USA - Sun Is Stranger Than Astrophysicists Imagined
A decade’s worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent.
“It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well: the sun,” said Brian Fields, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Physicists do not think the sun emits any gamma rays from within. (Nuclear fusions in its core do produce them, but they scatter and downgrade to lower-energy light before leaving the sun.) However, in 1991, the physicists David Seckel, Todor Stanev and Thomas Gaisser of the University of Delaware hypothesized that the sun would nonetheless glow in gamma rays, because of cosmic rays that zip in from outer space and plunge toward it.
Yet the Fermi Telescope detects, on average, seven times more gamma rays coming from the solar disk than [the] cosmic-ray theory predicts. And the signal becomes up to 20 times stronger than predicted for gamma rays with the highest frequencies. “We found that the process was consistent with 100 percent efficiency at high energies,” Linden said. “Every cosmic ray that comes in has to be turned around.” This is puzzling, since the most energetic cosmic rays should be the hardest to mirror.
Whether or not cosmic rays account for the entire gamma-ray signal, Joe Giacalone, a heliospheric physicist at the University of Arizona, says the signal “is probably telling us something very fundamental about the magnetic structure of the sun.” The sun is the most extensively studied star, yet its magnetic field—generated by the churning maelstrom of charged particles inside it—remains poorly understood, leaving us with a blurry picture of how stars operate.
-getpocket.com, 1 September 2022
Arno's Commentary
What is an astrophysicist? BetterTeam.com explains: “An Astrophysicist uses physics, mathematics, and computing knowledge to investigate the formation of stars, planets, and galaxies. Astrophysicists study astronomical events and celestial bodies to learn more about the universe and how it was formed, from either an observational or theoretical standpoint.” These well-educated, brilliant minds continue to discover something new—simply meaning the past was not true.
We take special notice of words such as, “spectacularly wrong … this is puzzling … poorly understood … blurry picture,” revealing there is much guessing involved when it comes to many long-standing theories. The beginning is found in Scripture: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Genesis 1:3-5). We realize that this is not the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars. He spoke life into existence, because He is life; He is the eternal One, the Creator of truth.
Only later we read of the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day” (Genesis 1:14-19).
Arno Froese is the executive director of Midnight Call Ministries and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed prophetic magazines Midnight Call and News From Israel. He has authored a number of well-received books, and has sponsored many prophecy conferences in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. His extensive travels have contributed to his keen insight into Bible prophecy, as he sees it from an international perspective.
