Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
I'll try as best as I can (this topic is beyond my level of understanding of Physics).
Essentially they've found something, they don't know what it is... a speculation is it could be caused by Black Holes which were formed by the first Stars to exist in the Universe Imploding (as predicted by Einstein).
The other part of the submission leads on to say that if they are correct in their first speculation, it could possibly validate other theories like the one made by Eric Lerner, on how the Universe "works" in terms of the various structures of matter and energy in the space between large masses (like planets or stars).
I'm suspect as to the accuracy of the first link in the article, it quotes:
Dust grows over time as stars manufacture heavy elements called metals, like carbon, silicon and oxygen, that make up dust and then spit them out into space.
The reason I'm suspect, is because Oxygen and Carbon are both nonmetallic elements (or at least I understood they were - I checked Wikipedia to confirm).
I hope that helps you a bit, this stuff is a bit of a mindbender.
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
Everything that's not hydrogen or helium, is a metal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal#Astronomy
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
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
To astronomers, Everything that's not hydrogen or helium, is a metal.
(Chemists have different viewpoints.)
I am a chemist, and as such I would say a metal is an element which favours losing electrons to form positive ions and electron 'clouds', rather than forming covalent bonds (electron-sharing between only a few atoms - normally 2). It seems that there is a specific definition of 'metal', which is used by the astrophysics guys, meaning any element heavier than helium. This says nothing about the ability/mechanism of the element to join with other elements, just its mass. As this is an astrophysics story, I'd have to go along with the 'heavier than helium' definition...
Well, the point is that in cosmology or extra-galactic astronomy, almost everything visible is almost entirely Hydrogen or Helium. The sloppy convention is to call the little bit left over "metals," although I know people who call it "dust," depending on the circumstances. Carbon (say) is definitely not a metal, but it would be called that in cosmology. It's just a convention.
Please recall that Mr pln2bz is an Electric Universe fanatic, pretending to be an objective outsider who was swayed by the Thunderbolts' persuasive arguments.