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

[BrianMarshall]

For that the stars would have to be electrically charged. A lot.

Best to explicitly make the point that stars are not (significantly) electrically charged. It seems most EU nutters believe that they are.

Re:Electric Universe

[meglon]

You forgot to sign in Chris.

Look, i know you electric universe dipshits have to keep pumping the con to keep the money coming in, but every little thing in the universe where electricity actually shows up doesn't prove you're con is anything more than bullshit.

Einstein was right, and we have the WORKING technology based on his theory (an ACTUAL theory) to prove it. The Earth isn't only 6000 years old, and the grand canyon wasn't made from a super lightning bolt.... it was eroded over a lot more than 6000 years. Electric universe is bullshit.

Re:Electric Universe

[jwhyche]

Damn you slashdot! I read the first post and saw that someone might have an answer for dark matter. I never really liked the dark matter answer ether. I thought Cool

But I've never heard of this "Electric universe" theory. I did a quick google search and now I know why. First name I saw associated with the theory, Immanuel Velikovsky.

Now I know why I have never heard of it. I came in here hoping for a sound scientific theory, only to leave with a pseudo scientific pile of bullshit. I can't even fertilize my petunias with this bullshit.

Re: Electric Universe

[paradigmsareconstruc]

The phenomenon of long-range-attraction, short-range repulsion which occurs between conducting plasma filaments is known as the Biot-Savart Law. A comment attached to the original post pointed to a diagram in Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe which can be viewed online. There is an entire chapter there in Peratt's text which goes through the mathematics of Biot-Savart (Chapter 3: Biot Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma).

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.

Re:Electric Universe

[meglon]

Explain:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/...

-- Einstein's postulates are wrong.
-- General relativity (GR) is wrong.
-- The Universe is not expanding.
-- The electric force travels faster than the speed of light with near-infinite velocity.
-- Gravity has two poles like a bar magnet; dipole gravity.
-- A plenum of neutrinos forms an all-pervasive aether.
-- Planets give birth to comets.
-- Stars do not shine because of internal nuclear fusion caused by gravitational collapse. Rather, they are anodes for galactic discharge currents.
-- Impact craters on Venus, Mars and the Moon are not caused by impacts, but by electrical discharges. The same applies to the Valles Marineris (a massive canyon on Mars) and the Grand Canyon on Earth.
-- The Sun is negatively charged, and the solar wind is positively charged — the two systems forming a giant capacitor (this is James McCanney's particular erroneous belief.)
-- EU proponents from the Thunderbolts Project claim to have predicted the natures of Pluto and Comet 67P more accurately than NASA or ESA.

Every one of these ideas are stupider than fuck. Anyone with a half way decent high school education SHOULD be able to look at that and realize that electric universe bullshit is a fucking worthless con job.

Lets take a shot at even the first one.... Einsteins postulates are wrong. Why is it that to get GPS to work, they have to account for Relativity? If Relativity was wrong, they wouldn't need to... now would they? The more you peddle this bullshit, the more you look like a fucking idiot.

Re:Electric Universe

[paradigmsareconstruc]

To Alfven, the Big Bang is a myth - a myth devised to explain creation. "I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory," he recalls. Lemaitre was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas' theological dictum of creatio ex nihilio - creation out of nothing.

Re:It's electric!

[Calydor]

Don't you mean dank matter?

Re:It's electric!

[BrianMarshall]

The original submission included a comment with more information about the theory of a plasma universe.

I bet it does.

Re: Go away, Electric Universers

[Anonymous Coward]

Psychoceramics: The study of crackpots.

All bullshit

[meglon]

https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

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.

Re:Go away, Electric Universers

[paradigmsareconstruc]

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:

"'Space' was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there"

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:

"Today it is recognized that 99.999% of all observable matter in the universe is in the plasma state..."[4]

"It is estimated that as much as 99.9% of the universe is comprised of plasma."[5]

"..the plasma state is the most abundant state of matter. It is thought that more than 99.9% of matter in the universe is in plasma"[6]

"plasmas are abundant in the universe. More than 99% of all known matter is in the plasma state"[7]

"It is an interesting fact that most of the material in the visible universe, as much as 99% according to some estimates, is in the plasma state"[8]

"Probably more than 99 percent of visible matter in the universe exist in the plasma state."[9]

"It is estimated that more than 99 percent of matter in the universe exists as plasma; examples include stars, nebulae, and interstellar particles"[10]

"It is sometimes said that more than 99 percent of the material in the universe is in the form of plasma"[11]

"about 99% of matter in the universe is plasma"[12]

"99.9 percent of the Universe is made up of plasma," says Dr. Dennis Gallagher, a plasma physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center" [13]

"How was it determined that 99% of the Universe is in a plasma state? Most of the gas in interstellar space is ionized (astronomers can tell by the wavelengths of light the gas absorbs and emits), and all of the gas in stars in ionized, that's where the 99% comes from. The 99% ignores any dark matter which might be out there."[14]

"It has often been said that 99% of the matter in the universe is in the plasma state.[15]

"And yet these radio-frequency links must survive the complexities of the plasma which comprises well over 99.9 percent of the universe".[16]

"This fourth state of matter probably comprises more than 99.9 per cent of the matter in our Universe."[17]

(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