Another piece of the LENR puzzle. Current scientific thinking postulates that the earth is thought to have formed around 4.5 billion years ago from a disk of dust grains left over from the cloud of material that built our sun. These grains slowly clumped together, drawn by gravity into pebbles, then boulders, then planetary embryos. Eventually, enough mass coalesced to form the planet Earth.
This grain clumping idea under the influence of gravity is not totally correct because the gravitational dust attraction potential at the dimensions of micro-sized dust grains is so weak that the dust based aggregates must grow to a fairly large critical average size before gravity becomes strong enough between dust grains to exert sufficient attraction between these particles to gather matter together. In the beginning of nebular formation, when a progenitor star explodes, it produces dust with a grain size proportional to that of cigarette smoke. Astronomers suspect exploding stars help make the universe a dustier place. But something doesn’t fit; for example, the new Spitzer Space Telescope images show the Crab Nebula, the wreckage of a star that exploded in A.D. 1054, contains none of the fine, micron-wide, smoke-size dust particles expected to condense out of supernova ejecta. "We know dust forms in supernovae," says Robert Gehrz, Temim's adviser and a collaborator on the study. "SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud formed dust about 600 days after the explosion." Elements like carbon, for example, should be among the first to condense and clump together. "Theoretically, we expect as much as a solar mass of dust to form, but when we look with infrared instruments, we see very little." So what could possibly be going on? To get down into the details, cigarette smoke particle sizes are about .2 microns ( visible light wavelengths at .4 to .7 microns) That’s why cigarette smoke looks blue as short wavelength light is scattered by particles smaller than light's wavelengths. Smoke density is around 10^9/cm^3. At this small grain size, gravity has no influence on dust aggregation. Cosmic dust ranges from .1 to 100 microns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_dust#Stardust The Williams.edu site provides a nebular density range from 10^5 to 10^8 particles/cm^3. (If you go there, they use cm^-3 or cubic millimeters so please check my math.) http://web.williams.edu/astronomy/research/PN/nebulae/exercise3.php So in general, the dense part of a nebula would be about one order of magnitude less dense than cigarette smoke. But it's spread out over light years. I don't think hydrogen atoms reflect light, they may scatter it, and they certainly emit light when excited. So I hazard a guess that a lot of the reflected light must be caused by cigarette smoke sized dust particles at +-10^2 to 10^5 particles/cm^3 (that's 1000th of the overall densities above). It's difficult to distinguish newly formed dust in recent supernovae from dust produced by the star before it erupted. Here, too, the Crab Nebula seems cleaner than expected. The new images show no circumstellar halo of dust shed from the Crab's progenitor. So, where did this smoke-size dust go? Here is what I think is going on. We know from study of our solar system that the first processes of nebular condensation are the formation of Chondrules. Nebular smoke condense under the influence of electrostatic attraction into Chondrules which are round grains found form molten or partially molten droplets in space before being accreted to their parent asteroids. Chondrules are believed to have formed by a rapid (flash) heating (within minutes or less) and melting of solid dust aggregates of approximately solar composition under temperatures of about 1000 K. The solar nebula or a protoplanetary environment is a possible place of formation. However, within this environmental setting, the energy source for the aggregation through heating of the precursor material is not known to main stream science. Meteors that have formed in the cold depths of the planetary nebula show vigorous particle aggregation without ever being exposed to the nuclear heat produced at the center of the star formation. We now suspect with our background in LENR that the heating mechanism is most likely cold fusion of nano-dust under the influence of an electrostatic charge separation mechanisms. So LENR may be fundamental to the formation of our universe. With this important insight, we may now be wise enough to put dust based LENR processes to work to advance our own purposes. Cheers: Axil
