One of the most beautiful words in the English language is ‘alignment’. In human life the word denotes a sense
of connection, agreement, unity, or oneness. In our local cosmic neighborhood in the
inner solar system, sky watchers look forward to the alignment of planets from
our perspective on Earth as a special event worthy of observation. On a cosmological scale however, where
celestial objects are thought to have formed under different conditions and are separated by unfathomable distances,
alignments, assuming their appearance is not sheer astronomically improbable coincidence, should not occur at all.
Such alignments speak to a relationship or communication between these objects which has no predictive foundation, nor
explanation, in standard astrophysics. And yet, as technological leaps have enabled scientists to gaze deeper and
deeper into the cosmos with ever finer detail, such alignments have indeed been observed.
In our Milky Way Galaxy, a particular group of alignments has puzzled astronomers for more than a decade.
In 2011, the astronomer Brian Rees first discovered that a number of bipolar planetary nebulae all appeared to be
aligned nearly parallel to the galactic plane. As noted in 2013, in a European Southern Observatory press release,
”Astronomers have used the ESO's New Technology Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope to explore more than 100
planetary nebulae in the central bulge of our galaxy. They have found that butterfly-shaped members of this cosmic
family tend to be mysteriously aligned - a surprising result given their different histories and varied properties.”
In the press release, Brian Rees stated ”This really is a surprising finding and,
if it holds true, a very important one... The alignment we're seeing for these bipolar nebulae indicates something
bizarre about star systems within the central bulge.” At the time, Rees and his colleagues
suggested that mysterious magnetism originating at the galactic bulge may have influenced the nebulae, producing
the alignments. The press release stated, quote “...this new finding hints at another
more mysterious factor. Along with these complex stellar characteristics are those of our Milky Way; the whole central
bulge rotates around the galactic center. This bulge may have a greater influence
than previously thought over our entire galaxy - via its magnetic fields.” Recently, another paper, this one in the
Astrophysical Journal Letters was published on the mysteriously aligned nebulae, and again scientists are looking
to magnetism as the cause of the so-called bizarre alignment. A science- alert report on the paper states, “The
only plausible explanation for the curiously neat alignment of this specific subset of planetary nebulae is
magnetic fields, according to the researchers. While the magnetic fields in the galactic bulge aren't currently
strong enough to account for the uniform arrangement, they could have been in the
past, locking the binaries into alignment long prior to the formation of the planetary nebulae.”
It is surely frustrating to proponents of the Electric Universe to hear these interpretations in light of the
remarkable scientific data. In an Electric Universe, the bipolar form of the aligned nebulae is not coincidental. As
demonstrated for many decades in the plasma laboratory, the bipolar structure is identical to that seen in the
electromagnetic plasma Z-pinch. Physicist Wal Thornhill discussed the role of the Z-pinch in supernovae and
planetary nebulae in his 2007 peer-reviewed paper in the IEEE's Transactions on Plasma Science, the
world's leading journal on plasma physics. In 2013, Wal discussed in a Space News video how easily the
mysteriously aligned nebulae are explained in the Electric Universe. ”We've all seen those beautiful images of
planetary nebulae, the hourglass shaped objects that have been seen and photographed very successfully through
the Hubble Space Telescope and other large new telescopes. The more detail it's seen, of course the more puzzles
have arisen. But the greatest puzzle of all has just arrived in the news that it's been discovered that these
hourglass shapes in the central bulge of our galaxy all have, if you like the stems of the hourglass all facing in the
plane of the galaxy. And this is not to be expected if these shapes are caused by the star itself and any objects that
happen to be orbiting that star. The surprise for astronomers is that there should be any connection at all between
these isolated objects. The other great puzzle is that the expected axis of rotation of stars tends to be in the
plane of the cloud of material from which it's formed. This is the standard model of how stars formed, and how
planetary systems are formed about that star, is the rotation of the cloud of material that gives it its axis of
rotation. But here we're looking at planetary nebulae close-in to the center of the galaxy and which have their
rotation axis perpendicular to the cloud, which is totally at odds with any idea of the formation of the stars from such
a cloud. All of this goes to show the inability of astronomers to predict or explain new
discoveries in space. The explanations themselves that we see in these reports are in a language that from the Electric
Universe point of view is all wrong. Planetary nebulae are supposed to have been formed by dying stars and stars
puffing outer layers off in that process. But according to the Electric Universe model, the so-called life and death of
stars is a complete fiction. The planetary nebula is simply a star in which we can see the electrical
circuitry of that star. It's being lit by the galaxy and therefore you might expect also that the alignment of that
electric current towards the center of the galaxy would be along the arms of the spiral.
And this would also explain this strange discovery that the planetary nebulae have their axes aligned perpendicular to
the plane of the galaxy. This is to be expected in the Electric Universe model. It's totally unexpected in the old,
centuries-old, gravitational model of the formation of stars and their planets.” Wal also addressed astronomers’ and
astrophysicists’ reliance on mysterious magnetism to explain the alignments without consideration of the electric
currents that are required to explain the magnetism's presence. As I’ve noted many times in previous videos,
while astronomers today have no choice but to acknowledge the pervasiveness of cosmic magnetism, they did not predict it.
As recently as the late 1990s, an official NASA web page on cosmic magnetic fields describes Standard
Astronomical Theory as follows. “On the cosmological scale, there is no data to suggest that magnetic fields are present.
They certainly are not important in the dynamics of the universe for any reasonable range of field strengths
consistent with present observational constraints.” In recent decades however, radio
astronomers have indeed affirmed the existence of cosmic scale magnetic fields and their presence is
increasingly recognized as anything but unimportant. Other major surprises have followed, including the discovery of
galactic magnetic fields of quote ”astonishing order” in defiance of astrophysicists’ suggestion that a
chaotic process like stellar explosions is the source of said magnetic fields. Like cosmic magnetism, cosmic alignments
offer compelling evidence of the organizational influence of electric currents.
Consider one of the most profound mysteries I ever discussed on Space News from the Electric Universe: the discovery
of so-called “black hole radio jets” of distant galaxies, all spinning out in the same direction. In 2016, a Royal
Astronomical Society press release reported the observation that quote, ”...supermassive black holes in a region of
the distant universe are all spinning out radio jets in the same direction....” A lead investigator said of the findings,
”This is not obviously expected based on our current understanding of cosmology...
it's a bizarre finding.” Professor Andrew Russ Taylor stated, “...these black holes
don't know about each other, or have any way of exchanging information or influencing each other directly over
such vast scales....” On the Intergalactic scale we can find numerous other heretofore unexplained
instances of objects having preferred orientations with respect to their surroundings. This includes the alignment
of the axes of the brightest galaxies in rich galaxy clusters with the clusters’ orientation as a whole as described in
the 2017 Nature Astronomy paper 10 billion years of brightest cluster galaxy alignments, “The most massive
galaxies in the universe appear to know about their surroundings. It is well established that the major axes of
brightest cluster galaxies are often elongated in the same direction as the galaxy cluster in which they reside and,
furthermore, that clusters themselves are aligned with their neighbors, a remarkable coherence of structures over
many millions of light years.” The authors propose that such alignments are quote, ”...the product of a special formation
history, one influenced by the development of the cosmic web over billions of years.”
The cosmic web the authors refer to is the vast strands of filaments, both observed, and theoretically modeled on
supercomputers, connecting vast structures across the intergalactic medium. Like cosmic magnetism and like
improbable or impossible cosmic alignments, cosmic filaments are one of the best clues to the electrical nature
of the Plasma Universe. As Wal was fond of saying, the filamentary structure of electrified plasma seen in the novelty
plasma ball provides a simple, yet meaningful analog to the electrical substrate of the entire cosmos. It is
surely significant, not just scientifically, but also philosophically, that our universe is neither empty, nor
disconnected. A fact that cosmic alignments powerfully confirm. The challenge now for astronomers is to
reconsider theories that are misaligned with science discovery, and to begin to align space exploration with the
predictive theoretical foundations of the Electric Universe and plasma cosmology.
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