New physics in Jupiter?

I heard interesting news about the physics of the solar system. The physics of the Jupiter’s magnetosphere is not quite as it should be. There is popular article “Unusual Plasma Waves Above Jupiter s North Pole” (see this). There is also a popular article in finnish (see this).

First some information about Jupiter. Jupiter is a giant planet with 90 moons. A giant storm, the red spot, has been raging for at least the last 350 years. Jupiter has a strong magnetic field, which is 54 times that of Earth (27 Gauss) and auroras are involved with it.

A team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota in the United States has observed new types of plasma waves at Jupiter’s north pole that have not been seen before in the solar system. NASA’s Juno spacecraft detected this mysterious wave phenomenon. The Juno spacecraft was launched into space in 2011 and reached Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Since then, the spacecraft has been studying the gas giant – including its magnetic field. In the final phase of its operation, Juno observed that Alfven waves in Jupiter’s magnetic field plasma were transformed into Langmuir waves. This has not been observed anywhere else before.

Alfven waves and Languir waves are are related to the plasma phase in a magnetic field. Wikipedia gives more information about these waves.

1. Alfven waves can be visualized as transverse oscillations of magnetic flux tubes. They propagate at an almost constant speed like light, but the speed depends slightly on the magnetic field and ion density and approach the speed of light in strong magnetic fields. The speed is proportional to the magnetic field strength and inversely proportional to the square root of the average ion density. (see this).
2. Langmuir waves are electron waves parallel to the magnetic field (i.e. longitudinal) for which the frequency depends very weakly on the wave vector and is inversely proportional to the square root of the electron density. (see this).

Langmuir waves occur at a frequency at which the dielectric constant vanishes. This means physically that at the plasma frequency an insulator cannot store energy in an electrostatic field. For example, the frequency-dependent capacitance of a capacitor goes to zero at this frequency. The energy propagates as a wave motion at this frequency that has very weak dependence on the wavelength. One could say that the energy of the sm radiation is stored in the plasmonic oscillation of electrons. For smaller frequencies the propagation is not possible and radiation is reflected at the surface. The transformation of Alfven waves into Langmuir waves was not expected. The frequencies would be the same for these waves, which gives a condition that fixes the wave vector for the Alfven wave.

What would TGD (see this and this) say about the possible new physics.

1. In TGD Alfwen waves could correspond to transverse oscillations of monopole flux tubes (see this and this). Monopole flux tubes, not possible in Maxwell’s theory, could be one piece of the conjectured new physics.

A second piece of the new physics could be that at the monopole flux tubes protons and perhaps also other ions can be “dark”, i.e. they are associated with a large effective Planck constant h_eff. They do not interact directly with the ordinary matter and in this sense behave like dark matter.

The transformation of ordinary matter into dark matter is possible. The large h_eff implies quantum coherence on very long scales and it plays a fundamental role in TGD-based quantum biology and astrophysics.

This dark matter does not correspond to galactic dark matter. It however explains the mysterious gradual reduction of baryon density in cosmological scales as a transformation of ordinary baryons to dark baryons at the monopole flux tubes associated with cosmic evolution as increase of the number theoretic complexity (see this).

The creation of the h_eff>h phase requires energy and, for example, the Pollack effect provides energy when photons are absorbed. The energy of photons is typically at IR, visible and UV wavelengths.

When positively charged protons/ions are “kicked” by photons onto a magnetic body, they become “dark”. The result is a negatively charged region, the exclusion zone (EZ), as Pollack calls it. Charge separation occurs: positive charge on magnetic flux tubes and negative charge in the EZ. This is new physics and is a central part of TGD-based quantum biology.

However, dark protons/ions spontaneously transform into ordinary ones when h_eff decreases and releases energy. At the same time, they are “dropped” from the monopole flux tubes and become ordinary. The released energy must go somewhere. Could the energies of the dark protons be stored in the Langmuir waves?

But how do Alfven waves relate to this? Could the Alfwen wave relate to dark protons/ions as an oscillation of the flux tube. As ordinary protons are kicked onto the flux tubes by photon absorption, the flux tube receives an impulse in addition to energy and starts to oscillate like a spring that has been pushed. When they drop from the flux tube, the oscillations and therefore also the Alfwen wave would disappear.

This mechanism could make possible the transfer of positive proton charge from the surface of the planet to the higher heights and might contribute to the generation of negative charge at the surface of Earth. For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.

Source: https://matpitka.blogspot.com/2025/08/new-physics-at-jupiter.html