Spiraling Filaments Feed Young Galaxies

[mightyno17]

Is Arp vindicated (again)? The news is of July from last year, fairly recent. I'm not sure if this was covered in the archived forum, but you can find the report here: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-spiraling ... axies.html

Quoting a few passages, it really seems like they're reporting Birkeland currents without even realizing it:

Galaxies grow by accumulating gas from their surroundings and converting it to stars, but the details of this process have remained murky. New observations, made using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, now provide the clearest, most direct evidence yet that filaments of cool gas spiral into young galaxies, supplying the fuel for stars.

"For the first time, we are seeing filaments of gas directly spiral into a galaxy. It's like a pipeline going straight in," says Christopher Martin, a professor of physics at Caltech and lead author of a new paper appearing in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature Astronomy. "This pipeline of gas sustains star formation, explaining how galaxies can make stars on very fast timescales."

As expected, no mention of Arp. The article continues, throwing in a few black holes and dark matter to remain politically correct (besides euphemistically using 'gas' instead of plasma):

"The main driver for building KCWI was understanding and characterizing the cosmic web, but the instrument is very flexible, and scientists have used it, among other things, to study the nature of dark matter, to investigate black holes, and to refine our understanding of star formation," says co-author Mateusz (Matt) Matuszewski (MS '02, Ph.D. '12), a senior instrument scientist at Caltech.

"When we used Palomar's CWI previously, we were able to see what looked like a rotating disk of gas, but we couldn't make out any filaments," says O'Sullivan. "Now, with the increase in sensitivity and resolution with KCWI, we have more sophisticated models and can see that these objects are being fed by gas flowing in from attached filaments, which is strong evidence that the cosmic web is connected to and fueling this disk."

I sometimes wonder if these people are aware of plasma cosmology, but know they have to remain shut, and then just adapt what they know into palatable theories that relativists in academia will accept.