Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
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Today we delve more deeply into a highly promising ongoing investigation
in the Electric Universe community.
In the previous episode, physicist Eugene Bagashov introduced the analysis
he and several others in the community have conducted
into the evidence for the pervasiveness of a type of electric current,
called a Birkeland current
within or nearby our cosmic neighborhood.
Of course when electric currents can't be directly measured by space probes,
the task of inferring their existence in space is complicated.
Eugene and his colleagues have followed Dr. Donald Scott's model
of the structure of a Birkeland current.
In Part 2 of this four-part presentation,
Eugene outlines in finer detail what he and his colleagues have found to date.
In the previous video, we've discussed Dr. Scott's model for cylindrical Birkeland currents
and have hypothesized that one major example of such a structure around us
might be represented by the so-called local chimney;
perhaps with more localized sub filaments on smaller scales inside it.
But at the same time, at least one argument against such an idea might be made.
If these are indeed strong electric currents, why don't we actually see them?
In particular, where is any synchrotron radiation from them?
And moreover, if there are strong magnetic fields in this structure,
why can't we observe them in some way?
The answer to the first part of that question
lies in the fact that these are most likely force-free field-aligned currents,
just as the ones analyzed in Dr. Scott's works.
What that means is that the electric currents
are in all points of this structure parallel to the magnetic fields.
So this is a minimal energy configuration with little to no electromagnetic stress
and therefore as the charged particles are not accelerated by the magnetic fields
but rather move right along them,
no significant synchrotron radiation is being produced.
This is just a plasma current in dark mode and that's it.
The second part of the question is a bit trickier.
At first we should consider the main method of detection of magnetic fields in space.
It rests on the so-called Faraday effect, or Faraday rotation.
Without getting into the physical reason for that effect,
as it is slightly complicated,
we might just say that the Faraday effect
causes the rotation of the plane of polarization of light.
That is the directions in which the electric and magnetic field
of an electromagnetic wave are oscillating.
And for it to happen, we should have some medium in a magnetic field in it.
The effect is only valid for the component of the magnetic field
that is parallel to the direction of propagation of the wave.
But the most important property of that effect in our context
is that it is reversed, if one reverses either the field direction
or the direction of propagation of light.
So, if we now consider again the structure of the Birkeland current filament
as follows from Dr. Scott's model,
what we see is the cylindrical shells where each consecutive shell
has the magnetic field that is reversed with respect to the previous one,
which would mean that indeed any such shell
would change the polarization of light to some degree.
But as the light enters the next shell with an opposite magnetic field,
we get the opposite change which effectively eliminates any change that took place
as light passed through both of these layers.
In that way we might argue that any Faraday effect would be virtually absent
and the best we might count on is seeing some much weaker background magnetic field
that the filament as a whole is spiraling around.
Well, let's assume then that we can't directly detect the currents themselves,
then what can we detect to at least recognize their presence?
One of the possibilities here might be represented by plasma refraction of light,
that is bending of light when it interacts with the charged particles
that carry the current itself.
Previously the works of Dr. Gupta and Dr. Dowdye
have shown that the bending of light in plasma might alter the trajectory of light rays,
and among other things, imitate the hypothetical gravitational lensing of light.
It might be expected therefore
that the areas with higher current density in the Galactic neighborhood of the solar system
might also impact the measurements of the direction of propagation of light.
In general, any inhomogeneity in plasma distribution
would introduce various errors if not properly taking into account.
Let's look at some examples of that.
One well-known technique of the distance estimates to the nearby stars and clusters
is the parallax method.
So, the parallax method is based on the idea that as the Earth moves around the Sun,
we might observe the same star at slightly different angles,
as our own position and space changes.
From this angular difference one may geometrically determine the distance to the star,
or in principle any other object.
This angle is usually very small as the stars are very far from us.
The largest parallax angle is obviously observed for the nearest star,
Proxima Centauri,
as it apparently moves in the sky the most as we proceed in our orbit.
And even that angle is only about 0.76 angular seconds;
that is about two tenthousandths of a degree.
However, the precision of modern observational methods based on space telescopes
in principle allows us to measure parallax angles as small as about 10 micro arc seconds,
which corresponds to distances of tens of thousands of light-years.
But let us now consider the situation
when the space between us and the star is not empty,
but rather filled with refracting plasma.
In this case, the reading of the parallax angle might be distorted,
and the parallax determination of the distance would be erroneous.
One of the famous examples of that is the so-called Pleiades distance problem.
So, according to modern astronomy
it is possible to determine the distance to Pleiades cluster
at least in two different ways.
First, one might do that by looking at smaller stars in it
in infrared wavelengths,
determine their brightness, or correctly speaking, the absolute magnitude,
and then compare that to the apparent brightness or apparent magnitude
and get the distance measurement.
Applied to Pleiades, this procedure would return a result of about 435 light-years.
And second, one might utilize the current theory of stellar operation
and estimate the mass from the surface temperature.
Then, if we're looking at some binary star system in that cluster,
we might track their orbits.
Since before we estimate their masses,
we might find the real size of the orbit from Kepler's laws
and thus find the distance to them from simple geometrical considerations.
In that way, the distance to the cluster was estimated to be about 430 lightyears.
But the problem appeared when these estimates were compared to parallax measurements,
especially the ones performed by the Hipparcos satellite.
The satellite did measure the parallax angle of the cluster,
but the according distance turned out to be only about 385 light-years.
Moreover, some later analyses have shown
that Hipparcos systematically gives smaller distances for many other stellar clusters.
The later measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope and radio telescopes from Earth,
using the very long baseline interferometry method,
seem to discount Hipparcos data also.
And, finally, the new Gaia satellite essentially using the same technique as Hipparcos,
has also acquired the result which is inconsistent with Hipparcos.
This seems to have ended the debate,
basically meaning that something is wrong with Hipparcos itself.
Although one could argue that the difference could have been caused by
different statistical processing of the results.
In particular Hipparcos data was analyzed using a weighted mean
of parallaxes for different stars in the cluster,
when there seems to be a correlation between distances and distance errors for stars in it.
The later estimates were made using an unweighted mean
for separate stars in the cluster.
Another source of discrepancy could have been
the various methods of measuring the parallax itself.
Hipparcos and Gaia were measuring the so-called absolute or direct parallax,
whereas Hubble and radio telescopes from Earth
have been measuring the so-called relative or differential parallax,
basically taking some distant objects right behind Pleiades as a reference point.
So we might assume that the differences in these readings
and the need of invoking different statistical procedures for the stellar clusters
might have been caused by the refraction of light in plasma
in the Pleiades cluster itself or on the way to it.
Moreover, there might exist a certain dispersion,
that is the dependence of the refraction amplitude on the wavelength
so that the radio telescope data might introduce additional shifts of position
with the respect to visible range observations.
The importance of plasma bending of light for Pleiades in the framework of our hypothesis
might be reinforced by the fact that this cluster is situated in the constellation Taurus,
the line-of-sight to which lies somewhere close to the axis of the local chimney.
So, if there is indeed an enhanced current density at the center of the chimney column,
it is not surprising that the objects observed in that area of the sky
would demonstrate some anomalies of that sort.
Perhaps it is worth noting that earlier works
have also demonstrated some correlated erroneous readings for the Hyades star cluster
which is also situated in Taurus.
Another prominent example of suspicious parallax measurements would be Polaris,
the pole star.
Various parallax measurements of Polaris made in the last two decades
have been steadily returning incompatible results.
The according distances range from about 330 to about 800 light-years,
which doesn't seem to be very precise and consistent.
And there are some other examples like that.
All of them might be related to the behavior of plasma in the local interstellar chimney
and nested cylindrical shells of current and sub-filamentary structures on smaller scales.
In the case of Polaris, as Jim Weninger argues,
even the smaller scale Birkeland current filament that is connected to Earth's North Pole
might be the cause for the discrepancy.
I have certain doubts about that, but it sounds like an interesting hypothesis anyway.
The importance of both Pleiades and Polaris in astrophysics and cosmology is very high.
The Pleiades represent a model star cluster
and the properties of stars in it that we infer from our observations,
are directly related to the distance to the cluster.
And Polaris is a so-called Cepheid variable star.
Cepheid variables
are widely used in astronomy to determine the distances to various objects
as it is assumed that we know how exactly they work.
In particular, it is assumed that there is a direct relation
between their pulsation period and their absolute luminosity.
And Polaris is the closest one to us;
so if we don't know the distance to it,
all the other distances determined through Cepheids should also be questioned.
To get a proper reading of that distance, we need to firstly figure out
the proper arrangement and properties of plasma structures in our vicinity.