Magnetism Shapes the Cosmos—New York Times Catches Up

Van Goth surely channeled his famous picture and it is beyond remarkable that we even know this.

We can now detect this macro structure out in the Galaxy.  and just how far away is all this?

By the  by, this image is showing us a uniformity of scale.  Is it real?  what about another direction?

Or is this all an artist using Van goth as inspiration?  Early days folks.

Magnetism Shapes the Cosmos—New York Times Catches Up

Readers of these updates and our Youtube fans know that vast electronic currents and magnetic fields have played a large role, together with gravitation, in shaping the stars and galaxies of the universe, a process continuing today. Imitating nature, we use many of these processes in our FF-2b experimental Fusion device. The role of magnetic fields has been known to plasma scientists for a half century. But most cosmologists tend to entirely neglect electrical and magnetic processes, in favor of gravitation alone, inventing imaginary entities like dark matter to substitute for the well-known effects of magnetism in plasmas.

Now the New York Times has, somewhat belatedly, “broken” the news that magnetism indeed does help shape the cosmos with an article accompanying striking new images of magnetic fields in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. In an article titled “The Magnetic Heart of the Milky Way”, Times science reporter Dennis Overbye reports on how “magnetism controls the universe”, as he only half-jocularly writes.

The images, which somewhat resemble Van Gogh’s famous Starry Night, trace the directions of the magnetic fields throughout the central 500 -light-year-wide region of our galaxy. The images were produced by David Chuss, a physicist at Villanova University and an international team of astronomers in a project called FIREPLACE, for Far-InfraRed Polarimetric Large Area CMZ Exploration.

What the patterns show is that the magnetic fields are ordered over huge regions of space. The pattern looks like a swirling flow, not random. This can only happen if the fields are generated by vast electric currents, as first explained by Hannes Alfven in the 1970’s. The magnetic fields guide the direction of the currents that in turn produce the fields. As all current must, these currents circulate along the field lines in loops, some of which are clearly visible in the image.

Hopefully this will be just the start of the Times coverage of the real (as opposed to the Dark) universe!

Fig 2. Image of the center of the galaxy, showing magnetic fields. The colors represent different temperatures of interstellar dust. Cool, dense dust is green; warmer dust is pink. The white lines show the direction of the magnetic field. Electric currents flow along the field lines.