Recently discovered space ribbon: a solar wind reflection

So we are seeing “border control.” The magnetism of the Sun deflects the charged particles of cosmic radiation, while the magnetism of the galaxy rejects the charged particles of the solar wind. A somewhat porous border, but still interesting.
In our measurements of incoming cosmic radiation, will we now have to take into account that a portion of that could be this reflected solar wind?

Sorry for my english: apocalypse (ethym.:apokalyptein=To disclose).

How does a “neutral atom” acquire enough energy to become “energetic”?
Disclaimer: I flunked solid-state physics in college.

@Leif Svalgaard – “Cosmology is an observational science..”
This is a half truth. All too often its a mathematical one in the absence of empirical observation. For example, this very press release from NASA is based on results from a model that admittely fits the observation fairly well.

Leif Svalgaard (13:38:39) :
solrey (09:16:52) :
Either way, it all starts with the ring current surrounding the heliosphere in the ISM. And what causes the ring current? BTW there is no ring of current around the Earth.

Leif, ummmm…are you serious?
http://pluto.space.swri.edu/IMAGE/glossary/ring_current.html

The ring current is one of the major current systems in the Earth’s magnetosphere. It circles the Earth in the equatorial plane and is generated by the longitudinal drift of energetic (10 to 200 keV) charged particles trapped on field lines between L ~ 2 and 7.

This image shows energetic neutral atom (ENA) emissions from the Earth’s ring current, as seen with the High Energy Neutral Atom (HENA) on NASA’s IMAGE spacecraft.
http://pluto.space.swri.edu/IMAGE/glossary/ring_current2.html
Yep, a persistent ring current that produces ENA’s…like I said.

Leif Svalgaard (13:38:39) :
The reflected solar wind hardly propagates upstream so, no we don’t need to take that into account.
That’s it? A hand-waving dismissal that the amounts are insignificant?
I am disappointed. I had hoped to find out there was a detectable difference in signatures, likely in the energy levels, that allows solar wind, even these reflected amounts, to be decisively kept out of cosmic radiation measurements. Instead I get ‘Eh, not enough to worry about.’
So much for “cutting edge, state-of-the-art science.”

In case you haven’t noticed, mainstream astrophysicists are constantly ‘shocked’ and ‘surprised’ at what they find. iow, commonly accepted theories don’t predict such things as ‘ribbons’ at the edge of the heliopause. These days, a lot of mainstream science seems to work that way. A lot of researchers are too often ‘shocked’ and ‘surprised’ by the results of their experiments and observations. (Hint: as with AGW, if the theory didn’t predict the observation/result, something is seriously wrong with the theory.)
Einstein was undeniably a brilliant man. However, he was not infallible and never claimed to be. Also: Today’s scientific ‘consensus’ wouldn’t give him the time of day. If he were a young clerk in the patent office, today, he’d play merry hell to get *anything* published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Leif Svalgaard (13:38:39) :
“First of all, the magnetic field is not strong, it is incredibly weak, 100,000 weaker than the magnetic field on your actual doorstep. And there is no strong electric current generating it. It is there because it cannot decay away, which would take a current and there you cannot sustain a current in a highly conducting plasma [it would short itself out immediately].”
With all due respect, I think you’re ‘selling this a bit short’ Leif.
Unless we are dealing with iron (lodestone), cobalt, or another substance with ‘magnetic memory’, an electric current is the source of a magnetic field (thus the term, ‘EM field’ (electromagnetic field)).
For an electrically induced magnetic field, the strength of the EM field is proportional to the strength of the electrical current. So the current determines the EM field strength! However, there are opposing scenarios that determine the electrical current strength!
You say; “It is there because it cannot decay away, which would take a current and there you cannot sustain a current in a highly conducting plasma [it would short itself out immediately].”. Well, are you suggesting that there’s a material with ‘magnetic memory’ here? I doubt it. Though, there are two scenarios that can produce this observed effect in the absence of a material with ‘magnetic memory’.
Scenario 1 will produce a weak EM field when the electrically conducting material that spans the regions of ‘opposing potential’ (think of this as ‘voltage’) is of low electrical conductance. Here, there is little current, due to the low electrical conductivity of the connecting media, giving a weak EM field that exhibits a high level of electrostatic activity.
Scenario 2 will produce a weak EM field when the electrically conducting material that spans the regions of opposing potential is of high electrical conductance, due to the limit of the regions of ‘opposing potential’ to supply the EMF (electromotive force, or voltage) that can sustain a greater current. Here, there is a low current, due to the high electrical conductivity of the connecting media which lacks the ‘power supply’, giving a weak EM field that exhibits a low level of electrostatic activity.
The most obvious distinction between these two scenarios is either the absence, or presence, of ‘electrostatic’ activity. This is ‘known’ science and I present it as such.
Best regards, suricat.

Leif Svaalgard
“In another thread Eric Barnes (16:32:04) asked :
Exactly what theories are pseudo-science?
He should come over here for a great sampling.”
In the 22nd century, textbooks of science will commence any discussion of the phenomenon of pseudo-science with the monumental fiasco of the late 20th century theory of CO2 AGW, which became dominant culturally and politically and predicted indefinite global warming caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions during a period which was later found to have been the beginning of the end of the Holocene interglacial.
Universities relocated from temperate latitudes to semitropical ones will link the diagnosis of pseudo science with the epistemological laws proposed by Karl Popper, specifically the critical difference between deductive and inductive scientific reasoning. Connected with this the issue of whether a “scientific” theory is falsifiable or not. Deductive reasoning means keeping the lines between experimental observation and deduction as short and economical as possible. Deductive propositions are straightforwardly falsifiable. Inductive reasoning, which came close to destroying the edifice of scientific understanding in the early-mid 21st century, by contrast operates by adding assumption to assumption in a linear manner, constructing a complex edifice of interlinked hypotheses and assumptions. While parts of the edifice are embellished with highly complex experimental and theoretical detail and are thus easy to defend by individuals deeply conversant in the particular specific topic, the validity of the body of reasoning actually depends on the correctness of a very large number of interlinked hypotheses or assertions, and is highly unstable to any weak link in what is more a cobweb than a chain.
For example, deductive reasoning would ask the question – if CO2 causes runaway and dangerous warming, then what evidence do we see of this in the palaeoclimatic record of the Ordovician era where CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 8-20 times higher than today. Receiving the answer that no warming followed, and that instead a severe global ice age ended the era, the deductive conclusion would be that the CO2 warming hypothesis was wrong – that CO2 is not dominant in global temperatures.
But the inductive response to this is quite different. It is to totally ignore the Ordovician history. And to ignore with a determination close to fanaticism any record of climate variation before the 19 and 20th century. Instead to create a detailed narrative based on some physics of the properties of CO2 and applying the analogy of a greenhouse, with the assumption that the climate system is simple enough to be characterised by simple linear algebraic expressions ignoring the possibility of chaos and nonlinearity.
In the same way that the internet is resistant to disruption by its interconnectedness, falsification of inductive hypotheses is extremely difficult and frustrating because as any weak points are found, the web-like edifice can adapt itself to avoid refutation and say “the overall theory never really depended on that individual part”.
Inductive theories can shield themselves behind sheer complexity and volume of technical information. The assumption is made that every part of the colossal edifice needs to be disproved in order for the overall theory to be challenged.
The nemesis of inductive reasoning is the prevalence in the real world of chaotic nonlinear and nonequilibrium pattern due to complexity and the universality of feedbacks. In the 22nd century it will be universally taught and understood that only a small fraction of natural phenomena can be meaningfully studied by linear inductive type reasoning, where one or at most two factors are dominant. Astronomical objects and gravitationally controlled movement is one such example. Mathematics is of course an abstract refuge where one can indulge in gratuitous inductivism without any rude interruption from the real world.
So students of science in the 22nd century will be required to create their own inductive pseudo-scientific hypotheses and defend them, the more ridiculous they are and the more robustly defended, the higher the score. This in order to understand fully the workings of this corrosive epistemological pathology.
The purpose of an inductive pseudo-scientific theory is clear and well defined:
(1) To support a political agenda, to demonise and generate public animosity toward a selected enemy of the state, and
(2) To make itself so complex, interlinked and flexible and simultaneously enmeshed in mountainous volumes of technical detail, so that refutation is impossible.
Another 20th century example was the advance of the theory that ionising radiation is dangerously carcinogenic at all doses down to zero. Again the deductive approach in this field is to look at the experimental fact that radiation doses below 100 mGy cause no increase in cancer in humans or animals, and that instead such low exposures actually reduce cancer incidence, boost immunity and extend lifespan. Again, the inductive approach is to ignore the organism-level data and look only at the level of DNA and the cell, to construct elaborate theories based on DNA strand breaks, genetic and cell phenomena and extrapolate them to the level of the whole organism. Gene and cell effects can be seen down to zero dose – therefore there must be organism level effects of a similar nature, all the way down to zero dose. Again the huge complexity, connectedness and immunity to falsification. Again the direct experimental evidence is ignored. Again the blindness to the possibility of totally different chaotic nonlinear pattern dynamics in complex natural systems.
The success of this particular pseudo-scientific theory had the effect of destroying the nuclear scientific community in North America and Europe in the early 21st century, so that now the only successful nuclear technology companies are in Russia (what is left of it), Asia and Persia. The loss of much of the world’s fossil fuel reserves due to glaciation meant that it was fortunate indeed that the ability to generate energy from nuclear reactions was not lost altogether.
The political driving force behind these pseudo-science movements, students of science history will learn, was of an anarchic, left wing and anti-capitalistic nature, and is also “Luddite” in its opposition to industry in general, technologies such as nuclear power, genetic modification, pharmaceutical industry. This movement was a delayed reaction to the industrial revolution itself and its early abuses. It also fed on socio-economical divisions engendered by industrialisation. This political ideal shares with the Nazis of 1930’s Germany the rural peasant idyll, free of industry – although is not shy of using industrial and technical power to advance its agenda.
However in the current 22nd century glacial world, the need to share resources to survive and the technological challenges to provide the populations needs from a much reduced habitable earth surface, have largely extinguished the sources or power and motivation for reactionary and anti-industrial pseudo science as a political weapon.

First rule of the Universe: “There must be far more that is unknown than is known, otherwise the occupants will be bored.” (Call it Dark Knowledge:-)