The plasmoids are basically charged particles contained in an (electro-)magnetic field. This can be done in a lab, in controlled situations and with significant magnetic field strengths. Although there are claims these plasmoids can occur in our atmosphere, I highly doubt they just form simply without a rather "special" situation. For instance, when there is a big thunderstorm, surely a mix of magnetic fields (caused by moving charges) and charged particles are observed, possibly causing ball-lightning/plasmoids. However, it is far from normal, more or less "neutral" atmospheric conditions, and I would not consider it to be a simple answer to uaps/orbs.
There seems to be a "soliton" feel to them - an arrangement that evolves in time in a way that mostly preserves that arrangement. A metastable solution to a differential equation, say. However, the wikepedia articles on them and their postulator (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmoid ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_H._Bostick ) leave me wondering where they are on the scale from sub-atomic sized to atmospheric-phenomena sized:
External Quote:
In 1956 Bostick demonstrated the existence of "plasmoids", force-free, charge-carrying "strings".[4] Ten years later he postulated an electron composed of helical plasmoids forming vortex "loops" around a "ring", similar to the Parson Magneton.[5] Bostick maintained that this model could account for atomic structure, strong and weak forces within the nucleus, and that it was a physical basis for string theory, but this view received no support from the mainstream scientific community and is considered fringe science.
-- about him, implying subatomic
External Quote:
A plasmoid is a coherent structure of plasma and magnetic fields. Plasmoids have been proposed to explain natural phenomena such as ball lightning,[1][2] magnetic bubbles in the magnetosphere,[3] and objects in cometary tails,[4] in the solar wind,[5][6] in the solar atmosphere,[7] and in the heliospheric current sheet.
-- about them, implying potentially planet-dwarfing
Initially I thought that this blew my soliton comparison out of the water:
External Quote:
In a field-free vacuum, for example, a plasmoid will rapidly expand and dissipate.
-- ibid
but the Severn Bore would dissipate if it weren't for the river banks, so if anything it might even reinforce the analogy.
Very few things scale across so many orders of magnitude, in particular when it comes to things like fluid dynamics, so I suspect "plasmoid" is more being used to describe a shared property of many different systems.
I'm also kinda worried by this image:
image link:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Plasmoid.jpg/640px-Plasmoid.jpg
via:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plasmoid.jpg
Because it reminds me of the medieval map on a local restaurant's wall that has an angry dragon where the Faroes should be. Just because you put it in a diagram doesn't make it real. it's described as:
External Quote:
Schematic of the formation of a plasmoid in the Earth's magnetotail, from "A Brief History of Magnetospheric Physics during the Space Age" by D.P. Stern. The article was produced by a US Govt. employee and is therefore in the public domain. This article can be found in (1996). "A brief history of magnetospheric physics during the space age". Reviews of Geophysics 34 (1): 1. DOI:10.1029/95RG03508
I was firewalled from viewing the original of that paper, but what I iniitally thought was an OCR of it can be found here:
http://www.phy6.org/Education/bh2_1.html , which has a mysterious HTTP 404 for the image
http://www.phy6.org/Education/Figures/plasmoid.gif on this page:
http://www.phy6.org/Education/bh2_7.html
I was unable to find a version of that document on the Internet Archive, where it's been scraped for over 2 decades, that contains the image - all have a dead link. So even though the page has been regenerated (different layouts and splitting into pages) many times, noone's seen fit to check that all the images work. The accompanying paragraph is so wooly that it doesn't give me great faith in its contents:
External Quote:
Ultimately, in this scenario, the increased southward IMF reaches N2 and increases the rate of reconnection there, and after a while the supply of returning magnetic flux reaching N1 again matches the demand. But meanwhile other processes may intervene. The increased pressure on the lobe may squeeze the plasma sheet, causing reconnection at an internal neutral line N3 (Figure 16), so that the flux returning sunward is now supplied by reconnection at N3. Tailward of N3 an isolated magnetic bubble will be created, named "plasmoid" by Hones [1976; p. 567], a term previously applied by Bostick [1956, 1957, 1986] to a type of transient plasma bubble observed in the laboratory. Hones [1979, p. 393] described it as "...a blob of magnetospheric plasma ... detached from the magnetotail plasma...". The reconnection process at N3 was assumed to provide the substorm's energy and to accelerate particles; observations of impulsively accelerated particles in the tail [e.g. Keath et al., 1976; Roelof et al., 1976] were believed to indicate proximity to to N3.
... may ... may ... may ... assumed ... believed ... eh?
However, that little bit of digging does satisfy me that my suspicion that the term was being applied to multiple different things is made much firmer.
No, I have no idea where I'm going. But I wasted my effort doing all the clicking, so you have to waste your effort reading my rambling!
