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A new study from the University of Leicester confirms one of the key ideas of my novel Permanence: that brown dwarfs or supergiant planets can produce vast amounts of electrical power via their magnetic fields. In the novel this power is harvested to sustain civilizations around these dark wanderers. The study, done at the University of Leicester, concerned the planet Jupiter, which has vast auroras over its poles. The study attempts to explain the origin of these auroras, and posits truly gargantuan electric circuit between Jupiter and the plasma fields around it. Professor Stan Cowley says, in a Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) press release dated March 27, 2002, "The force associated with this electric current causes the plasma gas to spin at the same rate as the planet as it flows outwards. Our calculations suggest that the total current in this giant circuit is 100 million amps. The power transferred from the atmosphere to the plasma disk is about a thousand million megawatts or about 20,000 times the peak electricity demand in the UK!" In Permanence I suggest that solitary brown dwarfs and "rogue" gas giant planets floating alone in interstellar space could be colonized. It is very easy to harvest electricity from the plasma around such bodies--all you need is a long wire--and with electricity your colonists can have heat and light. (The definition of an electric generator is a wire in a moving magnetic field.) Since Jupiter is about 1/10th the size of the smallest brown dwarf described in the novel, you can imagine the power available to colonists or visitors to a dwarf. Also intriguing is the idea that on a brown dwarf ten times Jupiter's mass but only twice the diameter (due to gravitational effects), the polar auroras might be much more intense than they are here (vastly greater current flow over almost the same area). Not bright enough to heat any moons orbiting the dwarf--though the dwarf may radiate enough infrared to do that anyway--but might the auroras be bright enough to see by? Maybe. Enough to sustain photosynthesis on the surface of a moon? Well, now I'm sticking my neck out... but it's fun to imagine what such a place would be like. < | >
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