The Electric Sun

The boldest single claim in the Electric Universe is about the star next door. In the standard model the Sun is a self-contained fusion reactor: hydrogen fuses in the core, energy works its way out, and everything we see — light, wind, flares — is internally powered. In the electric Sun model, the Sun is not isolated at all: it is the focus of a galactic electrical circuit, behaving like the anode (positive electrode) of a glow discharge, its visible surface a plasma phenomenon rather than the top of a furnace.

This page lays out the model as its proponents present it — the anomalies they start from, the mechanism they propose, and the laboratory test they built.

The anomalies proponents start from

The case for an electric Sun is usually argued from features of the observed Sun that are, by general agreement, genuinely puzzling — and that proponents say fall out naturally from discharge behavior:

• The corona is the wrong way round. The Sun's visible surface sits near 5,800 K, yet the wispy corona above it runs at one to three million kelvin. Heat should not flow from cool to hot; this "coronal heating problem" has been a named open problem in solar physics for decades. In a glow discharge, proponents note, the hottest region naturally sits above the anode surface.

• The solar wind accelerates. Charged particles leave the Sun and keep speeding up past the corona, against gravity. An electric field centered on the Sun, proponents argue, is exactly what would do that to positive ions.

• Sunspots are dark. Where the photosphere parts, we look deeper into the Sun — and see something cooler and darker, not the glow of an approaching furnace. In the electric model, the photosphere is a bright anode-tufting layer (a sheath of plasma "tufts" regulating current flow), so beneath it lies a cooler body, just as the umbra suggests.

• Surface granulation, the sharp photosphere edge, and the solar cycle are read, respectively, as the tops of plasma tufts, a discharge sheath boundary, and variation in the external current supply.

The model and its people

The proposal originated with Ralph Juergens (1924–1979), an engineer in Immanuel Velikovsky's circle, who in 1972 published in Pensée the idea that the Sun is externally powered — an anode collecting electrons from a galactic discharge environment. It was refined by Donald E. Scott, a Ph.D. electrical engineer who taught for nearly forty years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Scott's The Electric Sky (2006) models the photosphere's behavior on the known characteristics of plasma discharges and transistor circuits — small changes in the plasma sheath's voltage drop regulating the whole output — and his "Real Properties of Electromagnetic Fields and Plasma in the Cosmos" appeared in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science (2007). Wal Thornhill made the electric Sun a pillar of the broader theory, arguing the Sun's power arrives via the very Birkeland-current filaments that structure the galaxy.

In this model, fusion is not absent — but it happens in the photospheric discharge, near the surface, a by-product rather than the engine. The Sun's steadiness comes from the stability of the galactic circuit feeding it.

SAFIRE: putting an anode in a chamber

The model's proponents did something unusual for a heterodox cosmology: they commissioned a laboratory test. The SAFIRE Project — led by engineer Montgomery Childs, with about $15 million over six years — built a chamber containing a metal anode in a hydrogen plasma, deliberately replicating the electric-Sun geometry. By the project's own reports (its mandate was declared fulfilled in 2019), the experiment produced stable plasma double layers around the anode "analogous with the sun's photosphere," anomalously high energy densities, and — most strikingly — reported transmutation of elements on and near the anode surface. Childs's summary: "In all our experiments and discoveries we have found no disparities with the Electric Sun model." The project has since been folded into a commercial venture, Aureon Energy.

These are the project's own claims, not independently replicated results — but as a falsifiable laboratory program attached to a fringe cosmology, SAFIRE is close to unique, and proponents weight it accordingly.

Related pages

The Plasma Universe — Birkeland, Alfvén, Peratt

Electric Comets — Tempel 1, Wild 2, and 67P

The Thunderbolts Project — People and History

Sources & further reading

• Ralph Juergens, "Reconciling Celestial Mechanics and Velikovskian Catastrophism," Pensée (1972) — where the externally powered Sun first appears

• Donald E. Scott, The Electric Sky (Mikamar, 2006); "Real Properties of Electromagnetic Fields and Plasma in the Cosmos," IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. (2007)

• holoscience.com — Thornhill's electric-Sun essays

• SAFIRE / Aureon Energy — the project's history and reports in its own words

• For the standard picture: any modern solar-physics review of the coronal heating problem and the solar neutrino results