Telescope Offers 'Clearest View Yet' of Milky Way - Including Plasma Filaments (ska.ac.za)

Chris Reeve writes: The MeerKAT radio telescope was inaugurated in South Africa this past Friday, revealing the clearest view yet of the center of the Milky Way. What is especially surprising about the produced image are the numerous prominent filaments which seem to appear in the foreground.

Herschel made a similar announcement just three years prior that "Observations with ESA's Herschel space observatory have revealed that our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale." Intriguingly, close inspection of yesterday's SKA image show these filaments twisting around one another, yet without combining — a phenomenon observable in most novelty plasma globes when the filaments are conducting electricity... The SKA telescopes is one of the first telescopes to witness these filaments because it is 50 times more powerful than any former telescope, but also because it is apparently one of the few telescopes which can observe dark mode plasmas. For these reasons, the SKA telescope will inevitably revive the debate over the underlying physical reasons for filaments which exhibit coherent thin magnetic structure over light-year distances.
The original submission included a comment with more information about the theory of a plasma universe.

Comments

Electric Universe

[Anonymous Coward]

Galactic scale magnetic fields... Is this why stars don't orbit galaxies at the velocities predicted by gravitation alone? Perhaps this will ultimately put an end to dark matter hocus pocus.

Re: Electric Universe

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: And yet when we search for these massive fields, they've never been found

It's not clear why you expect to see "massive" fields. Don Scott has published the mathematics for the force-free field-aligned Birkeland current, and it is a Bessel function - a series of concentric cylinders of counter-rotating charge.

To be clear, there is no mathematical basis in the Bessel function for your claim that a massive field would be observable from outside of the filament structure.

If you take a close look at the geometry which is being alleged, you should notice that the existence of these counter-rotating cylinders means that we cannot assume that electric currents will produce large magnetic fields.

It wasn't more than about two years after Dr. Scott published this paper, by the way, that another paper was published, acknowledging the existence of counter-rotation in AGN [active galactic nuclei] jets:

our results have now yielded firm evidence that many — possibly all — AGN jets have inward currents along their axes and outward currents in a more extended region surrounding the jets. This provides fundamental information about the conditions leading to the formation and launching of the jets, as well as key input to theoretical simulations of astrophysical jets. It also indicates that astrophysical jets are fundamentally electromagnetic structures, which must be borne in mind when interpreting observed features in the distributions of both their intensity and linear polarization.