The Role of Plasma in Recent Solar System Changes
A team from the Siberian Russian Academy of Sciences has been investigating changes in the heliosphere, the electromagnetic envelope that surrounds our solar system. The heliosphere acts like a giant protective sheath surrounding our sun and the entire solar system as we travel through space. Normally, it functions as a giant deflector, protecting us from a potentially harmful influx of cosmic radiation and keeping conditions within the inner solar system relatively stable. However, it is now being bombarded with so much radiation that an unprecedented amount is breaking through. This is reaching our sun and all of the planets of the solar system, including our own.
What is a plasma?
A plasma is a partially ionized gas and is sometimes called the fourth state of matter. The behavior of plasma is quite unlike those of solids, liquids, and gases. In nature, plasmas are usually found in gas-like clouds, as in the case of interstellar nebulae. Other examples of plasmas include ball lightning and the phenomenon of the aurora borealis.
The increase in incoming interstellar plasma, Dmitriev suggests, is dramatically impacting the behavior of our sun and its solar system. “Strong evidence exists that these transformations are being caused by highly charged material (in) interstellar space which have broken into the interplanetary area of our solar system,” Dmitriev wrote in 1997.
Changes in Interstellar Space
For much of the twentieth century, space was visualized as a near vacuum. The astronomical reality, it is now being discovered, is actually quite different. Our solar system moves through something called the local interstellar space medium (LISM).
The LISM is not uniformly empty at all, but has greater and lesser amounts of plasmic flux density created by the presence of highly charged particles. The amount of energy within empty interstellar space is actually highly variable. Scientists are now coming to realize that space has more in common with our terrestrial oceans, with their complex tides and currents, than was previously recognized.
The quantity of plasma we encounter in the LISM is a critical variable for what happens in the wider behavior of our solar system. This increased influx of energy is, according to the research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the fundamental cause of the multiple magnetic and climatic changes that have recently been observed in the sun and across all of the planets. Dmitriev even goes as far as to say the consequence of the increase in this interstellar plasmic energy is far more important, in his opinion, than human greenhouse gas emissions are in the creation of our planet's current global warming crisis.
Changes in the Heliosphere
The heliosphere itself has exhibited a dramatic change in behavior over the last ten years. The transition through this increased plasma flux has expanded the heliosphere's bow shock wave in front of the solar system more than ten-fold. Dmitriev gives an extensive catalogue of changes he claims this has caused within the solar system.
RECENT PLANETARY CHANGES
Significant physical, chemical, and optical changes observed on Venus; an inversion of dark and light spots detected for the first time and a sharp decrease of sulfur-containing gases in its atmosphere
The first stages of atmosphere generation on the moon, where a growing sodium-based atmosphere that reaches 5,500 miles in height has been detected
Changes in the atmosphere of Mars, including a cloudy growth in the equatorial region and unusual growth in ozone concentration
Significant melting of the Martian polar ice caps
A doubling of the magnetic field intensity on Jupiter after the series of impacts from the fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy comet in 1994; also, the appearance of large auroral anomalies, excessive plasma generation, and radiation belt brightening
The creation of an ionic flux tube between Jupiter and the volcanic regions of its moon, Io. This stream of plasma is millions of miles in length and is 1 million amperes in strength. It is affecting Jupiter's magnetic field and intensifying its plasma genesis.
Reporting of auroras and a visible increase in brightness on Saturn
Abrupt large-scale growth of magnetosphere intensity and an increase in brightness on Uranus
A change in light intensity and light-spot dynamics on Neptune
A growth of dark spots on Pluto
Dmitriev notes that Uranus and Neptune, which are magnetically conjugate planets, have both undergone major magnetic pole shifts of more than fifty degrees each in the last decade. Earth is magnetically conjugate to Jupiter, so he theorizes that the dramatic changes on Jupiter could well have consequences for our planet.
The claim of a direct causal link between the increase in plasma entering the solar system and recent planetary changes is still very controversial, but Dmitriev's research is quite comprehensive and is backed up with extensive scientific references. It seems likely that the increase in this cosmic energy does have some role to play in influencing climate, but it may be one of many contributing factors, rather than a sole cause. Dmitriev himself points out that planetary changes are complex affairs with many interdependent factors. It is the total sum of all these influences that actually determines what happens.
