Plasma Clouds

Discovery Science

About this app

Plasma Clouds

Earth–Moon L4 and L5, computed on this device

The Moon's geocentric position and velocity come from the bundled JPL Development Ephemeris DE432s, file de432s.bsp (NAIF/JPL). The kernel is evaluated locally for the current device time. This is not a live NASA feed.

Device UTC is substituted for Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB), which is the kernel's time argument. ΔT (TT−UT) and the small TT−TDB term are not applied.

The vectors are SPK frame 1 (J2000). L4 and L5 are the equilateral points in the Earth–Moon plane: the Moon's geocentric position, rotated 60° ahead of the Moon (L4) and 60° behind it (L5) about the orbital angular-momentum axis, at the Moon's current geocentric distance. Ahead means the direction of the Moon's motion.

The faint ring is that current-distance circle. The brighter arc is the Moon's path from this same ephemeris, from 14 days before the device time to 14 days after.

The particle glow at L4 and L5 is a labeled schematic of the Kordylewski dust clouds. A published numeric density grid was not bundled. The glow is not a color scale, and this screen shows no plasma-density or dust-concentration numbers.

Judit Slíz-Balogh, András Barta, and Gábor Horváth, “Celestial Mechanics and Polarization Optics of the Kordylewski Dust Cloud in the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L5. Part I. 3D Celestial Mechanical Modelling of Dust Cloud Formation.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 480, 5550–5559 (the Part II bibliography dates this 2018). DOI 10.1093/mnras/sty2049. PDF opened: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07466.pdf

Same authors, Part II, “Imaging Polarimetric Observation: New Evidence for the Existence of Kordylewski Dust Cloud.” DOI 10.1093/mnras/sty2630. The DOI resolver redirected to https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/482/1/762/5114270 . PDF opened: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.07471.pdf

Part I Figure 5 is a grey-coded picture of relative simulated particle counts in a model, not a numeric density grid in the text. Those papers focus on L5. This view also marks the geometric L4 point; it does not add a separate density measurement for L4.

Open question, not an established result

Robert Temple's book The New Science of Heaven argues that plasma may exhibit sentience or intelligence and can form its own dust structures. That is Temple's thesis. It is an open question, not a demonstrated property of plasma and not a demonstrated property of the Kordylewski clouds.

This app does not assert that the clouds are alive, conscious, or intelligent. The book is cited by title and author only.

No ads, no account, no analytics, and no network permission. The ephemeris is inside the app. Nothing on this screen is downloaded when you open it.