--- title: 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 ## 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](https://www.holoscience.com/) — Thornhill's electric-Sun essays - [SAFIRE / Aureon Energy](https://aureon.ca/) — 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