Spiraling Magnetic Signal Shows Up In the Cosmic Background 168
pln2bz writes "Astronomers looking for confirmation for emissions from early stellar formation in the cosmic microwave background radiation instead found a signal indicating large amounts of unaccounted-for spiraling magnetic fields in space, but without any accompanying infrared emissions. The discovery possibly dredges up the claims of plasma cosmologists like Eric Lerner, who claim that the intergalactic medium is a strong absorber of the CMB with the absorption occurring in a fog of narrow filaments. These filaments are the result of plasma's natural tendency, as observed within the plasma laboratory and in novelty plasma globes, to form braided, ropelike structures which are collimated by coiled magnetic fields."
Calling Electric Universe in 3 ... 2 ... 1... (Score:4, Informative)
Had to go look at the Electric Universe's webpage (won't link to it now; the curious can drive traffic). I see no mention of anything like this structure predicted on any sort of scale like this, though they post-hoc claim that galactic-sized spiraly bits can be explained with their theory. Probably their page is in need of revision, though, with these new findings...
Re:Err..what? (Score:5, Informative)
I'll try as best as I can (this topic is beyond my level of understanding of Physics).
Essentially they've found something, they don't know what it is... a speculation is it could be caused by Black Holes which were formed by the first Stars to exist in the Universe Imploding [wikipedia.org] (as predicted by Einstein).
The other part of the submission leads on to say that if they are correct in their first speculation, it could possibly validate other theories like the one made by Eric Lerner, on how the Universe "works" in terms of the various structures of matter and energy in the space between large masses (like planets or stars).
I'm suspect as to the accuracy of the first link in the article, it quotes:
Dust grows over time as stars manufacture heavy elements called metals, like carbon, silicon and oxygen, that make up dust and then spit them out into space.
The reason I'm suspect, is because Oxygen [wikipedia.org] and Carbon [wikipedia.org] are both nonmetallic elements (or at least I understood they were - I checked Wikipedia to confirm).
I hope that helps you a bit, this stuff is a bit of a mindbender.
Re:Err..what? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal#Astronomy [wikipedia.org]
Here are the 4 papers (Score:5, Informative)
Interpretation of the extragalactic results (the real source of the OP) :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0559 [arxiv.org]
Note that the above paper does not mention the "wildly speculative" spiraling magnetic fields idea.
Extragalactic results in general :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0555 [arxiv.org]
Galactic results
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0562 [arxiv.org]
A description of the instrument :
http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0546 [arxiv.org]
Re:Calling Electric Universe in 3 ... 2 ... 1... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060719spacevortex.htm [thunderbolts.info]:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/051114currents.htm [thunderbolts.info]:
Re:Here are the 4 papers (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, if you read the New York Times article, these guys are experimentalists, and they are just trying to get theorists involved.
Dr. Kogut and his colleagues stressed that they do not really know where the signal comes from and they hope that theorists will take up the quest."
I would not put too much weight on their theoretical musings.
Re:Err..what? (Score:3, Informative)
Importance of the Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect that there are a lot of slashdotters who aren't strong on Cosmology and won't be bothered looking up the significance of the CMB on Wikipedia (I must say the Wikipedia article is particularly dense and won't be the easiest for non-specialists to digest).
So in a nutshell, the CMB is the the radiation we see in every direction of the sky. It's a little more complicated but you can think of it as the afterglow of the big bang. (Note: That is an over-simplication. To understand it better you have to look at a timeline of what happened after the big bang, especially hyper-inflation and recombination).
The reason it's so important is that it is the result of and thus put limits on the conditions at the time of the Big Bang. Since we don't have time machines and can't observe the universe from the outside, it is a critical piece of observational data against which we test our theories.
It is a particularly important piece of the puzzle when trying to work out what's going on with regards to dark matter because the amount of dark matter and the way in which it formed must be consistent with conditions that produced the CMB we observe.
Re:Err..what? (Score:5, Informative)
To astronomers, Everything that's not hydrogen or helium, is a metal.
(Chemists have different viewpoints.)
Re:Err..what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Err..what? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the point is that in cosmology or extra-galactic astronomy, almost everything visible is almost entirely Hydrogen or Helium. The sloppy convention is to call the little bit left over "metals," although I know people who call it "dust," depending on the circumstances. Carbon (say) is definitely not a metal, but it would be called that in cosmology. It's just a convention.
Re:Here are the 4 papers (Score:5, Informative)
Note that the above paper does not mention the "wildly speculative" spiraling magnetic fields idea.
But this is /., where no one cares about science unless it is wildly speculative.
Good critique of Lerner: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html [ucla.edu] Dunno why the summary mentions him at all.
ELECTRIC UNIVERSE!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Please recall that Mr pln2bz [slashdot.org] is an Electric Universe fanatic, pretending to be an objective outsider who was swayed by the Thunderbolts' persuasive arguments.
Re:Ingnoring the electric field (Score:3, Informative)
Please take those claims with a healthy grain of salt. For whatever reason, the Electric Universe movement is heavily laden with kooky pseudoscience.
I'm not saying you should discredit it completely. Just treat it with a skeptical eye and separate the reasonable EM phenomena from the ridiculous claims.
Re:Err..what? (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe because Lithium (a real metal) was also produced in the Big Bang :
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/darkmatter/bbn.html [berkeley.edu]
Re:Calling Electric Universe in 3 ... 2 ... 1... (Score:3, Informative)
....that few will risk their reputation to publish....
Yet, it has been the few, the daring to be different, not the ones feeling safe in the crowd, that have contributed the most to major knowledge in the early history of experimental and observational science.
This was true centuries ago and still is true today. Danish Astronomer Roemer was the first to assert that light did indeed have a finite velocity, even though the prevailing majority opinion (politically correct) at the time was that light travelled instantaneously from place to place. It took over 50 years before the scientific community as a whole finally admitted that Roemer was correct in his observations.
Other early scientists, such as Kepler, Copernicus, Pasteur and others also had to fight the majority status quo establishment, but were finally, after a long uphill battle proven to be right. Had any of these early scientists been subject to the politicized grant dispensing mechanisms of today, they would have gotten the same treatment as those who propose electric universe, intelligent design or other theories labeled "crackpot" pseudoscience by the establishment today. These early scientific lone pioneers would have never gotten their work published, if today's mechanisms of "peer review" by the "majority scientific sheeple" had been in place back then.
Present day cosmology exalts gravity as the dominant force operating in the large scale universe. They ignore entirely or relegate electricity into a minor role in the larger structure and operation of the universe. That is surprising to me given the fact that the electric interaction is about 40 orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity. Most matter in the universe is NOT composed of nicely neutral atoms, such as we enjoy here on Earth, but consists of loose electrons and nuclei moving violently in response to immense cosmic electric and magnetic fields.
Cosmic rays are powerful evidence of charged particles at energies orders of magnitude greater than anything man has generated in expensive gadgets, such as the LHC, of immense accelerating fields over cosmic distances.
I too would like to see alternate ideas, such as the electric universe theories be tested by the newest available evidence coming in from advanced space probes and modern telescopes. However, I fear that, as in the past, new radical ideas will not become mainstream until the entrenched scientific powers die off and get replaced by a generation of people who have not invested their entire lives, careers and prestige in the existing theories and procedures. Anyone who HAS written their PhD thesis, innumerable books and papers espousing the current theories, will NOT be amenable to having all that work thrown onto the rubbish heap of false scientific beliefs.
Re:Ingnoring the electric field (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit. Where is the quantitative explanation for the (obviously magnetodynamic) solar cycle? Whence the twisted plasma filaments edging solar spots? http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/3306886.html?page=1&c=y [skyandtelescope.com] Not well understood at all.
Re:pln2bz is a strong proponent of EU theory (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the fundamental problem with the Electric Universe theory. It's really quite simple. Our observations do not fit the EU theory. We do not see energy falling into the Sun to ignite fusion. If fusion is occur at or near the surface of the Sun, then it needs to have a substantial input from the external world. We would detect that energy flux on the surface of the Earth (especially at night) since the Earth would intercept a portion of it and in our observations of the Solar System. We do not see it. Instead, we see plasma, the solar wind flowing out from the Sun not inwards as well as the huge amount of EM radiation. That alone eliminates the EM-related phenomena, such as plasma, etc as a possible energy contribution to fusion in or near the Sun because the energy flow is outwards not inwards. Even a voltage potential makes no difference. Energy doesn't flow via potential differences. The energy budget for the Sun doesn't make sense in an electric star world.
Moving on, if fusion were occur near the surface of the Sun, we would see it manifest strongly. It has a distinction spectra high in x-rays and soft gamma rays. The corona doesn't have enough energy to explain this part away. We also know there will be fusion in the interior of the Sun. The mass of the Sun is well known and we understand fusion pretty well. For there not to be fusion in the center, the temperature has to be below and density above certain threshholds. A cold dense interior is incompatible with what we observe (again). The surface is too warm. Nor does the electric star model explain the rippled appearance of the Sun (convection currents do though). Solar flares are another place where the electric star model fails. They probably originate from inside the Sun. The plasma velocities (in 2005, protons from a plasma from a solar flare averaged around a third the speed of light over the distance from Sun to Earth) reached means that acceleration probably doesn't occur on the surface but comes from deep in the interior.
The remark that Jupiter is not an "anode" miss the point. Why should the Sun be an anode either? The problem is that the dynamics of the "electric star" have to lead to the Sun appearing as a star, but not Jupiter, in order to fit observation. Yet the initial conditions are similar. Jupiter would also be far down this potential well, it has a similar composition to the Sun. Why isn't Jupiter an "anode"? A good fraction of star systems have two or more stars, some closer and some more distant than Jupiter is to the Sun. What is different?
The electric star model doesn't explain supernovas (especially the consistent Type 1A supernovas that are in conventional theory thought to be white dwarfs stealing material from a second binary companion star). Why do massive stars suddenly collapse if all the action is on the surface? The electric star model doesn't explain red giants. Red giants should be compact bright bluer objects not huge, relatively dim, redder objects. The density of a red giant is all wrong for an electric star, but quite consistent for a conventional model star that has started to fuse helium and heavier elements in the interior.
In summary, the electric star and electric universe models do not explain what we see in the Sun, the Solar System, or in other stars and star systems.
Re:not a debate (Score:3, Informative)
Zerkshop, be careful with your open mind. It will get you into trouble in the physics discipline. As you get older, you will come to see that cosmology is unfortunately no place for people with open minds like yourself. The best tactic is to learn your studies as hard as you can, but keep your opinions of "fringe" scientific readings to yourself. I wouldn't even let your professors know that you're reading this stuff. It could very well affect your upward mobility within your field.
(As for psy trance, I would propose that psytrance has largely been killed off by dubstep. A lot of people who used to listen to psytrance have discovered that dubstep is a far more melodic and danceable drum&bass. I highly recommend it!)
What you've noticed with wikipedia is like watching the Hatfield-McCoy family feud through a pinhole in a fence. The theory of the Electric Universe has been barred from wikipedia by the likes of Leroy Ellenberger, scienceapologist and various other BAUT/talk.origins "authorities". These authorities are actually defenders of conventional wisdom. They do not believe in building new cosmological models because they try to tear them all down before any are ever built. Everybody seems to take their cue from the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today website, run by Phil Plait, where people who create new astrophysical paradigms are set before a panel of like 6 or 8 astrophysicists and burned at the stake on every single minute detail imaginable. What that effectively does is spur people to try to develop mathematics-based models. What we need to be doing, however, is questioning our mathematical models. We need to be taking a closer look at our physical fundamentals within the discipline of physics. The EU Theorists are doing this. We need to be asking tough questions about things like galactic rotation, observations of the photosphere, filamentary structures in space, stellar observations that are enigmatic to the Standard Model, etc.
The fact that people cannot go to wikipedia to understand what the theory says makes it pretty damn difficult for people to learn what the theory says and whether or not its wrong. We've been struggling for years now just to be allowed to explain to people what the theory says on wiki. Online vigilantes have worked tirelessly to prevent it, even though they frequently have to violate their own precious wikipedia rules in order to do so. We can in fact point to published literature, some of it by Nobel Physics laureates like Hannes Alfven, and some of it peer-reviewed to support our interpretations for astrophysical imagery. The Electric Universe debunkers spend much of their time trying to use high school electrostatics to disprove that the math can be made to work when modeling the Sun as a glow discharge. But, so long as the prominent features of the two match up, isn't it obvious that the math can be made to work? And why do they think that people are taught plasma physics in high school? Electrostatics can be used to disprove the behavior of a plasma glow discharge in the laboratory. Can we really count on it to help us in cosmology, or in the study of astrophysical plasmas -- which constitute 99.999% of all visible matter in space?
Unfortunately, and not by choice, the only places to understand EU Theory are at http://www.thunderbolts.info, http://www.holoscience.com and in their books "The Electric Sky" by Don Scott, and "The Electric Universe" by Wal Thornhill. I would in particular point to the writings of Wal Thornhill, who is largely self-taught on the subjects of astrophysics and plasma physics. Wal has proven himself to be very well read on the subject of glow discharges -- better than most professional astrophysicists -- and this has been the key in formulating a new plasma-based cosmology. The more you read of Wal Thornhill, the more you will likely come to respect him as I have. He's been playing the role of scientific heretic for a very long time now. He knows ALL of the criticisms dished at him by now, and he's