Sparky wrote:The resulting plasmoids form spinning electrical discharges that glow first as red stars, then “switch discharge modes” into yellow stars, some intensifying into brilliant ultraviolet arcs, driven externally[/b] by the Birkeland currents that created them.
Do you challenge these conclusions?
I'm challenging the applicability. The plasmoids in question are relativistic electrons moving between solid electrodes in the laboratory, and they don't necessarily speak to the aggregation of matter into planets, stars, etc.
mharratsc wrote:...it seems that there is a whole bunch of gettin' off-track going on now...
It's all related, somehow...
While I'm not terribly concerned that changes in low-level, abstract maths are going to force a total overhaul in our conception of cosmology, I
am still struggling with the "aggregation from scratch" issue. I agree with Mathis (and many others) that without pressure, gases don't condense, so we definitely have a problem. In his
Star Formation paper, he assumes that the galaxy is already organized, and uses its EM fields and "photonic matter" to coalesce gas into stars. While interesting, it doesn't explain how the galaxy became organized in the first place.
Neither am I particularly pleased with my own concept, that wimpy gravity gets everything moving, and then the magnetic fields so created polarize the particles with respect to each other, which helps in their polymerization. If there was a Big Bang, high initial velocities would be a given, and these would generate enormous magnetic fields that would polymerize matter quite nicely, and I wouldn't need gravity to provide the initial velocity. But then I'd have to explain what caused the Big Bang, and I'm not any better off.
But I
did make a little bit of headway in how the first stage of aggregates (such as small rocks and proto-asteroids) might continue to aggregate, given just that there are already
some aggregates, and some background photoionization. It just requires the application of the "like-likes-like" idea (coined by Feynman and continued by Gerald Pollack).
Once aggregates of matter start forming, they develop a net negative charge. Isolated atomic nuclei, and small molecules, are not good at hosting excess electrons. But liquid and solid matter can very definitely host net negative charges. At the atomic level, it's a binary issue — is there enough electric force to hold onto that electron, or not? But at a larger scale, it's not an either/or situation anymore. The electron cloud in a large aggregate can easily hide a few extra electrons per every million protons. So when atoms get ionized by UV radiation in space, the electron that is so liberated might fall back into the same atom, or it might hit a larger aggregate of matter, in which case it might get lost in its electron cloud. For this reason, planets have a net negative charge, while the plasma floating around in space is positively charged.
This means that between two negatively charged bodies in space, we can expect a greater density of positively charged plasma that will actually pull the bodies together in the so-called "like-likes-like" phenomenon. An isolated body with a negative charge will be surrounded by a concentric shell of positively charged plasma. But if two negatively charged bodies are within range of each other, the concentration of positive charges between them will be 4 times greater, because the plasma is attracted to the negative charges in both bodies. The bodies are then attracted to the plasma, making it seem as if the bodies are attracting each other, when really, they're both attracted to the shared positive charge between them. In other words, it's like covalent bonding, except on an astronomical scale. And we can expect this phenomenon to manifest itself at every level, from asteroids to planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies.
The "like-likes-like" force then removes the need for gravity from dark matter to be the organizing principle of galaxies. So either there is 5x more gravity due to dark matter, or there is 5x more force coming from a "like-likes-like" electric configuration. Since the electric force is 39 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, a near-infinitesimal dose of it could provide 5x more force than gravity, and hold galaxies together. Since this explanation does not require the invention of new forces and/or particles to get CDM into play, it survives Occam's Razor, while CDM does not, and therefore is the superior explanation.