Here's a scoshi bit of background that you might find interesting. The article from which this magnetic mapping was taken was from work by Bryan Gaensler, a very smart young radio astronomer at Sydney University in Oz.
'Jarvamumdo' and I happened to read it and e-mail the author the same week, recently, and he took time to respond to us simultaneously. He wrote:
…to answer your basic postulate, there is no doubt that cosmic magnetic fields are caused by electrical currents. That is a given, as required by Maxwell's Equations. Asking "where do these magnetic fields come from?" and "where do these electrical currents come from?" are the same question.
So to phrase the problem in terms of currents, the problem is that we don't know what keeps the currents flowing for billions of years. Why don't they fade away? Why do they flow in such an organised way? The simple response would be that interstellar gas is highly conducting, and so (like a superconductor), currents can just keep flowing forever. However, what has only recently becoming fully understood (and perhaps Perratt, being a plasma physicist, might not have been aware of this) is that interstellar gas is extremely turbulent. Energy and gas-flows thus cascade down to smaller scales and are dissipated as heat, and any current will fizzle out comparatively rapidly. This is likely quite a different situation from the solar system or the laboratory.
So the mystery remains. What keeps the current going for so long? The likely explanation is a dynamo, in which differential rotation and helical turbulence combine to amplify and organise currents (or magnetic fields, if you prefer) over long time scales. But a dynamo can only ever amplify an existing weak current or field. So the question remains: where did the first currents come from? We of course have ideas and theories about this, but we don't know which one of these ideas is correct. This is a question that I and my colleagues hope to address in the coming years.
Notice that Bryan did not hesitate to use electrical currents, and assigned them as being the source of the magnetic fields he is mapping. How surprisingly refreshing is
that from someone in the midst of mainstream astronomy?
Of course, it is axiomatic in mainstream cosmology to say that dynamos are the source of electric and magnetic fields in space, whereas the Electric Model prefers to think about the huge current flows (not huge in terms of charge density, but huge in cross section and therefore amperage, or total current flow). There may be dynamos inside a star or planets for all I know (not that much!) but getting these dynamos to effect electrodynamic events hundred to hundreds of thousands of parsecs away seems a little... dubious in my mind. Whereas, if the flow of current through interstellar and intergalactic space continuous over long distances due to the low resistivity of plasma, then magnetic fields of very large morphology are set up, and the current interactions with these fields is a continuous feedback loop, with changes in one creating changes in the other.
I am not sure what the evidence is that leads to Gaensler's saying that the interstellar medium is turbulent. I found a paper that says that there is enough photon energy to ionize the interstellar medium within 50 million parsecs of a galaxy, so the IM and IGM are clearly enough a thin ionized gas. As it is in motion through - as well as creates its own - magnetic and electric fields, it is an electrical current flow, which breaks down into filamentary structures (Birkeland current filaments) as shown by Alfven and Peratt.
As these currents are highly aligned with their magnetic fields, there is little random or Browning or "thermal" motion and interaction among the widely distributed charged particles, so although they may be moving relatively fast, with a high kinetic energy, thinking in terms of gas dynamics (including turbulence) thermal dissipation as a result seems to me to be unlikely to slow or stop the current flows in instances where the filaments have been connected between stars, or between galaxies. Where they have not connected to other bodies, such as in the case of jets and counter-jets in active galactic nuclei, planetary nebulas, etc, they appear to stay collimated and organized over long distances, often with plumes appearing in their radio signatures out at the end of their flow. Those may be turbulent as they are not fully interconnected with another element in a circuit. Just conjecturing, here.
Gaensler hit on a key question, however, which neither EU nor mainstream cosmology has a good answer for:
ab initio, what force is/was able to start these electrodynamic currents and fields, and what keeps them going for who knows how long?
Or are we in a conservative universe with a fixed but large total momentum, mass and energy value which manages to recycle endlessly, sort of a gyroscope on frictionless bearings, which never heats up or runs down? It's all good conjecture for short-lived, carbon-based life forms.
