[QUOTE=TheFonz]
Magnetic fields are caused by moving charged particles.
[/quote]
True enough — but not very relevant to gravitational forces, which don’t care about charge.
[QUOTE=TheFonz]
Venus absorbs.
[/quote]
I can’t tell what this is supposed to mean. Stuff falls into Venus, more so than other bodies? What makes it unusually absorbent?
[QUOTE=TheFonz]
Note the top half of Mars and how it was eaten by Venus . . .
[/quote]
I’ll note that there is, yes, a measurable difference between the average altitudes of Mars’ hemispheres. The surface of the northern hemisphere is a little lower, overall, than that of the southern hemisphere. The difference is quite striking when you look at a color-coded altitude map of the planet.
However, compared to Mars’ radius, the altitude difference is tiny — a small fraction of a percent. And there are no other significant asymmetries tied to this altitude asymmetry, that I’m aware of anyway. If Mars had been half “eaten”, I would expect the surface to have many more lava flows in the north, or some other indication of the trauma. Also, if this “eating event” had happened in recent times — a few millennia ago, isn’t that what’s proposed? — that should have erased all the craters on the bitten hemisphere. But Mars is pretty evenly cratered over both halves.
For that matter, Earth is also asymmetric in the same way. Most of the higher altitude land is in the northern hemisphere, making our planet “half-eaten” too I suppose, chomped on from the south. Or perhaps Earth is just naturally a bit lopsided. It’s not as if there’s some principle that forces planets to be perfect spheres. They’re allowed to be a little irregular for no reason.
[QUOTE=TheFonz]
. . . as well as the exploded ex-planet asteroid belt that Venus absorbed a while bunch out of.
[/quote]
Not quite. The asteroid belt is basically a planet that failed to coalesce because of tidal forces from Jupiter. Any pair of those asteroids trying to stick together from their mutual gravity will quickly (in astronomical terms) be separated again.
[QUOTE=TheFonz]
Yeah that’s right, a stringy object came flying all the way towards Earth and nearly reached our damn planet. It probably stopped when it reached our magnetic field, but oh well.
[/quote]
Pretty much did reach our planet, I’m sure. SOHO is only 1.5 million km from here. Most particles with enough kinetic energy to leave Venus and reach SOHO can also go the extra little distance to reach Earth. Many of those ions reaching Earth will have fallen into its magnetic field, and been trapped there for a time.
But all of this is perfectly safe and nothing to worry about. Our own ionosphere is a plentiful source of, well, ions. They swamp the ones arriving occasionally from Venus.
[QUOTE=TheFonz]
I’m sure this stringy object has nothing to do with the awesome surface features of Venus that resemble Lichtenberg figures:
[/quote]
I assume that last sentence was sarcasm. Which is fine, I’m just clarifying.
There’s some more on the SOHO observations here and here. An abstract of the original paper is here. Note that the event you’re referring to occurred back in 1996. Presumably it happens frequently, whenever Venus passes between the Earth and Sun closely enough to cast its ion “shadow cone” in our direction. It has nothing to do with Venus’s surface features.
In other words, this is the sort of interesting phenomenon that scientific instruments can detect, but isn’t otherwise of any practical importance.
[QUOTE=TheFonz]
This is what frustrates me when talking to the Dopers, because they believe I am the one who is arrogant and ignorant when it is THEY who cannot see the world falling apart around their very eyes.
[/QUOTE]
I for one will cheerfully admit that the world might be falling apart. I see BrainGlutton is allowing for the possibility too. You can and will find plenty of people here who take an interest our species’ impending doom.
What you should realize though is this. In this thread you’re making some wild claims about physical phenomena that are either (1) much better understood than you suppose (like solar fusion, and celestial mechanics), or (2) are not so well understood (like lightning), but are still not explainable by the fanciful ideas you’re offering or quoting from elsewhere. A bad explanation is worse than no explanation at all. You should expect argument on such topics.
Actually, on this board, you should expect argument on every topic.
