The blue lines in this picture represent the auroral current system. Together with the ionospheric closure current and the
magnetosphere generator, these form the complete auroral current system. The figure shows a North-South
section through the structures that usually extend several hundreds of kilometers into the East-West
direction. We don't talk about the auroras in these terms though. Before the first satellites were put into orbit,
most scientists believe electrical phenomena couldn't exist in space. When those first satellites encountered
streams of charged particles, the understandable but incorrect belief that space was charged neutral, blinded early
scientists from seeing the streams for what they are. Electric currents. Instead, they were named radiation
belts. How did a mistake like that happen? Well, it turns out magnetic fields in space are easy to measure. Electric
currents are not. So, the movement of particles in the radiation belts were described in terms of magnetic fields.
And the fact that moving charges constitute a current, was just ignored. If charges move from one place
to another, they build up excess charge in that place and repel any additional charge, and that stops the movement.
For particles to continue to move, their path has to be a closed circuit and if a
closed circuit exists the description of the particle state at any point depends not only on the local conditions but
also on what's happening in the rest of the circuit. For example, if a double layer
forms and explodes, all the energy of the circuit will be released from it in an amount that can be vastly greater than
the energy of the double layer itself. Double layers are capacitor-like formations in plasma. They're
particularly interesting because they don't have any noticeable magnetic effects. The only way to spot one, is to send
a probe through it. Astrophysicists who map magnetic fields but assume there's no electricity in space, or figure if
there is, it doesn't do anything, they don't even realize double layers exist. The father of plasma cosmology Hannes
Alfvén identified several interacting circuits in the Earth's magnetosphere. The aurora is the visible
part of one of these and because the circuits radiate, that is lose energy, they must be getting power from some source of
energy. But laboring under the idea of an isolated electrically neutral model of cosmology, early scientists looked at
these electric currents and instead named them “the solar wind”, despite there being no wind in space. And then they
left the question of, where's the power coming from, out of their equations. So, all astrophysicists who are
clueless about electric currents in the atmosphere may not know about double layers, let me tell you, not only do they
exist, the electrical effects of a double layer can be incredible. They store and discharge energy and radiate noisily
over broad bands of frequency. They accelerate charged particles and divide plasma into cells of like properties,
often separating small variations into categories like temperature, density, or chemical composition. There's that
amazing self-organizing property of plasma I mentioned before. When electrically ignorant astrophysicists
observe these effects, they come up with all kinds of crazy mechanical explanations. They dance around what
clearly looks like electrical phenomena to me. Everything from black holes, magnetic reconnection, neutron stars,
frozen-in magnetic field lines and shock waves, and on and on. But up in our atmosphere where we see these energetic
effects like the aurora in action one might ask, where's the power source? Well, the power could be generated
locally. The rotation inertia of a body could drive the circuit in much the same way a water-driven turbine in the dam's
generator works. And it's true, early plasma physicists figured that was how it worked. But now we're in space,
and everywhere we look we see smaller scale circuits in space coupling up to larger
-scale circuits, just like how our auroral circuit is connected to the solar wind or the Sun circuit, more accurately.
For proponents of an electrical theory of space this leads to an undeniable truth: we are externally powered. And that
power is delivered by vast, sometimes Intergalactic, circuitry that can travel across light years while keeping its
narrow, braided structure intact. The fact is there's just one known method for confining gas in a vacuum, one known
explanation for tight jets that span light years - the magnetic field, the natural byproduct of electric
current. We know from hundreds of years of plasma research that an electric current in plasma will generate its own
magnetic field and self-constrict the current channel. This is known as the Bennett pinch effect. It produces filaments
or threads of current that keep their shape over vast distances. Multiple filaments tend to
spiral around each other, forming helical power cables that can transmit electric power across the
cosmos. But this isn't just some stellar effect. It happens here too. These cables have been identified running from
equators to poles in the same circuits that power the aurora. Plasma cosmologists also identify them in the
filaments that extend from active radio galaxies to what they call radio lobes, which are just double layers far above
each pole of such galaxies. And almost every body in the universe displays some kind of
filamentation. Venus has a tail composed of invisible ‘stringy things’ (NASA's description). Comets have tails composed
of visible ‘stringy things’, or in reality ion tails. The neon light glow of planetary
nebula, when you look up close, as we can with the James Webb, looks like intricate webs of filamentary braided strings. The
jets of Herbig-Haro stars do the same thing. Huge, braided strings that keep their narrow shape over light years. Then
there's the spiral arms of some galaxies that look hairy, with these threads of material extending away from them. Now, if
what we're looking at, if all these filaments truly are Birkeland currents, as proponents of the electric model of
space suggest, then consider this. We're only seeing the visible structures. All
the rest of the circuits should generate magnetic fields and those can be mapped, and that would help us grasp the extent
of some of these circuits. As an example, check out this image that maps the magnetic structure of Galaxy
M82. The arrows indicate the direction and strength of the magnetic field. This one is an artist conception of
the likely circuit schema that follows around and organizes the galaxy. Higher density currents flow out along the spin
axis to large distances. These distant regions are likely locations of energetic double layers which show up as
radio and X-ray lobes in certain active galaxies. The currents then spread out and flow circumferentially around the
equatorial plane. They return to the galactic core along spiral arms, pulling in matter and pinching it into stars as they
go. Every element in these galactic circuits radiates energy and that hints at further couplings with even larger
circuits. We get a hint of this with the observation that galaxies occur along strings. This is why the late great
Halton Arp's observations of physical plasma bridges were so invaluable. These bridges connect thousands of
highly redshifted galaxies to lower redshifted ones. For those familiar with Arp’s groundbreaking work, this is a bull
in the China shop to the expanding Universe in Big Bang theory. Because it's direct evidence that suggests red shift
has a lot less to do with directional movement of galaxies and far more to do with their age and energetic
qualities. If these far-off objects really are companions physically connected by currents of interstellar
plasma, then everything we see outside the Milky Way is part of one of those stringy structures we see around
galaxies. That means those strings of galaxy quasar groups are actually super galactic Birkeland cables and the
galaxies along them are just pinched areas. Arp’s observations raise the possibility that everything we see
occurs along one braided filament that swirls from the Virgo supercluster to the Fornax supercluster, with our galaxy
situated somewhere around midway. But even this string of galactic superclusters has to be a load on a
bigger circuit whose extent and power supply we can only guess at. And maybe that's what draws me to this path of
science. Plasma cosmology seeks to understand what we see, not invent stories to explain where it came from.
We're still trying to figure that part out, though some of us have our own ideas. Here's what we've worked out in plasma
laboratories over a couple hundred years of electrical engineering. Electricity scales
infinitely in both directions, and in a laboratory it reproduces reliably all the same galactic structures we see in
space. It can be put into a computer model and produce predictive success without mysterious particle physics
being shoehorned in. So, is electricity the missing key that ties it all together? Is it the answer to what we see
happening in space? Well, I can't say for sure, but so far the shoe fits. And it fits a hell of a lot better than
the crazy, medieval style origin myths being handed out from Standard Model space sciences. Things like Big Bang,
supercondensed matter, and neutron stars that spin faster than a dentist drill before changing speed and direction.
They're just not panning out anymore. And the James Webb is blasting them out of the water like ducks in a row. When we
look to the stars, the vast majority of what we observe is matter in a plasmatic state, overflowing with electric charge,
and organizing into spectacular structures. And yet, so far conventional space science tells us that none of that
does anything worth noting and we shouldn't pay any attention to electricity in space. Clearly this isn't
true. Space is anything but electrically inert, and at this point, after decades of
massing evidence, including the James Webb telescope's incredible photographic
evidence of braided filamentary circuits that cross the cosmos, to deny electricity is playing a major role is
both baffling and at this point inexcusable. So, there it is, another reason why the Electric Universe model
of cosmology is a viable alternative to the Standard Model by seeing and
defining the circuits in the big picture of the cosmos. Its predictive success rate alone demands attention.
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