Introduction
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts." Richard Feynman
Plasma Cosmology
The purpose of this web site is to provide an introduction to the emerging Plasma Universe paradigm, and to explore some of the many far reaching implications. Mainstream science, for the most part, looks on the universe as electrically neutral and purely mechanical; a place where the weak force of gravity holds fort. Plasma Cosmology, by contrast, acknowledges the electrodynamic nature of the universe. Gravity and inertia are NOT the only forces at work. The history of science, of course, is fraught with controversy, and it is important to bear in mind that the situation today is little different.		"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Max Planck
What is Plasma?
Plasma is the fourth state of matter. It differs from solids, liquids and gases in so far as it's atoms are divided into free-floating 'negative' electrons and 'positive' ions (an atom which has lost its electron/s). It is sometimes referred to as an ionized gas. Students are generally taught about only three states of matter, and when Plasma does get a mention, little importance is assigned. Not only should plasma be added to the list, but the order should be reversed to put it in first place. The reasons for this will become clear. The term Plasma was borrowed from blood plasma in order to describe its almost life-like and self-organising properties. Plasma sometimes emits light when under the excitation of electrical and magnetic fields. Polar auroras bear witness to this fact.
Where is it?
Plasma is almost everywhere. At least ninety-nine percent of the known universe is, in fact, matter in its plasma state! The surface of the sun is plasma; not hot gas, which is quite a different thing. Plasma in space consists entirely of ions and electrons, and is thus very energetic or 'hot'. Only when cooled does it form the matter to which we are familiar here on Earth: solids, liquids, and gases. Because plasma remains electrically charged in space, it is influenced more by electromagnetic forces than gravity. In fact space, once considered mostly empty, has been found to be alive with plasma. Vast flows of charged particles have been discovered spanning hundreds-of-thousands of light years across interstellar space. The most familiar examples of electrical plasmas here on earth are neon signs and lighting, television screens, and electrical arc welding machines. Fire and Lightning are also forms of Plasma.
What does it do?
Plasma is an excellent conductor of electricity. Because of its free-flowing electrons its conductive properties far surpass those of copper and gold. Due to its interaction with electromagnetism, plasmas display a complexity in structure far exceeding that of matter in gaseous, liquid, or solid states. It has a tendency to form into cellular and filamentary structures. These structures derive from the fact that a charged particle flow (or current) produces a ring of magnetic fields around itself, 'pinching' plasma into multi-filamentary strands, as can be seen on both cosmic and more localised scales. Pictured right is a novelty plasma-lamp typical of those available on the high street.
Mainstream misconceptions
While conventional astronomy maps magnetism, electric currents are excluded on the mistaken basis that they are of no significance in space. Working from the inertia of this prior belief, astrophysicists have a tendency to talk in euphemisms. 'Electron rains' and 'clouds of ionized gas' are just two examples. From a conservative perspective these terms might seem easier to grasp than the behaviour of more ethereal plasma, but they are, nonetheless, obfuscations. In reality we are talking about electrodynamic phenomena.		Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing ever happened." Winston Churchill
It is important to understand that gravity based models were codified before space travel and high powered telescopes. Back then our galaxy, The Milky Way, was considered the entirety of the universe ... and electrically sterile! Instead of trying to shoehorn what we now see into old models, Plasma Cosmology respects the progress of the past, but is not constrained by it. Scientific theories, by definition, are vulnerable to being falsified. Science moves on.		"It is an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe remain hypothetical!" Jim Peebles
The role of Plasma in The Universe
Plasma cosmology has gone beyond hypothesis and analysis. There are problems with part three, of course, experimentation on universal scales, but the fact is that plasmas are highly scalable, and super-computing capabilities have enabled us to model plasma behaviours on galactic scales ... utilising only a few simple formulae. These models are consistent with reality. Big Bang cosmology, by contrast, fails to adequately account for the 'clumpiness' and filamentary structures that we observe. Plasma cosmology does NOT rely on abstract mathematical modelling or an increasing array of exotic hypotheticals like Dark Matter and Dark Energy!		Were Sherlock Holmes a Cosmologist, he might have said 'It's Filamentary my Dear Watson.'
casts, and so much more. Now the definitive channel for challenges to consensus science!

 

Plasma Cosmology

We still have a lot of material to cover in this section, and I want to give you a brief overview of an interesting alternative to conventional cosmology. So I'm going summarize for you these two challenges to the big bang and include a third problem as well. The test of any scientific theory is based upon the relationship between its predictions and observations. Let's see how well the big bang has done:

• It predicts that there should be no object older than 20 billion years and larger than 150 million light years across. And as we've discussed, that's certainly not the case.
• It predicts that the universe, on the large scale that it exists, should be smooth and homogeneous. It's not—it's clumpy!
• The third problem has to do with the strongest evidence in support of it, cosmic microwave background radiation. In order for the universe to produce the galaxies we see around us, the fluctuations found in the background radiation indicates that there must be a hundred times more dark matter than visible matter. But there is no experimental or observable evidence that dark matter exists. It's a theory to make the big bang work. So if there is no dark matter, the theory predicts that we can't have galaxies, but we live in one—the Milky Way.

So while the big bang predicts the things in the preceding list, observations have shown them to be incorrect. However, this is the accepted theory for now, and many scientists assume that it's right. To abandon it would not be easy. Few theories in science are ever left behind when there is no alternative in sight. So what are we left with? Well, there is a new alternative on the horizon. It's called plasma cosmology. Here's a basic idea of what it's about.

The advocates of plasma cosmology believe that the evolution of the universe in the past must be explained in terms of the processes occurring in the universe today. In other words, events that occur in the depths of space can be explained in terms of phenomena studied in the laboratories on earth. This approach rules out the concepts of a universe that began out of nothing, somewhere in time, like the big bang. We can't recreate the initial conditions of the big bang in laboratories. The closest we can get is in the particles created in accelerators. Plasma cosmology supports the idea that because we see an evolving universe that is constantly changing, this universe has always existed and has always evolved, and will continue to exist and evolve for eternity.

Another aspect of this new theory is that, while the big bang sees the universe in terms of gravity alone, the plasma universe is formed and controlled by electricity and magnetism, not just gravitation. With the introduction of electromagnetism the “clumpiness” of the universe and the fluctuations in microwave background radiation can be easily accounted for. Even the expansion of the universe can be explained by the electromagnetic interaction of matter and antimatter.

And while electromagnetism forms the basis for plasma cosmology, it is also the basis for our technological society that surrounds us today. Plasma technology has stimulated research for better computer screens, how radio and radar transmission can be increased, and may be the answer to developing the long-sought-after genie in the bottle: fusion energy. So in the long run it holds the possibility of not only providing a better description of the origin and structure of the universe, but it can also lead to a whole new area of advanced technology. I'll be discussing some material on the Eastern traditions and their approach to cosmology. There are some interesting correlations between their understanding of the universe and the ideas behind plasma cosmology.

 

Anthony Peratt

Plasma Cosmology

 

Anthony L. Peratt, Los Alamos National Laborat'ory

 

 

 

 

ASIMOV’S “Nightfall” tells the of  a civilization  on  a planet  with

six suns, where night comes only once every 2,049 years. Scholars of that world have uncovered traces of at least nine previous cultures, all of which reached a height comparable to their own and then vanished suddenly.

Because of their viewing handicap, those scientists’ cosmology is faulty. At their most creative, they can only imagine that their universe consists of perhaps a few dozen “stars” — mysterious lights that eccentric cultists are forever talking about. When night does fall and myriad stars shine forth, their cosmology, and indeed the philosophical basis of their society, crumbles.

Until recently our own view of the universe also was handicapped, limited to information derived from the narrow range of wavelengths that make up visible light. About the middle of this century our spectral window expanded to include infrared and radio radiation. Then, begin- ning in the 1960’s, space research opened up the ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray regions of the spectrum as well. Today only very long-wavelength celestial radio waves remain unknown to us. They are blocked by the magnetosphere, a protec- tive cocoon that envelops Earth.

Most of the radiation in the spectrum comes from something called plasma. This is a fourth state of matter, different from a solid, liquid, or gas, but most closely resembling the last. However, unlike a gas, whose component atoms or molecules are electrically neutral, a plasma is made up of charged particles.

A plasma can form when a gas is heated to such a high temperature that collisions ionize it by tearing electrons from atoms. The result is a cloud of free, negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions, atomic nuclei with one or more of their attendant electrons missing.

The term plasma also includes ionized

The plasma universe may be eternal and infinite, directly contradicting the Big Bang model. In this nonstandard picture, swirling streams of electrons and ions form filaments that span vast regions of space. Where pairs of these spaghettilike structures interact, the particles gain kinetic energy and at narrow “pinch” regions produce the entire range of galaxy types as well as the full spectrum of cosmic electromagnetic radiation. Thus galaxies must lie along filaments, much as they are observed to do on a large scale. The bulk of the filaments are invisible from a distance, much like the related Birkeland currents that circle Earth but are unobservable from its surface.

 

gas at a relatively low temperature, where only some of the atoms or molecules have lost electrons. This state of matter even exists inside a metal at room temperature. In this case the conducting electrons in the solid are free to wander through the rigid crystal lattice of metallic ions.

Because of its free electrons, a plasma is a good conductor of electricity, much better than copper, silver, or gold. Light- ning  offers  one  of  the  most dramatic

manifestations of this property. As a thunderstorm develops, negative charges accumulate along the cloud base, causing positive charges to build up on the ground below. The resulting electrical  field  be- tween the two concentrations becomes so strong that it ionizes the air. This creates a conducting  path  of  free  electrons  and  ions

— a plasma — through which the  light-  ning  discharges.

A  young  engineer  working  for  the  Gen-

eral  Electric   Company   gave   plasma  its

name. In 1923 Irving Langmuir, who went on to win the Nobel prize  in  chemistry, was fascinated with the effect of electrical discharges on gases. He borrowed the  term plasma from medicine because it fitted the unstable, almost lifelike  behav- ior of the ionized material with which he experimented.

While all matter is subject to  gravita-  tional  forces,  the  negatively   charged  elec-

 

!asma  also  react  to  electric  and  magnetic

›rces that are 10" times as  strong.  Be- ruse of these additional interactions, plas- mas display  structures and motions  that  e far more complex than  those  found  in

• utra1 solids, liquids, or gases. Langmuir as among the first to note the separation I highly conducting plasma into charged- Article sheaths or cellular like walls. This ructure appears wherever samples with ifferent  densities,  temperatures,  or mag-
• tic-field strengths come into contact.

Like flashes of lightning, terrestrial plas- mas are by and large transient. Even in a con or fluorescent  bulb,  the mixture  of ee electrons and ions remains  only  as  ing  as the  power  is turned  on. Extrater-

:strial plasmas are much more long-lived, ut until recently only a handful of scien- sts had speculated about the universal ttent and character of such matter. Yet lmost all of the observable universe is lasma. Stars, for example, are gravita- onally bound plasmas, while all of inter- ellar and intergalactic space is a plasma.

Supercomputer simulations of interactions between a pair of galaxy-size  plasma  filaments can reproduce the shapes of cosmic radio sources. The brightness maps of actual double radio galaxies in tbe top row show bewildering variety. Those at bottom are all from different stages of one simulation. The left figure corresponds to some 20 million years after the interaction begins; time increases toward the right plot, which depicts the simulated interaction some 40 million years later. These calculations suggest that  apparently unrelated radio  galaxies may be part  of  the same family, but  at different  stages of development.

 

THE PLASMA UNIVERSE

Wherever plasmas exist, they produce rodigious amounts of electromagnetic ra- iation. In particular, X- and gamma rays om beyond the solar system are likely roduced by free electrons with energies arresponding to  temperatures  of  more ian I million degrees — the realm of hot, iagnetized plasmas. We call the overall icture obtained from these energetic emis- ons the plasma universe.

Hot plasmas also  emit  radiation  of lower energy, such as visible and radio waves (we can both see lightning and hear it on a receiver). However, the emission does not always have a  thermal  origin.  For example, unknowing humans have viewed synchrotron radiation (from elec- trons spiraling at nearly the speed of light  in a magnetic field) from the Crab nebula for centuries.

Synchrotron radiation  is  named  after the  particle  accelerators  developed  in the

1930’s and 1940's to produce high-energy electrons. In 1950 Hannes Alfvén, Nikolai Herlofson, and Karl Kiepenheuer brought this form of plasma radiation to astrono- mers’ attention. Alfvén, who later won a Nobel prize in physics for his solar stud- ies, proposed that streams of electrons  move at nearly the speed of light along magnetic-field lines not only in Earth's magnetosphere and above  the  Sun,  but also throughout the cosmos. If so, sheets and ropes of electric current should criss- cross the universe in ever-increasing sizes. These currents, Alfvén thought, should give the universe a cellular and filamen-

tary structure.

Astronomers accepted Alfvén's notion of widespread synchrotron radiation but refused to believe that electric currents give rise to the large-scale structure of the universe. In those days it was standard cosmological lore that the universe be- came smoother and smoother  on  larger and larger scales. Huge filaments, sheets, and walls of galaxies were unknown.

Modern plasma cosmologists have been heavily influenced by the earlier  research of Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland (S&T: May, 1985, page 389). At  the turn  of the century he suggested that electrical currents due to  “corpuscular  rays” (plasma) from the Sun caused the aurora borealis. Such currents were considered impossible until they were discovered by an  artificial  satellite  in   1974.  Enormous

 

Complex  forces between  two Birkeland  currents,  which  are electric currents aligned along

magnetic-field  lines created by electrons  moving in helical  orbiLs around  and along   the

field lines.  These  currents have  parallel  components  that  exert  a  long-range  attractive and circular components  that provide  short-range  repulsion.  Let: The geometry   used

computer simulations. If the electrons are moving near the speed of light tbey emit synchrotron radiation beamed along their magnetic-field line, so  the  emission  nearly  mirrors the magnetic-field pattern. flight: How the forces due to the Birkeland current components vary with separation,  along with the behavior of the combined  (net)   force.

Bir keland currents connecting Jupiter and its moon Io were recorded by the Voyager pacecraft in 1979.

In 1984 Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, Don Chance, and Mark Morris found an exam- ple of Birkeland currents on a galactic scale. Working with the Very Large  Array

 

Fahril nrv. 1992.  ?k v k Telescone    137

 

                                               

 

               

These images from a supercomputer simulation trace the development of spiral structure in two interacting plasma blobs over a span of nearly I billion years. At the start of tbe interaction at upper left the filaments are 260,000 light-years apart; all 10 panels are reproduced at the same scale. Simulations such as this can reproduce the full range of observed spiral-galaxy types using electromagnetic processes rather than gravitational ones. Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations are courtesy the author.

 

The Wolf Effect and Galaxy Redshifts

 

 

Spectral lines can be redshifted toward longer wavelengths or blueshifted toward shorter ones. The Doppler effect ex- plains how these shifts occur because of relative motions of the source and the observer along the line of sight. Ap- proach causes a blueward shift and reces- sion a redward one.

Scientists have long believed that only the Doppler effect or gravity as de- scribed by Einstein could account for wavelength shifts in the  spectrum  of  light as it travels through space. Where neither factor applies, scientists have always  assumed  spectral  invariance

the spectrum remains the same no matter how  far the light travels. This is the  case

 

 

 

1.0 -

 

 

08-

 

@ 0.6-

 

04-

 

02-

 

0.0

Shifts of Spectral Lines

 

 

 

 

Laboratory

 

Doppler Shift                  {

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5000        5100        5200        5300       5400

WAVELENGTH   (angstroms)

 

with ordinary sources — called “Lamber- tian” after  Johann  Heinrich  Lambert such as the blackbody radiation from stellar surfaces.

In the past few years, however, experi- ments have shown that there is a  third way to shift spectral lines. This mecha- nism   involves   non-Lambertian  sources

Left: Due to the Wolf effect beamed emission from two separate sources can interact

and shift the wavelengths of lines in their spectra. The change can be redward or blueward by different amounts depending on the observer’s point of view, but from “head-on” the shift is to the red. This is a distinctly different process than the more familiar Doppler effect. Right: Here the two mechanisms are compared for the case of oxygen lines with a redshift of 0.07. However, the light sources involved in the Wolf effect are stations  , not fleeing the observer at 84 kilometers per second.

 

that emit beamed energy, such as lasers and devices producing synchrotron light. The discoverer of the new effect is physicist Emil Wolf, who, along with  Max Born, wrote the definitive textbook Principles of Optics.

A mechanical analog to Wolf’s discov- ery is a pair of tuning forks with nearly identical  resonant  frequencies  (pitches). If these forks are connected together mechanically by, say, a sounding board, the coupling is strong and the resonant frequencies tend to  get  “dragged  down” qto   lower   ones.qqIn   other  swords   the

wavelength  is  lengthened,  or redshifted.

This phenomenon has been verified ex- perimentally with light waves and for sound waves from coupled speakers.

The actual frequency shift due to the Wolf effect depends  on  the  geometry. As the illustration above shows, whether an observer sees a redshift or a blueshift depends on his or her location  with respect to the source.

This mechanism can be extended from the case of two  radiating  point  sources to that of a whole collection of such objects,   for   example   a   plasma cloud.

Wolf and his colleagues have shown  that

such a cloud can produce shifts that closely mimic the Doppler effect. The figure above shows an example.

Thus the assumption that quasars beamed electromagnetic radiators with large redshifts — are part of the  “Hub- ble flow” of an  expanding  universe could be wrong. Whether this also ap- plies to normal galaxies remains unclear. This situation, coupled with the question of the origin of the cosmic background radiation, raises the possibility that there is really no need for the Big Bang.

 

                                                                                    

Filamentation — the transformation of energetic, high-temperature material into current-carrying bundles — is characteristic of plasma at any scale. Lej?: In the laboratory filaments are produced when a pulse-power generator delivers 10 trillion watts to a plasma only a few centimeters long, heating it to a temperature of 8,000,000° Kelvin. Center: Similar structure is seen in solar prominences, but in this case the lengths are measured in hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Photograph by Benny Sundstriim. flights Long, thin structures near the center of the Milky Way stretch out over roughly 120 light-years. Courtesy Farhad Yusef-Zadeh and Mark Morris. Another jump to a scale a few million times larger would bring us to the size of filaments that plasma cosmology needs to form galaxies. Thus the recent discovery of vast filaments and sheats of galaxies spanning hundreds of millions of light-years is good news for plasma cosmology. Standard cosmology assumes that the universe becomes smooth at very large scales.

 

 

radio telescope, they discovered an arc of radio emission some 120 light-years long near the center of the Milky Way. The structure is made up of narrow filaments typically 3 light-years wide and running the full length of the arc (see the image above, right). The strength of the associ- ated magnetic field is 100 times greater than previously thought possible on such a large scale, but the field is nearly identical in geometry and strength with simulations of Birkeland currents in stud- ies of galaxy formation (S&T: August, 1984, page 118).

SUPERCOMPUTING  THE COSMOS

The set of equations describing how a filamentary, electrically conducting, mag- netized plasma evolves is a mathemati- cian’s nightmare! Because of this complex- ity, effective solutions had to wait for the advent of supercomputers.

Plasma theorists often use a method called particle simulation. Some tens of millions  of  “particles”  are  used  to repre-

sent, say, a galaxy. But since a system similar to the Milky Way may contain 1065

free electrons and ions, each  particle  in  the simulation actually represents  a cloud of real ones. These “superparticles” are assumed to be in a magnetic field  similar  to that between the planets in the solar system, but much larger in size. The computer then calculates how the particles move according to the laws of electromag- netism.

The simplest simulation, whose geome- try is pictured at the bottom of page 137, traces the interaction of two Birkeland filaments made up of fast-moving elec- trons (because of their greater mass, posi- tively charged ions move more slowly and are usually ignored). No matter how  many

When two magnetized plasma filaments of galactic dimensions interact, they emit an early burst of synchrotron radiation that lasts 4 million years or so.

 

filaments are present, the two closest to each other will always interact most strongly, because the net force between  two like currents falls off in direct propor- tion to the distance between them (see the graph on page 137). This so-called Am- pere’s-law force is stronger and has  a longer range than  gravity, which  falls off as the square of the  distance.

Because electrons spiral around mag- netic-field lines, each filament has a circu- lar current component. Tvo such compo- nents repel each other and in so doing give off energy in the form of synchrotron radiation like the example illustrated  above. In a typical case about 2  x  10" joules are released over an  interval  of some 4 million years (1 joule will raise an apple 1 meter off the  ground).  Dividing the energy by the duration gives a  radiated

power  of  103   watts.  Interestingly,  this is

close to the output of a strong extragalac- tic radio source like Cygnus A.

The  two-current  simulation  was  one of

the first large-scale plasma calculations. Today’s supercomputer networks are nearly 100 times more powerful than those of just a few years ago, and simulations can now involve as many as 50 million particles. The calculations provide infor- mation not only on sources’ power levels and shapes but also on their polarizations. All of these properties can be compared with results from radio telescopes.

One result •of this improved perform- ance is the ability to sort out the evolution of “double” radio sources that until now seemed unrelated. The top diagram on page 137 suggests that double radio galax- ies evolve from filamentary plasma, an- nouncing their birth through a double- beam pattern of radiation that they retain through the era of synchrotron radiation.

The radiation patterns grow more com- plex as they fade. The plasma does not disappear, however, and the illustrations at the top of the facing page show how double radio galaxies and quasars might change first into peculiar and Seyfert galaxies, then into normal and barred spirals. Filamentary plasma on supergalac- tic scales can produce a wide variety of galaxy shapes.

Calculations are now good enough that we can compare their detailed predictions with observations of how a galaxy’s rota- tional velocity varies with distance mom its center (see the illustrations on the next page). Simulations involving plasma can match the data well and do not require a large amount of “dark matter” (whatever that is) to do so.

COSMIC BACKGROUND

In one view, the radio sky is peppered with sources that chance to beam their energy toward Earth. If so, what happens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

100              50               0               50

PADIUS (thousands of light-hears)

 

No Paradox in tbe Olbers’  paradox,  which  dates  back at incorrect  assumption.  The  universe may least  to  Edmond  Halley,  exemplifies   the be  neither  filled  with  an  infinite  number bias  of  a purely  “visual”  cosmos.  If the of  stars  nor  finite  and  uniformly filled. universe  is an  infinite set  of  stars,  why is According     to    plasma    physicists     Per the  sky  dark  at  night?  Sooner  or   later Carlqvist,   Hannes   Alfvén,    and   Boris every  line  of   sight   should   intercept  the Meierovich,      stars     condense     out     of surface  of   a   star,  and   the  entire   sky plasma   only   when   the   electric   current should blaze as brightly as the  Sun. passing  through  the  material  exceeds  a Olbers thought  that the solution lay  in certain   threshold.   Then   the   plasma is light-absorbing   interstellar   matter.   We “pinched”  and  compressed  to  the  point now   know   that   this   couldn’t   work be- where gravitational  collapse ensues. This cause  the dust  would  just  heat  up  until it threshold  is  exceeded  only  when galaxies vaporized.  Sir  John  Herschel  believed   in evolve  from  quasars  into  normal spirals a   “hierarchical”   universe  in  which  stars (stars  are  not  resolved   in  quasars,  but form   galaxies,   galaxies   form  clusters, emission    lines    from    plasmas    are  ob- clusters   form  superclusters,   and  so  on served). without  end, so that  stars are not distrib- Olbers’  paradox  exists  only  if  we are uted uniformly. limited  to  observing  the  universe  in   vis- Some  modern  cosmologists  say  the sky ible  light.  Then  we  miss  entirely  the hot, is   dark   because   the   expansion   of    the magnetized    plasma    that    may    be   the universe  redshifts  and  dims light. Others predominant   form  of  matter.  No  para- say   the   reason   is   that   the   cosmos   is dox exists  in the  plasma  universe because young  —  there  hasn’t  been  enough  time the  evolving   stars  are  not  assumed   to for  light   from  very   distant   objects  to occupy  all  of  space.  Understanding   their have  reached  us  yet.  Still others  cite both evolution  requires  use  of  the  full electro- of  these explanations  (5& T.  June, 1989, magnetic  spectrum   —  that  is,  the   stars’ page 594). radiation  before  they  “ignite”  and begin From  the  viewpoint  of  plasma cosmol- to   shine  in  visible   light   and   after they ogy,  the original question  starts from  an disappear  from sight.

to   the   energy   haphazardly   radiated   in

other directions?

Plasma cosmologists William Peter and Eric Lerner asked just  that  question.  The two were intrigued by  the  parallels  be- tween the cosmic microwave background radiation and  the  radiation  produced  by very energetic plasma generators in the laboratory.

In both cases the spectrum is that of a blackbody, a perfect absorber  and  emitter of energy. However, this is so in the laboratory version only because filamen- tary insulation is placed around the genera- tor to protect the environment. Could gigantic filaments of cosmic plasma act  like that shielding and give the “wasted” radiation a blackbody spectrum that would fill the sky? Indeed they  could.

Then what would the energy density be? The answer is a minuscule 5 x 10 "  joule per cubic meter. Interestingly, this corre- sponds to a blackbody temperature of 2.87° Kelvin, in close agreement with the 2.73° K measured by the Cosmic Back- ground Explorer satellite.

MORE ANSWERS FROM PLASMAS?

Except for weakly ionized gases, all plasma is cellular, having regions with different properties separated by transi- tion zones. Does this honeycomb structure occur at increasingly larger scales without

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

100

f10f T tire tin:Pervert v:iiaiigc: of rotational velocity with radius in a spiral galaxy’s disk is compared with the

, results of a supercomputer simulation of a spinning object composed of two interacting plasma fila- ments. NGC 2998 is a 13th magnitude spiral in

Ursa Major. The mass used in the supercomputer cal- culations was typical of the Db8errnbfe mass of a galaxy

— its luminous stars and gas. The plasma universe needs no dark matter to reproduce such rotation curves because the electro- magnetic forces acting on plasma are so much stronger than gravity.

llllll I ' OUW icii gc cciii i ii‹iiiicii cc i oaiiJ gp We observe tiny plasma filaments in the

laboratory and ever-larger examples in the aurora, solar coronal loops, the galactic center, and perhaps the lobes of double radio galaxies and even clusters of galax- ies. Could there be even bigger examples containing superclusters of galaxies or even greater aggregations? If so, enor- mous cell walls and filaments might ex- plain the surprisingly nonuniform, very- large-scale structure of the universe.

Plasma cosmology offers other interest- ing alternative views of the universe. One example, described in the box below, involves Olbers’ paradox. Another, sum- marized in the box on page 138, explains the redshifts of galaxies without resorting to cosmic expansion, thus getting rid of the need for the Big Bang.

The plasma vision of the universe is at odds with how most cosmologists have viewed our universe for several genera- tions. It probably will be proved or dis- proved in the coming century. Either way, we are in for some exciting and interesting times now that we have reached “nightfall”   and   can  explore  the  uni-

verse  at almost  all wavelengths.

Anthony Peratt is an associate editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engi- neers’ journal Transactions on Plasma Science and author of Physics of the Plasma Universe (Springer- Verlag, 1991).