![]() Beyond the solar system, in interstellar space, ions and electrons proliferate everywhere.Ī plasma discharge (spontaneous flash of light) is familiar to students of electromagnetism. Every planet with a magnetic field generates its own plasma, like that around Jupiter and its moon Io. Plasma is essentially a collection of ionized particles and while in its simplest form it behaves according to basic electromagnetic laws, at its most complex it continues to astonish specialists in its ability to self-organize into cells with different electrical characteristics.Īurora on Jupiter, photo courtesy John T Clarke (U.Mich) Aurora borealis/australis is the result of charged solar wind particles clashing with and becoming trapped within the Van Allen radiation belts, where they hit the ionosphere and fluoresce. one or more electrons of an atom become liberated. When a material is heated from solid to liquid to gas phase, and then even hotter, it starts to become ionized, i.e. It has been called the ‘fundamental state of matter.’ His plasma theories describe behavior of aurorae, Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, effect of magnetic storms on Earth’s magnetic field, magnetic and electric fields in cosmic plasmas, the terrestrial magnetosphere and dynamics of plasmas within our galaxy.īecause of its unique behavior, (unlike solids, liquids, gas) plasma is seen as the dominant form of matter in the universe. ![]() Originally trained as an electrical power engineer, he researched and taught many years in the field. NASA, JPL, CERN and the Los Alamos National Laboratory all give explanations for their switch from traditional space theory to a more generally accepted (and more familiar electromagnetically-driven) plasma physics, whose founding father, Swedish Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995) coined the phrase ‘Plasma Universe’. And as plasma is almost exclusively electromagnetic –a cluster of ionized particles– electrical theory is being unwrapped from the closet and given another airing. Plasma is looked upon as the ‘fourth state of matter’, different from solid, liquid, gas. While physicists had trouble proving their theories (many of the ‘forces’ and particles were hypothetical and had theoreticians predicting ‘mass-less’ entities and the ‘graviton’) they are now swinging to a view of the operation of the Universe via another mode of Being: It was forever expanding outward from a point of primeval Big Bang, controlled and geared by gravity (the weakest celestial force), full of black holes, with anomalous behavior in comets, meteorites and exploding galaxies explained as the work of anti-matter, ‘dark’ matter or, as in nuclear physics, attributed to ‘unknown’ factors such as quarks, charm, CERN‘s conjectural Higgs-Boson particle or the existence of the ‘weak force’, anti-gravity or String Theory’s multiple dimensions. Gods wielding Thunderbolts: not imaginary mythological tales but formative Earth's memory of her violent pastįor years we were taught traditional theory of our Universe as ‘space’, a vacuum, inert, orderly with few surprises.
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