IMMENSE FLOWS OF CHARGED PARTICLES DISCOVERED BETWEEN THE STARS
BEAVERTON, OR.--A plasma scientist and a radio astronomer announced the discovery of charged particle flows in interstellar space at the 1999 International Conference on Plasma Science in Monterey, California. The discovery culminated decades of speculation and debate whether or not electricity existed on the scale of hundreds of thousands of light years in the interstellar space between the stars.
According to Anthony Peratt, Scientific Advisor to the United States Department of Energy and a plasma researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the discovery was made by computer analyzing large amounts of data gathered by radio telescopes from regions in space known to be occupied by 'neutral clouds of hydrogen.' The data was processed and the results obtained by radio astronomer Gerrit Verschuur, Physics Department, University of Memphis. Verschuur found that the 'neutral hydrogen clouds' were not completely a neutral gas of hydrogen and other elements, but rather consisted of charged particles of electrons and ions, called 'plasma.'
The name plasma as applied to charged particles was borrowed from blood-plasma by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir in 1923 because the particles interacted collectively in a lifelike manner in his laboratory experiments. "Verschuur analyzed nearly two thousand clouds, principally from the Aericibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, but also from other radio telescopes scattered around the globe," said Peratt. Verschuur had previously found, under high resolution computer processing, that the 'clouds' were not clouds at all but were instead filaments of material which twisted and wound like helices over enormous distances between the stars.
Peratt said that the filaments between the stars are not visible themselves but are observable with radio telescopes that can observe space at much longer wavelengths than are visible to the human eye. Prof. Per Carlqvist, a researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, estimated that the interstellar filaments found by Verschuur conducted electricity with currents as high as ten-thousand billion amperes.
"The individual filaments in space are often called Z-pinches. These Z-pinches occur when current-carrying plasma 'pinches' itself into a filament by a magnetic field the current produces around the plasma. Z-pinches, such as those produced on the Sandia National Laboratories 'Z' machine, are among the most prolific producers of X-rays known,� cited Peratt.
The United States Department of Energy funded Z-machine at Sandia has surprised the scientific community during the last few years by breaking all records in the production of high intensity X-rays from wire filaments converted into plasmas by million-volt pulses. Such filaments have already been discovered in our own solar system. For example, the aurora on Earth is known to be caused by million ampere currents flowing down the Earth's magnetic field lines at the northern and southern poles while similar were found by planetary explorer spacecraft to connect the planet Jupiter with its closest satellite Io. [............]
