The Universe Revealed

How stable is the Sun?

How stable is the Sun?

I'm writing this because @CottonJones has brought to my attention some very amusing information about a pseudoscientist (Eric Dollard) who believes that the Sun is hollow and interdimensional (whatever that means). Basically, he's claiming that the ionosphere, which is where short wave radio waves are bounced off of to permit long-range transmission, is being depleted because the Sun is actually shutting down. In other words he's claiming that the Sun is dying.

Why is it that these nut cases are claiming to know more than all of the other astronomers, astrophysicists and solar scientists? They always know some secret information that only they can obtain. First of all, this guy supposedly duplicated Tesla's work on transmission of electrical energy without wires. It figures that he would be a Tesla follower. Tesla ideas were a bit too far fetched. Dollard is just another pseudo scientist that has gone bonkers.

Let me count the ways that this idea is crazy. First of all, if the Sun were hollow it wouldn't have the mass necessary to keep the planets in orbit. That would violate Newton's laws of motion that use the mass of two bodies and the gravitational constant. How do you think that NASA figured out how to fly spacecraft all the way out past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune? They used Newton's formulas, which involved the mass of the Sun and the planet.

The Sun is the most massive object in the solar system. Its mass is 330,000 times that of the Earth. It accounts for 99.86% of all the mass of the solar system. If it were hollow, it couldn't provide heat and light for over 4 billion years, and during that time it has been very stable. Fusion energy requires massive compression (150 times the density of water) and high temperatures (15.7 million degrees K). You couldn't achieve those parameters in a hollow Sun.

Dollard claims that the Sun output has dropped to 50% of its original. If that had happened, you would now be frozen solid in a block of ice know as a glacier. Even a slight change in luminosity and energy output would be disastrous for life on Earth.

He also claims that the dark spots on the Sun are holes into a different dimension. That's crazy. The dark spots are sunspots caused by magnetic lines that have become tangled, a process that cools the plasma of the photosphere, making it look dark compared to the rest of photosphere. The temperature of the so-called dark spot is 3,000 to 4,500 K degrees, while the rest of the Sun is 5,780 K. I don't know about you, but I think that a temperature of 3000 degreed Celsius is plenty hot. Besides, there are no holes into other dimensions. The other dimensions above the 4th (time) are very tiny. You can't see them.

Yes, the Sun does go through solar cycles where sunspot activity increases every 11 years, but these cycles are not always consistent. Sometimes they are very violent and other times they're not. The two less violent periods are called Maunder and Dalton minima. The last Maunder minima occurred during 1650 to 1700 (The Little Ice Age). The difference in solar output over many centuries and solar maximum and minimums is only 0.1%. During a sunspot maximum period, the Sun shoots out more flares and coronal mass ejections, which disrupt the ionosphere and cause a change in shot wave radio transmissions. None of this is indicative of the Sun shutting down. It's just the way that a G-class star works.

I think that the problem with people like Dollard is that they think they're more intelligent than everyone else. They think they know what's really going on. My opinion is that they are insane. Unfortunately, there are a lot of idiots that believe nuts like him.

Thanks for reading.