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Spiraling Magnetic Signal Shows Up In the Cosmic Background
pln2bz writes "Astronomers looking for confirmation for emissions from early stellar formation in the cosmic microwave background radiation instead found a signal indicating large amounts of unaccounted-for spiraling magnetic fields in space, but without any accompanying infrared emissions. The discovery possibly dredges up the claims of plasma cosmologists like Eric Lerner, who claim that the intergalactic medium is a strong absorber of the CMB with the absorption occurring in a fog of narrow filaments. These filaments are the result of plasma's natural tendency, as observed within the plasma laboratory and in novelty plasma globes, to form braided, ropelike structures which are collimated by coiled magnetic fields."
This news is too nerdy to understand. Can someone explain it in more detail?
Had to go look at the Electric Universe's webpage (won't link to it now; the curious can drive traffic). I see no mention of anything like this structure predicted on any sort of scale like this, though they post-hoc claim that galactic-sized spiraly bits can be explained with their theory. Probably their page is in need of revision, though, with these new findings...
The universe really is made out of spiral energy!
Maybe it's the explanation for the problem these hippies' are having? No, on second thoughts, the problem is that they're hippies.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Interpretation of the extragalactic results (the real source of the OP) :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0559
Note that the above paper does not mention the "wildly speculative" spiraling magnetic fields idea.
Extragalactic results in general :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0555
Galactic results
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0562
A description of the instrument :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0546
Oh, cool!
Thank you, I didn't know that was the correct term.
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
...which is "what are the implications of this discovery with regards to the development of FTL travel and subsequent discovery of green alien chicks in bikinis?"
Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann joke/reference goes here :)
Hi Simon!!
I suspect that there are a lot of slashdotters who aren't strong on Cosmology and won't be bothered looking up the significance of the CMB on Wikipedia (I must say the Wikipedia article is particularly dense and won't be the easiest for non-specialists to digest).
So in a nutshell, the CMB is the the radiation we see in every direction of the sky. It's a little more complicated but you can think of it as the afterglow of the big bang. (Note: That is an over-simplication. To understand it better you have to look at a timeline of what happened after the big bang, especially hyper-inflation and recombination).
The reason it's so important is that it is the result of and thus put limits on the conditions at the time of the Big Bang. Since we don't have time machines and can't observe the universe from the outside, it is a critical piece of observational data against which we test our theories.
It is a particularly important piece of the puzzle when trying to work out what's going on with regards to dark matter because the amount of dark matter and the way in which it formed must be consistent with conditions that produced the CMB we observe.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The spending is spiraling out of control, out of this world and is astronomical, as every one knows.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Experimental data speculation + crackpot plasma theory = Slashdot science?
The many unexpected and anomalous astronomical observations are not really that surprising given that the astrophysical theories used to predict/interpret them are limited and likely mostly wrong. One big omission is the ignored role of the electric field. For a good overview of what should be (but is not) taken into account, see this site: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm
That the universe is a big giant plasma ball that hasn't been played with in a while... so what happens when someone plugs us back in and touches the glass again?
A man conceived a moments answers to the dream, Staying the flowers daily, sensing all the themes. As a foundation left to create the spiral aim, A movement regained and regarded both the same, All complete in the sight of seeds of life with you. Changed only for a sight of sound, the space agreed. Between the picture of time behind the face of need, Coming quickly to terms of all expression laid, Emotion revealed as the ocean maid, All complete in the sight of seeds of life with you.
Squirrel!
Or this could just be the transmissions of some aliens.
Shall we bend over with our upturned hinds towards the morning sun now? Is the Universe smaller than we thought because a black hole bigger than our own galaxy keeps us from seeing a lot?
Three letters spring into mind - DNA
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
If each universe (as discussed in previous post) has some thing in common, maybe, like a gravity-field and each of the universes were in a Mega-verse levity-field (you can laugh now) floating around like galaxies in our own small universe, then maybe ....
A gravity field universe passing through a levity-field mega-verse would generate a background energy halo. The mechanics much like magnets generation of electricity..., but gravity is not magnetism and levity is not electricity (laugh again, please).
What if; a black-hole not only causes a gravitational distortion, but collapse of so much mass/particles in one singularity causes the space-time of our (Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Shrodinger, Heisenberg, Hawking...) universal physics no longer exist at the center of the singularity (which is based on levity-field physics).
Can a black-hole-levity-well be (much/sorta) like a universe-gravity-well in a levity-field? ... maybe...almost... self sustaining ...
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Please recall that Mr pln2bz is an Electric Universe fanatic, pretending to be an objective outsider who was swayed by the Thunderbolts' persuasive arguments.
Sort, of. Dredge up (both literally and figuratively) means to bring back to the surface something that was formerly "sunk".
Anything other than Hydrogen and Helium is a metal.
Apart from the one-in-a-quadrillion chance of Oxygen and so on, all that was produced in the big bang was either Hydrogen or Helium. All other elements are produced in stellar fusion.
Shining flying purple wolfhounds show me where you are.
He has a history of posting any story that can possibly be interpreted as supporting the electric universe theory, along with his speculations as to why the story proves EU correct. Just saying...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Could be somebody up there pulled the handle and we're just starting the spin down the bowl?
This guy must be from the dept-of-redundancy-dept
"They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
If there is so much noise in space - this may explain why projects such as SETI as unsuccesful - the noise basically masks any signal that might have been there.
Metals are a metal, except when they are not.
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The Electric Universe debate...
is a Velikovskian spin on plasma cosmology. Plasma cosmologies may once have been (borderline) reasonable scientific speculation, but are no longer.
...between plasma physicists and astrophysicists.
Most plasma physicists are "standard cosmologists" in the sense that anyone who is not nominally a cosmologist can be said to be a cosmologist at all. Most astrophysicists are also "standard cosmologists" in the same way. The disciplines of cosmology, plasma physics, and astrophysics overlap and are of course inter-related. It is inaccurate to imply that there are only two camps, that the two largest (whether "only" or not) are labeled "astrophysicsists" and "plasma physicists", or that plasma physicists are predominantly "plasma cosmologists". The "debate" you claim exists is between "plasma cosmologists" and everybody else, including most plasma physicists.
It dates back to Kristian Birkeland, Irving Langmuir, Ralph Juergens and Hannes Alfven.
The ideas (those to which you allude, anyway) of these people were developed before the modern understanding of cosmology and even stellar dynamics were well-developed. They certainly aren't equivalent to the ideas propounded by the Electric Universe folks. For example, Alfven was the last of these who could be called a serious scientist, and I'm not aware of his ever a) claiming that stellar fusion and nucleosynthsis were in substantial error as the Electric Universe folks claim, let alone b) proposing scientific reasoning for such a position.
People who think that there exists no peer review in support of it do not realize who the proponents are.
Then please, enlighten us. There are several mythologists (neo-Velikovskians who are considered wildly incorrect among mythologists themselves), Anthony Peratt (a plasma physicist with, to my knowledge, little or no knowledge of contemporary astronomy, astrophyisics, cosmology, or relativity), Don Scott (an electrical engineer who as demonstrated less command of the aforementioned fields than Peratt), and various unaccredited non-scientists who have still less command of these fields.
Anthony Peratt, for instance -- who investigates evidence that supports the Electric Universe...
Anthony Peratt is a student of Hannes Alfven, and seems to hail (like Alfven and all the others you mentioned earlier, and I'll throw in Halton Arp, Fred Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar to round it out) from a scientific understanding that predates the modern one, and have been, in varying ways and to varying extents, unable or unwilling to incorporate more modern findings into their understandings of the way the universe works.
People who don't think that the Electric Universe is supported by peer review aren't paying attention to the debate and are confused on what's actually happening.
No. People who think there is a debate about the correctness or efficacy of plasma cosmology, let alone the Velikovskian electric universe take, are unaware of what's actually happening. What's actually happening is that scientific observations, measurements, theoretical advances, etc. are being published prodigiously while a small group of people who only understand their own corner of it (if that) claim that the findings in said areas refute the rest in such a way as to "support" the Electric Universe stuff. In other words, only the supporters of the Electric Universe think this is so, and they look foolish to the people who understand where and why they're wrong.
The EU Theorists
Should be "EU theorists" because "theorist" is not a proper noun, even when preceded by "Electric Univese" (which itself is a general term conscripted into use, and is a misnomer at that).
...have decided to circumvent th
...the Sun can be modeled as a plasma glow discharge based upon our observations of the glow discharge in the plasma laboratory.
No, it can't be. Laboratory plasmas are small; stars are not. In your example, the Sun is a very massive (n.b.: "having mass") plasma, about 2*10^30kg, concentrated in one place. Such balls of plasma have very high temperatures and pressures at their cores which cause nuclear fusion to occur, and they certainly cannot be contained in any literal "laboratory" in the sense you meant it.
The Electric Universe is based upon [that] simple premise...
The problem is that the premise is incorrect; it is indeed a "simple" premise though.
It really shouldn't even be controversial
Agreed.
And you shouldn't dismiss it until you can at least rattle off all of the key characteristics of both a glow discharge and the heliosphere.
You shouldn't accept it until you can at least rattle off all the key characteristics of stellar equilibrium, stellar fusion, helioseismology, spectroscopy, stellar dynamics in aggregate, and from the looks of things basic thermodynamics as well (you can't have that much hydrogen in one place and expect it not to fuse!).
If [granules in the photosphere] were convection cells, they would be light in the centers.
First, that is primarilty what is actually observed. Second, that some slightly cooler material in the centers of some granules is expected from the laws of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, and this has been fairly well understood for half a century. Third, spectral analyses of the cells reveals exactly the convective action expected from such convection cells.
Those are tornadic cells...
No, they are convection cells.
...rotation comes directly from electromagnetism.
Yeah, nothing rotates that wasn't set into rotation by electromagetism? This is the kind of claim that rightly causes people not to take the claimant seriously.
Use your head, people.
I second this. But, note that there are correct and incorrect answers, and merely "using one's head" (as implied by this anthropocentric appeal that the universe is somehow constrained to be amenable to our common sense) is not likely to improve on the state of the art in knowledge; everyone has such intuition, and it has proven too unreliable on its own-- thus the rise and subsequent success of scientific rigor.
Science is inherently controversial...
No, Science is about extending the boundaries of our understanding. There are right answers and wrong answers, and we need not find our attempts to extend these boundaries "controversial" at all, though in practice it can indeed happen.
I see no support whatsoever for plasma cosmology in the new data. It's an unexpected bright spot in the CMB spectrum. There are quite a few possible explanations and not really enough evidence yet to prefer any one of them in particular.
I'll leave the theory to someone more qualified than I, or to those folks who begin their post with "Well this is way beyond my understanding of Physics, but, as I understand it....". Rather, I just want to comment that, as it is commonly used, the word "signal" connotes transmission of a message from a sentient sender to a sentient receiver. The definition given by TheFreeDictionary.com should suffice: "3. Electronics An impulse or a fluctuating electric quantity, such as voltage, current, or electric field strength, whose variations represent coded information." (I suppose that we could assume that the Universe herself, himself, or itself is sending "coded information" to us, but then we'd have to parse the word "assume", and we wouldn't want to make donkeys of ourselves, now, would we?) So, I suggest that this "signal" is really an "emission", the characteristics of which lead astronomers to conclude that there are spiraling magnetic fields in the region of space they were observing. They expected to find IR radiation accompanying those spiraling magnetic field, but they didn't. Hence their surprise. Now, despite the fact that I'm not qualified to form such a theory, I'll state mine: The Universe is actually like an onion, only the number of layers is infinite. Once we humans peel back one layer -- Eratosthenes did! -- another is revealed. Newton peeled that one, to reveal the one that Einstein peeled, and then Hugh Everett III peeled-back another, and so on, ad universium.... Do I have my layers labeled right? I don't rightly know. But you might ask the Mother Hen....
I love how somebody labeled you as "flamebait" for pointing this out. I mean, that's a fairly uncontroversial statement you made there. The Electric Universe is almost entirely based upon the observations of the glow discharge in a plasma laboratory. It shouldn't really be all that controversial.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.