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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.
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.
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.
Don't you mean dank matter?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I bet it does.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
'Cause you can see the filaments! Just like in a toy plasma globe! Plasma can conduct electric currents, which proves the filaments conduct electricity!
This means we don't need dark matter OR the General Theory of Relativity!
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Psychoceramics: The study of crackpots.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7neg/electric-universe-theory-thunderbolts-project-wallace-thornhill
"Electric universe" theory is at odds with everything modern science has determined about the universe.
In physics, theories need math. That's how you predict, gather evidence, verify, disprove, and support. But EU theory isn't big on math. In fact, "Mathematics is not physics," Thornhill said. While that equation aversion makes the theory pretty much a nonstarter for "mainstream" astronomers, it is the exact thing that appeals to many adherents.
"At best, the 'electric universe' is a solution in search of a problem; it seeks to explain things we already understand very well through gravity, plasma and nuclear physics, and the like," said astronomer Phil Plait, who runs the blog Bad Astronomy at Slate. "At worst it's sheer crackpottery like homeopathy and astrology, making claims clearly contradicted by the evidence."
Lets get that again from a real scientist:
making claims clearly contradicted by the evidence
Electric universe is bullshit.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
the SKA telescope will inevitably revive the debate
No Doubt.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Re: "The filaments (having no similarity whatsoever with discharges inside globe toy nor with lightning) though are real and were discovered in mid 80s."
Filamentation is a fundamental aspect of plasmas conducting charged particles, and has been observed countless times in all sorts of plasma laboratories. The novelty plasma globe has been pointed to simply because the public will be most familiar with it.
Filamentation was also the most important prediction by Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven insofar as it distinguishes a universe dominated by plasmas from one that is not. Filaments do not naturally follow from the radial force of gravity, so those who might assert that they are not currents would have to rely upon either a creation event, chance observation from "shocks", or some other esoteric phenomenon forcefully imposed upon the observation in order to avoid the simple inference of electric currents.
If you have an alternative scientific explanation for why these filaments are magnetized and how it is that they remain coherent over light years distances, then you should post it.
Re: "The part that annoys me most about the whole Electric Universe thing is that nowadays you basically can't talk about electromagetism in astrophysics at all."
Astrophysicists' problems with magnetic fields did not begin with the Electric Universe; they began with the former mistaken assumption that the space between stars is basically empty. That unfortunate assumption guided the creation of scientific theories in the space sciences up until the first instrumented rockets definitively demonstrated that space is not actually empty. To this day, the most popular theories in the space sciences remain rooted in a pre-Space Age set of assumptions. The situation was properly stated in a 1963 Popular Science interview with James van Allen:
Once rockets were finally sent into space - in 1958 - the mistake was immediately realized because those rockets returned to the ground radioactive. Once it was realized that the space between planets and stars is permeated by an ionized medium, the introductions of many graduate-level textbooks were updated with explicit mention of the importance of the plasma state:
(sources are available at here.)
What is not widely recognized is that, based on observations of the ionosphere, a gas can start to behave as a plasma with less than 1% ionization.
To give an explicit example for how the empty vacuum of space mistake has shaped the direction
It's probably fair to say that the editor has not found the arguments presented on Slashdot against the Electric Universe to be very persuasive. Notice that even after some 70 comments, many of them disparaging the idea that laboratory plasma experiments can be used to inform inferences about cosmic plasmas, not a single commenter has posted a believable alternative interpretation which would explain these extraordinary filaments.
Dear Meglon,
We should always be extremely careful to distinguish between the quantitative vs. qualitative aspects of scientific theory. The former is constructed from abstract equations, the latter is constructed from abstract concepts. Both are maps (or aspects of a map) trying to describe the real territory, i.e. the universe.
You are right in that the quantitative aspect of Relativity has an enormous amount of experimental confirmation. What you seem to be missing is that such a mathematical framework was not originally developed by Einstein. This seems to explain why, when you get into the mathematics of Relativity, you have to study Lorentz Transformation Equations, the Lorentz Factor, Lorentz boosts, the Lorentz group, Lorentz Symmetry and Lorentz Invariance.
E. T. Whittaker, notable mathematician and science historian, wrote a classical textbook about the history of electricity and electromagnetism. If you check out the book, you will not find a chapter titled "The Relativity of Einstein", but you will find one titled "The Relativity Theory of Poincaré and Lorentz", in which Whittaker wrote:
"It is clear, from the history set forth in the present chapter, that the theory of relativity had its origin in the theory of aether and electrons. When relativity had become recognised as a doctrine covering the whole operation of physical nature, efforts were made to present it in a form free from any special association with electromagnetic theory, and deducible logically from a definite set of axioms". [A History of The Theories of Aether and Electricity, Vol 2, pages 42-43].
The original version of the quantitative map of Relativity — that we may call Lorentzian Relativity — is based on a qualitative interpretation where the speed of light is variable, time is absolute, and there is a preferred frame for light that is typically undetectable due to confounding properties of nature, such as the change in the rate of clocks with velocity and the contraction of matter with velocity. On the other hand, Einstein later found a way to obtain the exact same quantitative map through a completely different qualitative interpretation, i.e., the speed of light is constant in all moving frames, the rate of time is variable, and the undetectable aether is irrelevant. The new qualitative interpretation by Einstein was in line with the philosophy of instrumentalism, i.e. the philosophical belief that we should make no distinction between unobservable entities and non-existent ones, even if observations only make sense in terms of levels of physical reality that are not easily measurable, or beyond measurement.
Most importantly, people seem to be largely unaware that the quantitative maps of Einsteinian Relativity and Lorentzian Relativity are — in effect — quantitatively indistinguishable. Generally speaking, experiment cannot decide between the two. In other words, the quantitative maps (the equations) are identical, while the qualitative maps are totally different. This is thoroughly explained in the following paper by experimental physicist Doug Marett:
http://www.conspiracyoflight.c...
(See also the references included in the paper).
In other words, every experiment confirming Relativity is evidence confirming Lorenzian Aether-Based Relativity, which is the original Theory of Relativity. Considering that we generally cannot distinguish between the two "versions" of Relativity by quantitative measures, we should focus more than ever on carefully studying the qualitative differences between them, and making our choice wisely.
Interestingly, you mention technologies as demonstrating the validity of Einsteinian Relativity. In fact, technologies provide perhaps the easiest way to distinguish between Einsteinian and Lorentzian Relativity. Everyday technology shows that there is indeed a preferred frame. We just need spin to observe it.
Perhaps the easies
observed peer reviewed fact: star systems are overall electrically neutral
crash goes your nonsense theory
Debye screening has been shown to be untrue in countless instances. Astrophysicists enshrined the conjecture as a dogma, then subsequently ignored each violation. If you know of a serious attempt to somehow validate the conjecture, please kindly post it. Having some familiarity with these debates, I can clearly see that your confident declarations greatly exceed the actual evidence.
Yes, and notice that there are 250 comments (!) attached to the article - and anybody who actually reads through those comments will see an actual back-and-forth discussion happening. You're trying to convince people that there is no debate to be had here, but the link you've sent people to exhibits a debate attached to the article.
Re: "The fact that we'd have to throw out 100+ years of science AND WORKING TECHNOLOGY FROM THAT SCIENCE to entertain the electric universe bullshit means it is just that... bullshit."
Your claim that GPS somehow proves Einstein's Relativity was shown with explicit historical detail to be incorrect in Juan Calsiano's post. - which may be one of the best rebuttals to this claim ever posted onto the Internet. If you disagree with it, the proper response would be to help us to understand why it is wrong. Provide your analysis.
If you have an explanation for the filaments that does not involve electric currents, please provide it.
You're not quite understanding: the CMB is the emission.
Anthony L. Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34:
Notable that it comes from slashdot; I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, and this has never once been on the radar. Go online, and everything is different. Oftentimes via anon's.
High-power microwaves here on Earth are produced by plasma instabilities in electron beams - in other words, electric currents over plasma. COBE and WMAP, by contrast, are pitching a creation event as the cause for the microwaves coming at us from all directions. You might want to take a step back, and think more deeply about what is going on here - and especially your own role in the light of this information about microwaves which I can plainly see you were not aware of.
The bedrock claim put forward by the Thunderbolts Project - the claim which all proponents of EU will agree on - is that we can apply laboratory plasma physics principles to the interpretation of cosmic plasmas. Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven made the point repeatedly that laboratory observation of plasmas must be at the root of our attempts to understand cosmic plasmas:
If you don't believe that we should use laboratory observations of plasmas to explain cosmic plasmas, then how else do you propose we interpret these extraordinary cosmic filaments which appear to be electrodynamically interacting with one another?
The actual problem is that people do not understand what a plasma is - and yet, it is today widely recognized in the graduate programs that 99% of what we see with telescopes is matter in the plasma state. That's an overt problem with the science journalism which needs to be addressed.
It's remarkable that you provided no specific example in these three paragraphs to illustrate your point.
I appreciate your perspective, and I think it's healthy. What does not seem healthy at all to me is overt hostility in the heart of Silicon Valley directed at this simple idea of applying laboratory plasma concepts to astronomical imagery. The Big Bang concept is a creation event dressed up in some of the most sophisticated mathematics humans have ever devised. The math is sort of like a gauntlet which experts plunge all detractors into: If you cannot perform these brain tricks, then you are not qualified to judge the idea. Well, no, actually I can plainly see that you've allowed a Catholic priest to insert his Bible genesis story into your scientific hypothesis. That doesn't necessarily mean that it cannot be true, but it should raise more red flags for people than it apparently does.
A completely rational response is to learn as much as you can about the mainstream ideas, but to also consider the critiques, and to learn about competing ideas sufficient to notice any raw, unfiltered, unexpected vindications. If you want to truly know where science is heading, pay special attention to the unplanned observations. The "experts" will oftentimes fail to even notice this stuff, and it may only become apparent once you've removed the conventional interpretation from the article you are reading.
Notice, e.g., there has been no discussion in the mainstream science journalism about Biot-Savart Law. Every single astrophysicist, cosmologist, astronomer and science journalist has failed to notice that those filaments appear to be interacting with one another. But, also realize that the SKA will become more powerful over time, and I am inclined to believe that they are going to notice those filaments twisting around one another over some pretty short timespans. So, how will people react to this? The realization of what is going on will be slow and incredibly awkward because people have decided that they can interpret these images without cultivating some understanding of laboratory plasmas. Only those who have taken the time to learn about laboratory plasmas will be equipped to interpret what we're about to witness, IMHO.
Re: "The current flows predicted by the debunked EU theory have not been observed."
(they infer "turbulence" as the cause of the 27 star forming filaments, which plainly appear to branch off of one another! lol!)
Henri Poincaré, at the conclusion of the preface to his book, 'Hypothéses Cosmogoniques', states: