Artist's conception of a protoplanetary disc. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser

Another Donut on a Stick
Jul 19, 2010

The consensus belief is that a “cloud” of gas and dust will pull itself into a compact ball with the tiny force of its own gravity. Random motions will cancel out as the cloud collapses—else a net spin would soon generate enough centrifugal force to cancel out the collapse. However, in the final stage, spin somehow appears and sets the ball rolling, and friction heats the gas and dust to ignite a thermonuclear furnace in the ball’s core. The spin throws the remnants of the cloud out into a disk, and the radiation from the furnace eventually “evaporates” it.

Then astronomers discovered rings around some balls and long, threadlike jets from their poles. These formations were “surprising,” which is to say that gravity and gas can’t do that. The discoveries generated a flurry of ad hoc speculation that fractured the coherence of fundamental theory. Until now, the discoveries were limited to low-mass stars. Convention speculated that the intense radiation of higher-mass stars would evaporate the cloudy disk material before disks—now somehow compacted into rings—could form.

As discoveries multiplied, they were explained away with “somehow” excuses. Often, “magnetism” was invoked as a synonym for “somehow” without acknowledging that magnetism goes with electricity.

Such acknowledgement is long overdue: plasma phenomena (i.e., donut-on-a-stick formations) have been studied in plasma labs for decades. A high-energy electric discharge will generate magnetic forces many times stronger than gravity. They pull plasma into threadlike channels and spin it. Instabilities compress the plasma into hot, spinning balls and generate ring currents around them. The masses of the balls are a result of the ring and jet, not the cause: gravity and light pressure are irrelevant to the operation of Heraclitus’s “thunderbolt that steers the universe.”

Of course, such acknowledgement would destroy the entirety of the conventional belief—along with textbooks, papers, professorships, grants, research programs, and reputations that are based on it. The institution of astronomy as we know it is not likely to start talking plasma. Students of the cosmos who are more interested in understanding the stars than in starring in celebrity astronomy should go into electrical engineering.

Mel Acheson