Phil Plait adds his noise to the filaments of NGC 1275...

[substance]

I actually want someone to send this Plait guy an email containing links for this thread and for today`s TPOD. Wouldn`t it be funny, if he comments on the thread?
I hate such ignorant people, one of my friends is just like that, but he`s generally ignorant and not caring for everything science related.

[MGmirkin]

Well, let's not get into "hate" speech.

That said, I agree that Plait impeaches himself and goes to great lengths to expose his apparently ill-informed viewpoint. He should be embarrassed. Perhaps some day soon, he will be.

On another note, here's an interesting note from the New York Times forwarded by a learned colleague online:

(Galactic Puzzle Solved? Threads Tie It Together)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/scien ... galaxy.htm

A tangle of spidery filaments stretches outward from the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275 as if they were dendrites of an intergalactic nerve cell.

[...]

Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, with 10 times the resolution of earlier photographs, reveal that the filaments, about 1,500 light-years wide and hundreds of thousands of light-years long, are themselves made of finer threads — smaller structures about 200 light-years wide and 20,000 light-years long.

[...]

weak magnetic fields, about one ten-thousandth as strong as the Earth’s field, exert enough force on the charged particles in the threads to keep them together, thus perhaps answering the puzzle.

Giant ropes of plasma, composed of smaller ropes of plasma? To anyone even slightly familiar with electricity in plasma, this should immediately tell you exactly what they're seeing. This filamentary and inevitably fractal arrangement is exactly how electric currents in plasma arrange themselves. Filaments braid into larger filaments. Those larger filaments then braid into even larger filaments, and so on up the scales, even unto galactic proportions!

They have unwittingly stumbled upon they key to figuring it all out. But they haven't yet put it together with "magnetism" to figure it out.

The Plasma Cosmology / Electric Universe explanation is be best fit with the data. The standard model seems to not understand how magnetic fields are created, which leaves a gaping blind spot with respect to the source electric currents. No wonder their models are painfully wrong.

(Magnetic support of the optical emission line filaments in NGC 1275)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 07169.html

Regards,
~Michael Gmirkin

[junglelord]

Who really cares what anybody thinks?
You cannot change a closed mind.
To those who come let them come.
There is tons of "hogwash" internet science, some even gather in droves.
As a post graduate teacher I know, that only those who are called will come. I do not try to convert or correct...I just teach those who ask.

[faceoff]

I'm fascinated, still can not believe that definition given about magnetism. Electric current is cause and directly connected with this phenomena. But it's still phenomena. I would be most delighted if those who objects dr. Plait, to explain to all of us what is magnetism. Definition, of course.
I believe that we do know what cause it, but I don't remember that anyone explained it.