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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!
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
...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?"
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
Please recall that Mr pln2bz is an Electric Universe fanatic, pretending to be an objective outsider who was swayed by the Thunderbolts' persuasive arguments.
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