. The new findings, that the gas at the surface of the Sun is pushed down into the Sun at 3,000 mph, strongly reinforces this notion. Still, no scientists have even cited this as a possibility, to the best of my knowledge. Possibly because they cannot imagine a source of such bodies that would still not be depleted But with this new data I do not see how one can avoid this hypothesis.

My first thought was that the stream of bodies might have been ejected from Jupiter at the same time as proto-Venus, 6,000 years ago. Since the Great Red Spot, which marks the approximate crater location is at about -20 degrees latitude, the ejected bodies would have been launched into orbits inclined to the ecliptic, as required to impact different latitudes on the Sun. However, a little consideration of astrodynamics indicates that a Sun-grazing orbit originating at Jupiter cannot exhibit a period of 11 years, since the period of Jupiter’s revolution is 11.8 years, and the semimajor axis of any sun grazers originating at Jupiter would be half this value, and their periods considerably less. (In fact, the period is almost exactly that of a sun grazing orbit originating at Saturn.) But we suggest that the close correspondence of Jupiter’s period of revolution around the Sun and the sunspot periodicity cannot be mere coincidence.

There is a facet of the Velikovsky/Angiras scenario which suggests a solution to this mystery - one which conventional science could never imagine. It originates from the suggestion in several myths, e.g. that Pallas Athene (proto-Venus) was born ‘fully armored with a spear’, which we date at 6,000 BC. This, combined with a drawing of a large jet shooting out of Jupiter in an arabic document dated 1200 AD suggests that the impact out of which proto-Venus was born continued to produce a highly directed jet of hot gases originally extending hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Jupiter, for some five millennia. In addition to the high energy, 1043 ergs, the jet and the gun-barrel-like crater which resulted, may have been due to a unique impacting body, high density (nuclear matter?), high speed (intergalactic), or the unique composition of the snow/ice body of Jupiter (clathrates?). This jet is marked by the Great Red Spot. Investigators from Oxford University studying data returned from the NASA Galileo have recently reported a very narrow jet of swirling gases at the center of the GRS.

In Chaos, we suggest a number of major contributions which the jet has made to the solar system we observe today. (1) It supplied the outer layer of the four Galilean moons, the proto-bodies of which formed from material ejected into Jovian orbits at the time of the impact, 6,000 years ago. The great heat of the jet gases combined with the strong radiation field surrounding Jupiter after the impact, accounted for the great differences in the makeup of the four large moons. (2) The total mass ejected from the Jovian system by the jet over six millennia has slowed the rotation of the giant planet from its initial period of about one hour (Hoyle, The Cosmogony of the Solar System) to its current period of almost ten hours. Evidence of the ‘tail end’ of this deceleration is available in the records of the GRS circulation periods which have been kept for several hundred years, the monotonic increase of which ceased only about 1940.

What happened to all the material ejected with escape velocity as Jupiter whirled, which did not become captured by the Galilean satellites? We suggest that it agglomerated in the weightlessness of interplanetary space into unique dark bodies with very low densities, similar to cinders. Most became magnetized because they froze while still within the magnetic field of Jupiter. Several main belt asteroids, measured by passing spacecraft, and also Almathea, exhibit densities close to 1 gram/cm3 and magnetic fields. Scientists always attribute the low densities of these bodies to their being loosely bound ‘rubble piles’, i.e. without rigidity, although those imaged close up look rigid. We suggest that at least one entire class (C-type) of main belt asteroids, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, was formed in this way in the last 6,000 years. (The other class formed from the debris blasted into space at the time of the original impact, which did not become incorporated into proto-Venus.) Based on the Sloan Digital Survey data there are estimated to be some 700,000 main belt asteroids with diameters greater than 1 km. They are characterized by low to moderate inclinations, as would be expected from their ejection in the direction 20 degrees below the equator of Jupiter. The large range of inclination is also an indication of their relative youth, since their orbital inclinations should have been reduced to zero within 100,000 years, similar to the rings of Saturn.

In addition to those bodies in relatively stable main-belt orbits between Mars and Jupiter, we suggest that many others must have been introduced into orbits that pass close to the Sun. Their orbits would have varying semimajor axes, from circular orbits remaining far from the Sun, to Sun grazing orbits, depending on the direction of the GRS relative to the orbital velocity vector of Jupiter. Those launched in the ‘forward’ direction would have become main belt asteroids, and those launched in the backward direction, thus attaining less launch velocity, becoming sun grazers.

The systematic variations in impact latitudes on the Sun during each eleven year cycle require a systematic variation in the sun grazer inclinations with the same period. We propose this is due to the variations in the tilt of Jupiter’s spin axis, which changes the launch inclination (of the GRS) by plus and minus 3.14 degree during each orbit. We submit that this variation, combined with the eccentricity of Jupiter’s orbit (0.048) would produce variations in the sun grazing orbits with a period of 11.8 years, very close to that of the sunspot cycle. Therefore we suggest that these bodies are the cause of the butterfly characteristic of sunspots shown above.

Multiple bodies would have been produced as the jet was spun around with every rotation of the planet, and the original rotation rate was only about one hour. This process continued at a slowly diminishing rate for five or six millennia producing many millions of bodies. The orbits of these bodies as they approached the Sun would have been altered by relativistic influences, which may have increased inclinations, possibly explaining impacts as far as thirty degrees north and south on the Sun.

Given our hypothesis that water is the primary constituent of Jupiter, as corroborated by the high concentration of water on Europa, Ganymede and Calypso, this scenario explains the fact that water is present within sunspots. As these bodies enter the Sun they push the surface gases downward at the same time they are being vaporized, leaving the surface cooler, darker and full of water molecules. But the great orbital kinetic energy is not merely absorbed by the Sun. The gases at the point of impact are pushed downward then curl around and back toward the surface. The impact obviously perturbs the magnetic field in the locality but we believe that the kinetic energy imparted to the gases curling back around the impact site drives the solar prominences. It splashes hot gases in all directions from the periphery of the site similar to the way that impacts on hard surfaces like the Moon scatters rocks. These gases are initially contained by the magnetic field of the sun, but if their energy is great enough, the gases expanding from the impact site tear away from the constraining field and rush outward into interplanetary space. The impact leaves its mark on the Sun in the form of a relatively stable local circulation pattern, like a smoke-ring, partially explaining the lifetime of sunspots, which can be weeks.

We further suggest that the high temperature of the corona is also due to bodies falling close to the Sun. (In addition to the larger bodies which cause sunspots, these include bodies ejected from priori-Mars, which do not exhibit eleven year cycles - the same source from which meteorites originate.) This view is corroborated by the fact that studies of the Sun in radio, extreme ultraviolet and x-ray spectral regions (below) show conclusively that the temperature is nonthermal (non-Maxwellian). In other words, the temperature varies greatly by location and time. In some ways scientists are leaning toward this explanation. Quoting from an article summarizing data on the solar corona (Science, vol.285, 6Aug1999, p.849):

“In the Yohkoh images one sees only the hottest part of the corona. SOHO’s ultraviolet spectra of these regions have provided clear evidence for nonthermality. The Yohkoh images thus probably show the approximate locations of heat deposition in the corona.”

Depending on the location of the impact, the ejected waves of high velocity charged particles often enter the magnetic field of the Earth, spiraling into the poles and greatly enhancing the Aurora Borealis. The most intense flares can incapacitate communication networks and power grids. But these electromagnetic impulses perform vital functions for life on Earth. One, is that the sudden bombardment of the Earth by waves of high energy charged particles strengthens the geomagnetic field by Faraday induction acting on the superconducting core. The other is their effect in warming the Earth. From historical records and the ingenuity of a number of researchers it has been ascertained that there was a 70-year dearth of sunspots and aurora in the 17th century, referred to as the Maunder Minimum. At that same time in history a severe temperature drop was recorded anecdotally. During that same period, so-called “Frost Festivals” were held on the Seine river which was frozen solid in those years. This was the only period that the Seine river froze solidly. So if the sunspots start to ‘peter-out’, we may well need some artificial global warming to save ourselves from freezing.

The sudden introduction of 1043 ergs into the solar system 6,000 years BP had profound effects that the best scientists in the world have not even imagined. Once they come to this realization history and science will have to be radically revised. How many more years will they be content with the current notion that our little clockwork solar system has just been ticking along for billions of years.

The Louvre

During a recent vacation in France we devoted a half day to the Louvre. Our guide concentrated on the gallery of Italian and Spanish art which leads to the famous Mona Lisa. Among all the fine art there were two that were of particular interest, because in different ways they allude to the mysteries of the past revealed in Firmament and Chaos.

The first is a painting by Antonio Campi, called The Mysteries of the Passion of Christ. In the midst of the maelstrom surrounding the crucifiction there appears in the sky a mysterious entity or world. It is enlarged in the figure at the right.

If this had been painted before 687 BC, I would swear this was a depiction of priori-Mars in the heavens as it orbited the Earth. It is complete with the column of smoke and fire extending down toward the Earth. However, the painting was done in the sixteenth century. Of course it could not have been present at the crucifiction either.

There are stories of mysterious or secret sects such as the Pythagoreans and the Freemasons, or books such as the Kabbalah, that may have had knowledge of ancient times which was considered secret, or which was deliberately stated in cryptic language. There is no reason that this could not include sketches, some of which might have survived for millennia. It would be interesting to ascertain if Antonio Campi had any such mysterious associations, and whether the image in the upper right hand portion of his painting was passed down from much earlier times and placed in his painting.

The second ‘object de art’ is a bronze entitled Mercure Volant, by Giovanni Bologna, 1564, which I take the liberty of translating as ‘Mercury unleashed’ instead of the common ‘Flying Mercury.’ A number of myths, discussed in Firmament and Chaos, imply that the solid core of priori-Mars actually exited the planet on as many as one hundred occasions, i.e. at the end of each of its 15 year ‘dance encounters’ with Earth. This was the result of the deteriorated condition of priori-Mars and the tidal force of the Earth, combined with the close approach of proto-Venus. This hot, glowing core moved closer to, and rapidly orbited the Earth, thereby originating its description as a speedy messenger who moved ‘like the wind.’ It then reconnected with priori-Mars as it drifted away from the Earth, and reentered once out of the influence of Earth’s gravitational field. It was Hathor in Egyptian myth, a fearsome deity that swept low and caused death and destruction. A particularly low pass of Mercury may have been the cause of the great destruction that occurred around 2250 BC. The coming forth of the solid core of priori-Mars was experienced by a hundred generations for over 3,000 years, but in the classical Greek period, only a few hundred years after the last encounter, only the names of the heavenly entities remained and they were anthropomorphised into images like the one shown below. We have enlarged the lowest portion of this image to make clear that Mercury is exiting the mouth of another deity, who is not named, but one whose name was certainly known in every ancient culture. The figure out of whose mouth Mercury appears to be coming, was most likely interpreted, perhaps even by the artist, as the wind, but, as in the case of the painting above, there may have been cultural memory involved. We suggest the deep cultural memory behind this bronze, was the solid core of priori-Mars exiting through the great gash now known as the Valles Marineris.

Another object d’art, not from the Louve, which probably depicts the same events is shown at the right (Fig 10.12 in Firmament). It is known as a protome, and is thought to depict the power of Egypt (the lion) over the Nubians, in the lions mouth.

In 687 BC the last encounter between priori-Mars and Earth ended in a unique way. The solid core, or Mercury, exited as usual, but was deflected by interactions with the Moon (because the length of the month changed from 36 to 28 days at that time) and then interacted with Venus for some period of time before the two settled into their modern orbits.

We suggest the possibility that the interactions of Venus and Mercury during this period are represented by another sculpture in the same gallery of the Louve, called Mercury and Psyche, since there are strong links between Psyche and Venus in Greek myth.

Lacking the return of its solid core, the hollow shell of priori-Mars drifted outward in the solar system satisfying the laws of energy and angular momentum and collapsed in on itself, forming the diminutive low density body we know today as Mars.

Scientists today claim that the myth of Mercury’s speed stemmed from the fact that it orbits the Sun faster than any of the other planets. This is a ridiculous claim from people, most of whom have never even seen Mercury, and if they have, would certainly not get any impression of rapid motion, like the wind, from the observation. Equally ludicrous is the notion that Mars, in its present remote orbit, was called ‘the god of war’ and ‘the stormer of walls’, merely because it has a reddish cast. No, the myths were prompted by close approaches of proto-Venus, priori-Mars and what is now known as Mercury, which torqued the axis of the Earth, pummeled the Earth with rocks and thunderbolts, scorched millions of square miles into permanent deserts, drew entire seas across the land and slaughtered millions of people. These were not isolated events. They occurred hundred of times and were the common experience of mankind for over three thousand years.

Explaining More Mars Rocks

When the first meteorites were convincingly shown to be from Mars, it was proposed that they were blasted off its surface by energetic asteroid impacts. This explanation was counter to the fact that they do not exhibit signs of being highly shocked and many look just like terrestrial rocks. Cratering experts, such as Eugene Shoemaker, maintained that this was impossible because impacts of sufficient energy to expel rocks would completely vaporize all the surface material. (O’Keefe and Ahrens, Science 198, p. 1249, 1977.)

As more and more Martian meteorites have been validated (26 at last count) relative to only three of lunar origin, the need for an explanation has become a higher priority, because the average distance to Mars is 720 times that of the Moon. Moreover, the escape velocity of Mars is 2.5 times greater than that of the Moon and it has an atmosphere which would retard any rocks blasted from the surface.

A subsequent attempt to evade the vaporization problem was also published by O’Keefe and Ahrens (“Oblique Impacts: A Process for Obtaining Meteorite Samples from Other Planets,” Science 234, p.346, 1986). They proposed that highly oblique impacts could produce gaseous jets that might entrain rocks without shocking them and accelerate them to escape velocity. But as a result of identifying more and more Martian meteorites, scientists have come to the realization that there must be a great number of unidentified ones for every one that has been found, including those that have fallen at sea. This has led to the rejection of the oblique asteroid impact source, because of the rarity of such events, and a renewal of attempts to conjure up a mechanism which would produce millions of Martian meteorites.

The latest attempt is “Martian Meteorite Launch: High Speed Ejecta from Small Craters,” by James Head, Jay Melosh, and Boris Ivanov, Science 298, p.1752, 2002. Their computer model (the sacred cow of planetary science) indicates that as many as ten million rocks can be expelled from the gravitational field of Mars by a single small asteroid impact which produces a crater only 3 km in diameter, by a process of spallation. In this model the shock wave from the asteroid impact (7.7 to 10 km/sec) goes into Mars and part of the energy is reflected, presumably from a layer of rock, comes back to the surface around the impact site and blasts many small rocks into space with velocities greater than 5 km/sec. This mode of acceleration is calculated to exert less than 60 GPa (giga-Pascals) pressure impulse, the magnitude required to vaporize the rock. Most of the rocks imparted escape velocity remain in Mars-like orbits around the Sun, but a few ( 5% in 100 million years) are deflected toward the Earth by a long series of fortuitous encounters with Mars. Retardation of the rocks launched from Mars due to its atmosphere is considered negligible. The transit times from Mars to Earth are claimed to be between one and 100 million years.

Based on the meteorites found so far, it is now estimated that they are falling at a rate of one per month, because most are never found (“Why a Mars Rock Hits Earth Every Month,” by Robert Roy Britt, 7 Nov. 2002, space.com.) Assuming the present uniformitarian paradigm for the solar system, this rate implies that approximately 5.0 x 1010 meteorites have struck the Earth over the lifetime of the solar system. If evenly distributed over the surface of the Earth, this would amount to one meteorite every ten kilometers. This estimated meteorite flux forces the model to produce millions of rocks. This number can only be supplied by small impacts (3 km craters) on Mars, because the frequency of impacts drops exponentially as the size of the impacting bodies increases. Thus the model concentrates on these ejecting millions of rocks.

The long transit times are ‘corroborated’ by the cosmic ray exposure times, determined by counting the number of microscopic particle tracks near the surfaces of the meteorites. The corresponding exposure time is calculated based on the assumption that the flux of solar particles was the same throughout the time the rocks remained in space, as it is now. Using cosmic ray tracks to estimate transit times is consistent with the fact that they are equally distributed on all sides of the meteorites, not just on one side as would be the case if the rocks were exposed to cosmic rays while on the surface of Mars. But this forces the authors to assume that all the rocks ejected from Mars were covered with several meters of regolith (dirt), which protected them from exposure up to the time they were launched, since (they believe) the atmosphere has always been as thin as it is now and affords no protection as it does on Earth.

The Velikovsky/Angiras Explanation

Our scenario easily explains the great number of meteorites found on Earth, and their current rate of fall, as the result of their recent origin, less than 6,000 years BP. Priori-Mars orbited the Earth at a center to center distance of only 44,000 km off-and-on for a total of more than 1,500 years. During the encounters the smaller planet was convulsed tens of thousands of times, ejecting innumerable rocks, dust, atmosphere and water into space. A lower bound of the total ejected rock mass can be estimated from the fact that the northern plains of Mars (one third of the entire surface) are some 6 km lower than the rest of the planet. However, the mineral composition of the meteorites indicates that rock from all layers of priori-Mars were expelled. These include carbonaceous surface rocks containing water, mantle rocks, rocks from the core-mantle boundary, and pure nickel-iron meteorites from the liquid core. Significant fractions of the ejected material cover the near side of the Moon (regolith) and the entire surface of Mercury. Also, much has fallen into the solar atmosphere. But much more fell directly to the nearby Earth, and the same tidal force between the two massive planets that aided in the launching of bodies from Mars also allowed many rocks to make soft landings on the Earth, further decreasing their chances of being recognized as extraterrestrial. An extreme case may be Ayres Rock in Australia.

We maintain that all the meteorites that have fallen to Earth were launched from priori-Mars between 6000 and 2690 BP (before the present). (Buy meteorites!) Those currently recognized as originating on Mars are identified on the basis of the unique isotopic ratios in inclusions of atmospheric gases, which match those measured by the Viking landers and transmitted back to Earth. This just means they were launched late in the Vedic period, during which the encounters with Earth were taking place. Because of the innumerable convulsions of priori-Mars, gases formerly trapped in the interior for more than four billion years gradually escaped and changed the atmospheric isotope ratios during the Vedic period. Thus, those rocks ejected earlier in the period have different ratios than at present and as a result are not thought to be from Mars by planetary scientists.

Scientists believe that certain meteorites, the carbonaceous chondrites, are primordial rocks from the original solar nebula. This belief stems from the fact that their compositions are very similar to that of the solar atmosphere (absorption spectra), which they consider a proxy for the actual makeup of the Sun. But the reason they are similar is that many of these carbonaceous chondrites, the most common type of meteorite, have fallen into the solar atmosphere and colored its spectra. They cannot explain the tiny spherical nickel-iron inclusions (chondrules) which had to have been heated to over 2,000 degrees and suddenly cooled in a weightless state. Such rapid changes in temperature could not have occurred in the solar nebula. The chondrules were the result of lava fountains shooting from the convulsed interior of priori-Mars into the air as it orbited the Earth and being adsorbed in the normal near surface rocks which were ejected into space. Future astronauts will find these a dime-a-dozen on the surface of Mars.

The cosmic ray tracks in meteorites, which are currently used to corroborate the long (one to 100 million year) transit times from Mars current orbit to the Earth, are based on the flux of solar wind in the present quiescent solar system. But during the Vedic period there was much greater solar activity. As discussed in the sunspot article, large bodies from both Jupiter and priori-Mars were falling into the Sun much more frequently, producing solar flares, which in turn sent wave after wave of charged particles into interplanetary space. Their impacts on the meteorites caused great numbers of tracks in very short times. We attribute the lack of cosmic ray tracks on rocks, while on the surface of priori-Mars, to the protection afforded by its thick atmosphere, which was in place up to a few millennia BP. As with every other aspect of planetary science, the basic assumptions of uniformatarianism versus catastrophism color every interpretation.

The recent activity in the corona of the Sun is illustrated in a fascinating short motion picture clip from SOHO at the following website: http://www.space.com/spacewatch/sun_cam_animated.html.

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