Electric Universe: These are not the filaments you're looking for...

It's been a while since I've made the point about how the Peratt galaxy model fails observational testing.  The electric currents which Peratt claimed could be powering galaxies would be strong emitters of microwave radiation.  This was a fact even Peratt acknowledged, and EXPECTED that the microwave sky would be covered with spaghetti-like streamers which would connect galaxies like beads on a string (a popular metaphor of Electric Universe supporters).  Peratt and other supporters of Plasma Cosmology expected to see these currents in large microwave sky-surveys.  The best such survey in recent years is WMAP (Scott Rebuttal. II. The Peratt Galaxy Model vs. the Cosmic Microwave Background), and more recently PLANCK (Electric Universe: More data refuting the EU galaxy model).

Such microwave streamers connecting the galaxies were not found.

I've occasionally read or heard the response from Electric Universe (EU) supporters, who have rarely (never?) allowed their position to be altered by inconvenient facts, that the Peratt galaxy model still must be valid because we see filaments in space…as if any filamentary structure seen in the cosmos must be part of their network of galaxy-powering electric currents!

First, astronomers do not deny that electric fields, and currents, exist in the cosmos.  I've summarized a number of examples of cases where astronomers know theoretically as well as measured, electric fields and currents in space (365 Days of Astronomy: The Electric Universe) and these go back to the early 1900s.  EU supporters often like to reference such works, claiming it is also support for their more extreme nonsense such as electrically-powered stars, comets, and galaxies. 

But what about those filaments?

Filamentary structures within our galaxy

We do see filamentary structures within our own galaxy, many of which are associated with plasma motions.  In many of these cases, we observe synchrotron radiation being emitted from them due to free electrons spiraling along magnetic field lines.  However, the microwave spectra are never at distinct, well-defined frequencies which would occur when electrons moving together as a well-defined current.  Instead, the synchrotron emission is seen over broad range of frequencies, created by electrons moving in roughly all directions with a wide range of energy  (see CalTech: Synchrotron Emission).  Sometimes the atoms and ions of the plasma are excited into states that emit identifiable spectral lines so we can determined additional physical characteristics of the plasma (ionization states of the atoms, temperature, density, etc).

We model many of these objects with MHD models, and this goes back many decades, even before the modern "Electric Universe" cult was formed (I would probably regard this time as the late 1970s, when Ralph Juergens proposed his 'electric sun' model).  Consider from 1971 this paper, Plasma Interactions in the Crab Nebula (1971), or more recently, Generation of Crab Nebulae Wisps by Plasma Drift Instability from 1996.  Mainstream astronomy has a long history of studying plasmas, in spite of, rather than because of, Electric Universe claims.

Notice that these models generate predictions closer to the real measurements than ANY produced the claimed mechanisms of EU advocates.  Actually, I have been unable to FIND any actual models produced by EU advocates that generate real 'predictions' which we can compare to measurements.  Their 'predictions' are soft, squishy 'kinda, sorta, looks like', such as "it looks like the exhaust of a plasma gun".

To add to the uselessness of their 'predictions', we get no information about how these 'plasma gun' configurations can form in nature!

EU advocates seem to just wait around expecting someone else to solve all the problems with their 'models' and then claim they deserve credit!  How is this any different from the activities of patent trolls (wikipedia)?

Filamentary structures associated with galaxies. 

We've observed synchrotron emission, as well as polarization, from plasma moving along galactic magnetic fields and from jets emitted from the nuclei of active galaxies.  Here's composites of radio lobes combined with galaxy images in visible light.

Centaurus A with radio jets (Credit: ESO/WFI (visible); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A. Weiss et al. (microwave); NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Kraft et al. (X-ray); APOD )

Hercules A with radio jets (Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Notice that these radio jets ejected from the centers of the galaxies disperse into blobs in the intergalactic medium.  They are not connected to any larger cosmic 'electric circuit', 'Birkeland current' or similar cosmic structure, or even another galaxy.  We still have not heard from Electric Universe theorists what would power such gigantic circuits if they did exist!

See also:  Electric Universe: Measurement of the Electric Current in a Kpc-Scale Jet

The large microwave sky surveys also see such plasma loop structures around our own Milky Way galaxy, but all the observations indicate these are created by magnetic fields generated by the galaxy itself (Scholarpedia).

WMAP galactic emission templates, including synchrotron radiaiton (Credit Gold, B. et al., 2011, ApJS, 192, 15G)

In the synchrotron template of the Milky Way above, we see a number filaments in blue rising above the galactic disk (the horizontal enhancement across the center of the oval, mostly green and yellow).  However, we see many of them curve back down towards the galactic disk, indicating their origin is in the galaxy, not some external current passing through the galaxy.  See also the Planck One-year all-sky survey (ESA).

These filaments also cannot be part of EU's extragalactic circuit system.

Filamentary structures in large galaxy surveys

Another flaw in EU reasoning is the assumption that filamentary structures can only be formed by electric currents.  The mathematics of magnetohydrodynamics, or MHD (wikipedia), are very similar to those of regular hydrodynamics (wikipedia) and this is why both environments can exhibit similar structures.

• Wikipedia: Taylor Instability
• Wikipedia: Karman Vortex Sheet
• Wikipedia: Richtmyer–Meshkov instability
• Wikipedia: List of hydrodynamic instabilities
• UC Irvine, Mechanical & Aerospace.  Physics of Fluids
• University of Leeds: Astrophysical & Geophysical Fluids

Many of these instabilities in neutral fluid dynamics have analogs in MHD.  This stuff is used by REAL ENGINEERS AND PHYSICISTS to design and build real things.

So let's finally visit the filamentary structures we observe on a cosmological scale.

Millenium Survey and real surveys (Credit: Millenium Simulation)

The blue and the violet plots above show the galaxy distribution from REAL galaxy surveys with hundreds of thousands of galaxies.  The Milky Way (and Earth) would be at the center of this plot, at the apex of the plotted wedges.  In this case, each color point usually represents hundreds of galaxies, and these are distributed in space in these wispy, filamentary type structures.  Are THESE what EU supporters want to claim are the filaments of their cosmic electric currents?

But the Millenium simulation run (wikipedia), also plotted in the graphic above, is a large computer simulation attempting to simulate cosmic structure formation using our BEST knowledge of the underlying physics of gravitation and neutral plasma.  The results of that run are plotted in the red wedges, where again the dots represent many galaxies.

There are no cosmic scale Birkeland or similar currents included in the Millenium simulation, yet it forms filamentary structures very similar to those from the real galaxy surveys!  

But we do NOT see these filamentary collections of galaxies in galaxy surveys matching with the radio and microwave emission seen in electromagnetic surveys.  These two sets of data must have a strong correlation to validate the Electric Universe claims that galaxies are POWERED by EXTERNAL ELECTRICAL CURRENTS.

Yet they do not.

But it takes currents to make a magnetic field!

This whine is the popular 'corollary' to the Electric Universe claim that only currents can make filaments.

Only partially true.  But once a magnetic field is started, it can be maintained, and even regenerated, after the current is long gone, a consequence of the 'displacement current' (wikipedia) in Maxwell's equations, which is a consequence of the fact that electric charge is a conserved quantity.  The most well-known example of this feedback between electric and magnetic fields is electromagnetic radiation, AKA light, which can propagate for billions of years after the initial current which created it is long gone. 

In this case, the electromagnetic waves are constantly exchanging energy between their electric and magnetic field as described in Maxwell's equations.  The signal from a large radio antenna can still be propagating through empty space weeks after the antenna has been switched off.  The interactions of light with matter can be examined by just considering the electric and magnetic fields of the photon without consideration of the current that initially created the photon!  For all intents and purposes, the photon has lost the 'memory' of the original current that may have created it.

Plasma getting energy from other sources, such as mechanical, thermal, or nuclear processes, can also maintain a magnetic field.  Self-exciting dynamos (see University of Texas, Homopolar Dynamos), a process which has been produced in the laboratory (see Scholarpedia), are the perfect example where other energy sources are converted into a persistent magnetic field.

These are some of the simplest examples from basic electromagnetism, yet Electric Universe supporters not only ignore these facts, but go so far as to accuse astrophysicists, and even astrophysicists who do real work with plasmas, of being incompetent.  They make these accusations even as they claim that mainstream astronomy is 'coming around' to their view of the universe.

In actual fact, we can trace the knowledge of electromagnetic forces and plasmas in space back to the early 1900s (365 Days of Astronomy: The Electric Universe), with no assistance from the Electric Universe claimants.

And their galaxy-powering electric currents still do not exist...