Tuning in a New Signal
Feb 01, 2011

X-ray, deep optical, and infrared telescopes reveal the intricate circuitry of a galaxy-sized plasma discharge. The interacting filaments of Birkeland currents drive pinch and kink instabilities to flare into star-forming regions. The electromagnetic forces squeeze dusty plasma into plumes and cells. Electric fields accelerate the charge carriers in the current to high velocities, and the associated magnetic fields constrain them to spiral along the fields’ directions and to emit synchrotron radiation at all frequencies.

Fluctuations and twists in the currents build up into double layers and loop currents that explode as supernovae and nebulae. Intense secondary discharges smash ions together into heavier elements, and the several mechanisms that sort materials in plasma separate them into regions of elemental enrichment.

The old astronomers before the discovery of plasma developed their explanations from ideas of gravity and other mechanical effects on the surface of the Earth. Modern astronomers, willfully blind to the behavior of plasma, talk about the cosmic electrical phenomena in meteorological terms of gas, clouds, winds, and rains. To account for the greater energies that electricity supplies, they must multiply the mechanical energies by imagining the gas and the clouds to be concentrated in untestable ways: into black holes and dark matter.

Our country-bumpkin senses, which evolved on this small, rocky planet in the provinces of our galaxy, have wandered into the electrified cosmopolis of the rest of the universe. We must learn the ways of plasma and give up our rock-banging habits.

Mel Acheson