From: "Joel Morrison" (JM) Yahoo.com : WSM-7347
Date: Fri Dec 31, 2004 7:13 am
Subj: RE: Joel / plasma currents

>
> --- Joseph Steinman wrote:
> Other than plasma currents associated with the solar wind, have plasma
> currents in inter or intra stellar space been experimentally detected?

JM: Yes, the birkeland currents are in dark mode so they are difficult to see, but they sometimes produce radiation that has been mapped. The maps demonstrate that galaxies are strung together in ordered formations like beads on strings, their poles aligning with the currents as demonstrated in the plasma simulations.
See below: quotes from "The Big Bang Never Happened" (BBNH) - by Eric J. Lerner.
-- Regards, Joel.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
BBNH (pg 21-23):

Dr. Tully and his colleague J. R. Fischer set out to use the distance measurements of two thousand nearby galaxies to create a three-dimensional atlas of our part of the universe. They were among the best qualified for the task, since they had themselves uncovered a complementary way of measuring distance to a galaxy, based on a link between how fast it spins and how bright it is.

After years of plotting and analyzing the data they had their map—the Atlas of Nearby Galaxies. Remarkably, they found the patterns in the sky were entirely real. With less than two dozen exceptions all of the thousands of galaxies are strung like Christmas lights along an interconnecting network of filaments—a glowing cat’s cradle in the sky (Fig. 1.4). The filaments themselves, only a few million light-years across, extend across hundreds of millions of light-years, beyond the limits of Tully and Fischer’s maps.

How far beyond? Tully wanted to make a bigger map—out to a billion and a half light-years from earth. For that huge distance he couldn’t use individual galaxies. Modern telescopes can see galaxies out that far, but there are far too many—a couple of million. Instead, Tully decided to map the locations of the big clusters of galaxies, clusters identified forty years earlier by astronomer George Abell.

The pattern of the clusters, to Tully’s surprise, outlined the vast ribbons, each one made up of dozens of supercluster filaments. Tully identified about five “supercluster complexes,” each containing millions of trillions of stars. The density of clusters within the ribbon was about twenty-five times that outside of them. Moreover, several stretched to the boundaries of Tully’s new map and beyond, and all of them seemed to lie in parallel planes—as if stacked in space as if part of some still vaster structure.

-- BBNH (pg 46-49):

In 1977 he [Hannes Alfvén] applied his concepts to the next order, the galaxies, proposing a new way to explain the violent outbursts of energy that occur in their cores. Conventional wisdom ascribes their highly concentrated outbursts to black holes, bizarre objects with a gravitational field so intense that light itself cannot escape it. Alfvén had a less exotic concept based on laboratory experience with electrical systems.

In his theory, a galaxy, spinning in the magnetic fields of inter galactic space, generates electricity, as any conductor does when it moves through a magnetic field (the same phenomenon is at work in any electrical generator). The huge electrical current produced by the galaxy flows in great filamentary spirals toward the center of the galaxy, where it turns and flows out along the spin axis. This galactic current then short-circuits, driving a vast amount of energy into the galactic core. The galaxy “blows a fuse”: powerful electrical fields are created in the nucleus which accelerate intense jets of electrons and ions out along the axis.

Again, few astrophysicists took Alfrén’s description of electrical currents and magnetic fields of galactic strength seriously. But the new theory soon received support. In 1979 Tony Peratt, a plasma physicist and former student of Alfvén’s, began to see things in the lab that seemed to confirm Alfvén’s theory. Working at San Diego’s Maxwell Laboratory with machines that produced powerful electrical currents in plasma, he saw the current develop vortex filaments, which twisted up into what looked like tiny spiral galaxies (Fig. 1.12)—a phenomenon that, Peratt later learned, had first been observed in the fifties. Curious about these tiny plasma “galaxies,” he used a recently developed computer program to simulate the action of plasma on a galactic scale.

In his model he created two filaments of current, each a hundred thousand light-years in thickness, and brought them together to see what would happen. The results were dramatic: the two filaments merged, generating the graceful forms of spiral galaxies (Fig. 1.13). As Alfvén had predicted, the simulation showed currents streaming along slender filaments toward the galactic core, from which intense bursts of radiation were emitted.

When Peratt compared the details of his simulation with observations of real galaxies, there was excellent agreement: “I found in photographic atlases of galaxies examples of just about every thing I saw in simulations—the shapes, the radio emission, all were the same as in the computer.”

Astrophysicists either ignored the work or remained skeptical that such large currents existed. But in the summer of 1984 Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Columbia University, and colleagues at the Very Large Array radio telescope in Zoccoro, New Mexico, discovered large-scale magnetic vortex filaments at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy. Hundreds of light-years long, they were a textbook example of Alfvén and Peratt’s vortices: an outer layer of spiraling helixes and an inner layer running almost straight along the axis of a cylinder (as on the jacket of this book), the whole pattern arcing out of the plane of the galaxy straight up into its axis of rotation. Their magnetic field strength, at least a few ten-thousandths that of the earth’s surface, was also just what Peratt’s simulations predicted—and far above what most astrophysicists thought possible on such a scale.

This discovery convinced a number of astrophysicists, especially those already familiar with the work on solar system plasma, of the reality of current filaments in space. The alignments and shape of the galactic filaments simply could not have been created by gravity.

Following up his 1977 work on magnetic storms at the galactic core, Alfvén hypothesized in 1978 that the universe itself must have an inhomogeneous, cellular structure. In any plasma, from laboratory to intergalactic scale, filaments form naturally. Cur- rents moving in the same direction attract each other, and small currents formed by the random motion of the plasma merge and grow into bigger currents. Given enough time, currents and filaments of any magnitude, up to and including supercluster complexes, could form—in fact, must form.

Peratt, in creating his computer models, had also hypothesized that galaxies themselves are created by still vaster filaments, which then provide the magnetic fields that drive galaxies to generate currents. Peratt knew from experiments that such filaments were typically ten thousand times longer than they are wide; thus the galactic filaments, one hundred thousand light- years across, should be about a billion light-years long. From the standpoint of plasma physics, galaxies should be strung along such filaments, groups of which would, in turn, organize into still larger ropes. This is, of course, exactly what Tully, Fischer, and others later observed while compiling their maps. As one astronomer, Margaret Haynes, commented on the twisting filaments of galaxies she and her colleagues had discovered, “The universe is just a bowl of spaghetti.” Moreover, in 1989 a team of Italian and Canadian radio astronomers detected a filament of radio emissions stretched along a supercluster, coming from the region between two clusters of galaxies. Electrons trapped in a magnetic field emit radio radiation, so their finding provided indirect evidence of a river of electricity flowing through the empty space. The estimated size of the current, some five or ten million trillion amperes, was exactly that predicted by Peratt’s model. The existence of filaments at the supergalactic scale—explicitly predicted by a small group of plasma theorists—was confirmed by observation."

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