CATASTROPHISM

Ancient Destructions explained - Immanuel Velikovsky and the Electric Universe

Last Updated on Wed, 05 Oct 2022 | Ancient History

 Climate Policy Watcher
Alternative Energy (current)

Let me introduce you to Immanuel Velikovsky a man who caused incredible controversy in his time. In the 1950’s he wrote a book called “Worlds in Collision”, which had as its main theme the cataclysmic destruction on Earth by planets and comets in the Solar System. He believed mythology and legend should be interpreted literally.

This included the malignant forces attributed to Baal/Jupiter, father of the gods. He earned the wrath of the scientific world. Yet most of his Predictions made in 1960 were absolutely proved by NASA. Jupiter did emanate radio waves and was an electromagnetic body. The surface of Venus was 800 degrees centigrade not the same as Earth. He was right. Conventional science was badly wrong. He claimed the solar system is unstable. Both the Moon and Mars have been ravaged by celestial bodies. Part of his theory was that Venus was once a comet expelled from Jupiter.

Immanuel Velikovsky sought proof of the unstable solar system from many sources. Mythology had bones of truth! Hesiod the ancient Greek philosopher portrayed this in his ancient book ‘Theogeny’ where, for instance, he sites Venus being ejected from Jupiter. Homer in his book the ‘Iliad’ describes the destructive war between the planets as the major factor governing the destruction of Troy in the Trojan wars. Immanuel Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision proposed that many myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures are based on actual events: worldwide global catastrophes of a celestial origin actually had profound effects on the lives, beliefs and writings of early mankind.



Professor Emilio Spendicato recently commented:
“Worlds in Collision is a book of wars in the celestial sphere that took place in historical times. In these wars the planet earth participated too. The historical-cosmological story of this book is based on the evidence of historical texts of many people around the globe, on classical literature, on epics of the northern races, on sacred books of the peoples of the Orient and Occident, on traditions and folklore of primitive peoples, on old astronomical inscriptions and charts, on archaeological finds, and also on geological and paleontological material.”

After reaching the number 1 spot in the best-sellers list, Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision was banned from a number of academic institutions, and created an unprecedented scientific debacle that became known as The Velikovsky Affair. In 1956 Velikovsky wrote a sequel “Earth in Upheaval” to present conclusive geological evidence of terrestrial catastrophism.

“I have excluded from [these pages] all references to ancient literature, traditions, and folklore; and this I have done with intent, so that careless critics cannot decry the entire work as “tales and legends”. Stones and bones are the only witness.”

However for forty years these highly controversial theories remained an anathema to the academic world. Then in June 1994 an event occurred that radically changed scientific thought and gave credibility to Velikovsky’s theories. Myth and legend, once dismissed, had to be re-examined. What was this catastrophic event?

In June 1994 a rogue comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 approached Jupiter. Observers on Earth soon realized that it was on a collision course. But what happened next was totally unexpected. Without warning it split into twenty three large pieces. Then one by one these pieces plummeted into Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. It tore huge craters into this massive planet; the size of each crater was four times the size of earth these craters persisted for months afterwards on the unstable surface of Jupiter. Simultaneously a gaseous cloud was released that went on to envelope the surface of the planet. This toxic cloud persisted for months.

For the first time modern man had witnessed a comet collide with a planet! What was thought to be stable solar system, was now a place where the unexpected could happen. Could this have occurred on Earth? Had mankind actually witnessed such an event? Could it happen to Earth in the future? No one could now deny any of these possibilities. Perhaps Baal, alias Jupiter, does have an effect on Earth. The proof is not final, but no longer is it a wild heretical theory based on fantasy. Velikovsky could be taken seriously.

Earth In Upheaval Velikovsky : Immanuel Velikovsky : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Worlds in Collision : Immanuel Velikovsky : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

New Findings Suggest Laws Of Nature Not As Constant As Previously Thought

Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.


Scientists examining the light from one of the furthermost quasars in the universe were astonished to find fluctuations in the electromagnetic force [Credit: Shutterstock]


In a paper published in prestigious journal Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that have measured tiny variations in the fine structure constant.

UNSW Science's Professor John Webb says the fine structure constant is a measure of electromagnetism - one of the four fundamental forces in nature (the others are gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force).

"The fine structure constant is the quantity that physicists use as a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force," Professor Webb says. "It's a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck's constant and the electron charge, and it's a ratio of those things. And it's the number that physicists use to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force."

The electromagnetic force keeps electrons whizzing around a nucleus in every atom of the universe - without it, all matter would fly apart. Up until recently, it was believed to be an unchanging force throughout time and space. But over the last two decades, Professor Webb has noticed anomalies in the fine structure constant whereby electromagnetic force measured in one particular direction of the universe seems ever so slightly different.

"We found a hint that that number of the fine structure constant was different in certain regions of the universe. Not just as a function of time, but actually also in direction in the universe, which is really quite odd if it's correct...but that's what we found."

Looking for Clues

Ever the sceptic, when Professor Webb first came across these early signs of slightly weaker and stronger measurements of the electromagnetic force, he thought it could be a fault of the equipment, or of his calculations or some other error that had led to the unusual readings. It was while looking at some of the most distant quasars - massive celestial bodies emitting exceptionally high energy - at the edges of the universe that these anomalies were first observed using the world's most powerful telescopes.

"The most distant quasars that we know of are about 12 to 13 billion light years from us," Professor Webb says. "So if you can study the light in detail from distant quasars, you're studying the properties of the universe as it was when it was in its infancy, only a billion years old. The universe then was very, very different. No galaxies existed, the early stars had formed but there was certainly not the same population of stars that we see today. And there were no planets."

He says that in the current study, the team looked at one such quasar that enabled them to probe back to when the universe was only a billion years old which had never been done before. The team made four measurements of the fine constant along the one line of sight to this quasar. Individually, the four measurements didn't provide any conclusive answer as to whether or not there were perceptible changes in the electromagnetic force. However, when combined with lots of other measurements between us and distant quasars made by other scientists and unrelated to this study, the differences in the fine structure constant became evident.

A weird Universe

"And it seems to be supporting this idea that there could be a directionality in the universe, which is very weird indeed," Professor Webb says. "So the universe may not be isotropic in its laws of physics - one that is the same, statistically, in all directions. But in fact, there could be some direction or preferred direction in the universe where the laws of physics change, but not in the perpendicular direction. In other words, the universe in some sense, has a dipole structure to it.

"In one particular direction, we can look back 12 billion light years and measure electromagnetism when the universe was very young. Putting all the data together, electromagnetism seems to gradually increase the further we look, while towards the opposite direction, it gradually decreases. In other directions in the cosmos, the fine structure constant remains just that - constant. These new very distant measurements have pushed our observations further than has ever been reached before."

In other words, in what was thought to be an arbitrarily random spread of galaxies, quasars, black holes, stars, gas clouds and planets - with life flourishing in at least one tiny niche of it - the universe suddenly appears to have the equivalent of a north and a south. Professor Webb is still open to the idea that somehow these measurements made at different stages using different technologies and from different locations on Earth are actually a massive coincidence.

"This is something that is taken very seriously and is regarded, quite correctly with scepticism, even by me, even though I did the first work on it with my students. But it's something you've got to test because it's possible we do live in a weird universe."

But adding to the side of the argument that says these findings are more than just coincidence, a team in the US working completely independently and unknown to Professor Webb's, made observations about X-rays that seemed to align with the idea that the universe has some sort of directionality.

"I didn't know anything about this paper until it appeared in the literature," he says. "And they're not testing the laws of physics, they're testing the properties, the X-ray properties of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and cosmological distances from Earth. They also found that the properties of the universe in this sense are not isotropic and there's a preferred direction. And lo and behold, their direction coincides with ours."

Life, the Universe and Everything

While still wanting to see more rigorous testing of ideas that electromagnetism may fluctuate in certain areas of the universe to give it a form of directionality, Professor Webb says if these findings continue to be confirmed, they may help explain why our universe is the way it is, and why there is life in it at all.

"For a long time, it has been thought that the laws of nature appear perfectly tuned to set the conditions for life to flourish. The strength of the electromagnetic force is one of those quantities. If it were only a few per cent different to the value we measure on Earth, the chemical evolution of the universe would be completely different and life may never have got going. It raises a tantalising question: does this 'Goldilocks' situation, where fundamental physical quantities like the fine structure constant are 'just right' to favour our existence, apply throughout the entire universe?"

VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT

If there is a directionality in the universe, Professor Webb argues, and if electromagnetism is shown to be very slightly different in certain regions of the cosmos, the most fundamental concepts underpinning much of modern physics will need revision.
"Our standard model of cosmology is based on an isotropic universe, one that is the same, statistically, in all directions," he says. "That standard model itself is built upon Einstein's theory of gravity, which itself explicitly assumes constancy of the laws of Nature. If such fundamental principles turn out to be only good approximations, the doors are open to some very exciting, new ideas in physics."

Professor Webb's team believe this is the first step towards a far larger study exploring many directions in the universe, using data coming from new instruments on the world's largest telescopes. New technologies are now emerging to provide higher quality data, and new artificial intelligence analysis methods will help to automate measurements and carry them out more rapidly and with greater precision.

Author: Lachlan Gilbert | Source: University of New South Wales [April 27, 2020]

Theory of Electromagnetism and Gravity Modeling Earth as a Rotating Solenoid Coil 
Greg Poole
 Electrical Power Engineer 
Pilot Hill, CA USA 1 
https://archive.org/details/TheoryOfElectromagnetismAndGravityJHEPGC/mode/2up
Abstract
Presented in this manuscript are conventional electrical engineering tools to model the earth as a rotating electrical  machine. Calculations using known parameters of the earth and measured field data has resulted in new understanding of the earths  electrical system and gyroscopic rotation. The material makeup of the inner earth is better understood based on derived permeability  and permittivity constants. The planet has been modeled as simple coils and then as a parallel impedance circuit which has led to fundamental insight into planetary speed control and RLC combination for Schumann Resonance of 7.83Hz. Torque and Voltage  Constants and the inverse Speed Constant are calculated using three methods and all compare favorably with Newtons Gravitational  Constant. A helical resonator is referenced and Schumann’s Resonant ideal frequency calculated and compared with others idealism. A new theory of gravity based on particle velocity selector at the poles is postulated. Two equations are presented as the needed links  between Faraday’s electromagnetism and Newtonian physics. Acceleration and Speed Control of earth is explained as a centripetal  governor. A new equation for planetary attraction and the attraction of atomic matter is theorized. Rotation of the earths electrical coil is explained in terms of the Richardson effect. Electric power transfer from the sun to the planets is proposed via Flux Transfer Events. The impact of this evolving science of electromagnetic modeling of planets will be magnified as the theory is proven; and found  to be useful for future generations of engineers and scientists who seek to discover our world and other planets. 

 #VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT 

Juno tunes into radio noise triggered by Jupiter's volcanic moon Io

by Bill Steigerwald, NASA

The multicolored lines in this conceptual image represent the magnetic field lines that link Io’s orbit with Jupiter’s atmosphere. Radio waves emerge from the source and propagate along the walls of a hollow cone (gray area). Juno, its orbit represented by the white line crossing the cone, receives the signal when Jupiter’s rotation sweeps that cone over the spacecraft. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Jay Friedlander

The Juno Waves instrument "listened" to the radio emissions from Jupiter's immense magnetic field to find their precise locations.

By listening to the rain of electrons flowing onto Jupiter from its intensely volcanic moon Io, researchers using NASA's Juno spacecraft have found what triggers the powerful radio emissions within the monster planet's gigantic magnetic field. The new result sheds light on the behavior of the enormous magnetic fields generated by gas-giant planets like Jupiter.

Jupiter has the largest, most powerful magnetic field of all the planets in our solar system, with a strength at its source about 20,000 times stronger than Earth's. It is buffeted by the solar wind, a stream of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields constantly blowing from the Sun. Depending on how hard the solar wind blows, Jupiter's magnetic field can extend outward as much as two million miles (3.2 million kilometers) toward the Sun and stretch more than 600 million miles (over 965 million kilometers) away from the Sun, as far as Saturn's orbit.

Jupiter has several large moons that orbit within its massive magnetic field, with Io being the closest. Io is caught in a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and the neighboring two of these other large moons, which generates internal heat that powers hundreds of volcanic eruptions across its surface.

Juno tunes into one of its favorite radio stations. Hear the decametric radio emissions triggered by the interaction of Io with Jupiter’s magnetic field. The Waves instrument on Juno detects radio signals whenever Juno’s trajectory crosses into the beam which is a cone-shaped pattern. This beam pattern is similar to a flashlight that is only emitting a ring of light rather than a full beam. Juno scientists then translate the radio emission detected to a frequency within the audible range of the human ear. Credit: University of Iowa/SwRI/NASA

These volcanoes collectively release one ton of material (gases and particles) per second into space near Jupiter. Some of this material splits up into electrically charged ions and electrons and is rapidly captured by Jupiter's magnetic field. As Jupiter's magnetic field sweeps past Io, electrons from the moon are accelerated along the magnetic field toward Jupiter's poles. Along their way, these electrons generate "decameter" radio waves (so-called decametric radio emissions, or DAM). The Juno Waves instrument can "listen" to this radio emission that the raining electrons generate.

The researchers used the Juno Waves data to identify the precise locations within Jupiter's vast magnetic field where these radio emissions originated. These locations are where conditions are just right to generate the radio waves; they have the right magnetic field strength and the right density of electrons (not too much and not too little), according to the team.

This processed image of Io by New Horizons shows the 290-kilometer-high (180-mile-high) plume of the volcano Tvashtar near Io’s north pole. Also visible is the Prometheus volcano’s much smaller plume in the 9 o’clock direction. The top of the Masubi volcano’s plume appears as an irregular bright patch near the bottom. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

"The radio emission is likely constant, but Juno has to be in the right spot to listen," said Yasmina Martos of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, College Park.

The radio waves emerge from the source along the walls of a hollow cone aligned with and controlled by the strength and shape of the magnetic field of Jupiter. Juno receives the signal only when Jupiter's rotation sweeps that cone over the spacecraft, in the same way a lighthouse beacon shines briefly upon a ship at sea. Martos is lead author of a paper about this research published in June 2020 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Data from Juno allowed the team to calculate that the energy of the electrons generating the radio waves was far higher than previously estimated, as much as 23 times greater. Also, the electrons do not necessarily need to come from a volcanic moon. For example, they could be in the planet's magnetic field (magnetosphere) or come from the Sun as part of the solar wind, according to the team.

Scientists solve 40-year mystery over Jupiter's X-ray aurora

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More information: Yasmina M. Martos et al, Juno Reveals New Insights Into Io‐Related Decameter Radio Emissions, Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets (2020). DOI: 10.1029/2020JE006415

Journal information: Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 

Provided by NASA 

VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT

Geomagnetic fields reveal the truth behind Biblical narratives

by Tel-Aviv University

Burnt mud brick wall from Tel Batash (Biblical Timnah) with markings of the field orientation

. Credit: Yoav Vaknin.

A joint study by TAU and the Hebrew University, involving 20 researchers from different countries and disciplines, has accurately dated 21 destruction layers at 17 archaeological sites in Israel by reconstructing the direction and/or intensity of the earth's magnetic field recorded in burnt remnants. The new data verify the Biblical accounts of the Egyptian, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian military campaigns against the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Findings indicate, for example, that the army of Hazael, King of Aram-Damascus, was responsible for the destruction of several cities—Tel Rehov, Tel Zayit, and Horvat Tevet, in addition to Gath of the Philistines, whose destruction is noted in the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, the study refutes the prevailing theory that Hazael was the conqueror who destroyed Tel Beth-Shean.

Other geomagnetic findings reveal that the cities in the Negev were destroyed by the Edomites, who took advantage of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians.

The groundbreaking interdisciplinary study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is based on the doctoral thesis of Yoav Vaknin, supervised by Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef and Prof. Oded Lipschits of TAU's Institute of Archaeology and Prof. Ron Shaar from the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University.

Yoav Vaknin explaining about the research. Credit: Tel Aviv University

The researchers explain that geophysicists, attempting to understand the mechanism of earth's magnetic field, track changes in this field throughout history. To this end they use archaeological findings containing magnetic minerals which, when heated or burned, record the magnetic field at the time of the fire.

Thus, in a 2020 study, researchers reconstructed the magnetic field as it was on the 9th of the month of Av, 586 BCE, the Hebrew date of the destruction of the First Temple and the City of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian army.

Now, using archaeological findings unearthed over several decades at 17 sites throughout Israel, alongside historical information from ancient inscriptions and Biblical accounts, the researchers were able to reconstruct the magnetic fields recorded in 21 destruction layers. They used the data to develop a reliable new scientific tool for archaeological dating.

Yoav Vaknin measuring at the site. Credit: Shai Halevi, Israel Antiquities Authority.

Yoav Vaknin explains that "based on the similarity or difference in intensity and direction of the magnetic field, we can either corroborate or disprove hypotheses claiming that specific sites were burned during the same military campaign. Moreover, we have constructed a variation curve of field intensity over time which can serve as a scientific dating tool, similar to the radiocarbon dating method."

One example given by the researchers is the destruction of Gath of the Philistines (identified today as Tel Tzafit in the Judean foothills) by Hazael, King of Aram-Damascus. Various dating methods have placed this event at around 830 BCE, but were unable to verify that Hazael was also responsible for the destruction of Tel Rehov, Tel Zayit and Horvat Tevet.

Now the new study, identifying full statistical synchronization between the magnetic fields recorded at all of these four sites at the time of destruction, makes a very strong case for their destruction during the same campaign.

A destruction level at Tel Beth-Shean, on the other hand, recording a totally different magnetic field, refutes the prevailing hypothesis that it too was destroyed by Hazael. Instead, the magnetic data from Beth-Shean indicate that this city, along with two other sites in northern Israel, was probably destroyed 70-100 years earlier, a date which could correspond with the military campaign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Shoshenq.

Shoshenq's campaign is described in the Hebrew Bible and in an inscription on a wall of the Temple of Amun in Karnak, Egypt, which mentions Beth-Shean as one of his conquests.

One of the most interesting findings revealed by the new dating method has to do with the end of the Kingdom of Judah. Prof. Erez Ben Yosef says, "The last days of the Kingdom of Judah are widely debated. Some researchers, relying on archaeological evidence, argue that Judah was not completely destroyed by the Babylonians.

"While Jerusalem and frontier cities in the Judean foothills ceased to exist, other towns in the Negev, the southern Judean Mountains and the southern Judean foothills remained almost unaffected. Now, the magnetic results support this hypothesis, indicating that the Babylonians were not solely responsible for Judah's ultimate demise.

"Several decades after they had destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, sites in the Negev, which had survived the Babylonian campaign, were destroyed—probably by the Edomites who took advantage of the fall of Jerusalem. This betrayal and participation in the destruction of the surviving cities may explain why the Hebrew Bible expresses so much hatred for the Edomites—for example, in the prophecy of Obadiah."

Map of the studied destruction layers and the different military campaigns. Credit: Itamar Ben-Ezra

Prof. Oded Lipschits adds that "the new dating tool is unique because it is based on geomagnetic data from sites, whose exact destruction dates are known from historical sources. By combining precise historical information with advanced, comprehensive archaeological research, we were able to base the magnetic method on reliably anchored chronology."

A separate paper, presenting the scientific principles of the novel archaeomagnetic dating method, is in preparation. Prof. Ron Shaar, who led the geophysical aspects of the study, as well as the development of the geomagnetic dating method, explains that "Earth's magnetic field is critical to our existence. Most people don't realize that without it there could be no life on earth—since it shields us from cosmic radiation and the solar wind. In addition, both humans and animals use it to navigate. The geomagnetic field is generated by earth's outer core, at a depth of 2,900 km, by currents of liquid iron."

Burnt mud stones. Credit: Tel Aviv University.

"Due to the chaotic motion of this iron, the magnetic field changes over time. Until recently scientists believed that it remains quite stable for decades, but archaeomagnetic research has contradicted this assumption by revealing some extreme and unpredictable changes in antiquity. Our location here in Israel is uniquely conducive to archaeomagnetic research, due to an abundance of well-dated archaeological findings. Over the past decade we have reconstructed magnetic fields recorded by hundreds of archaeological items."

"By combining this dataset with the data from Yoav's investigation of historical destruction layers we were able to form a continuous variation curve showing rapid, sharp changes in the geomagnetic field. This is wonderful news, both for archaeologists who can now use geomagnetic data to determine the age of ancient materials and for geophysicists studying the earth's core."Chicken bones and snail shells help archaeologists to date ancient town's destruction

More information: Vaknin, Yoav, Reconstructing biblical military campaigns using geomagnetic field data, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2209117119. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2209117119

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Provided by Tel-Aviv University 

You don’t need glue to hold these materials together — just electricity

 VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT; THE UNIVERSE IS ELECTRO MAGNETISM

AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY

 

IMAGE: 

THESE SOFT MATERIALS (CHICKEN ON THE LEFT AND TOMATO ON THE RIGHT) PERMANENTLY STICK TO HARD SURFACES JUST BY PASSING ELECTRICITY THROUGH THEM.

view more 

CREDIT: ADAPTED FROM ACS CENTRAL SCIENCE 2024, DOI:10.1021/ACSCENTSCI.3C01593

Is there a way to stick hard and soft materials together without any tape, glue or epoxy? A new study published in ACS Central Science shows that applying a small voltage to certain objects forms chemical bonds that securely link the objects together. Reversing the direction of electron flow easily separates the two materials. This electroadhesion effect could help create biohybrid robots, improve biomedical implants and enable new battery technologies.

When an adhesive is used to attach two things, it binds the surfaces either through mechanical or electrostatic forces. But sometimes those attractions or bonds are difficult, if not impossible, to undo. As an alternative, reversible adhesion methods are being explored, including electroadhesion (EA). Though the term is used to describe a few different phenomena, one definition involves running an electric current through two materials causing them to stick together, thanks to attractions or chemical bonds. Previously, Srinivasa Raghavan and colleagues demonstrated that EA can hold soft, oppositely charged materials together, and even be used to build simple structures. This time, they wanted to see if EA could reversibly bind a hard material, such as graphite, to a soft material, such as animal tissue.

The team first tested EA using two graphite electrodes and an acrylamide gel. A small voltage (5 volts) was applied for a few minutes, causing the gel to permanently adhere to the positively charged electrode. The resulting chemical bond was so strong that, when one of the researchers tried to wrench the two pieces apart, the gel tore before it disconnected from the electrode. Notably, when the current’s direction was reversed, the graphite and gel easily separated — and the gel instead adhered to the other electrode, which was now positively charged. Similar tests were run on a variety of materials — metals, various gel compositions, animal tissues, fruits and veggies — to determine the phenomenon’s ubiquity.

For EA to occur, the authors found that the hard material needs to conduct electrons, and the soft material needs to contain salt ions They hypothesize that the adhesion arises from chemical bonds that form between the surfaces after an exchange of electrons. This may explain why some metals that hold onto their electrons strongly, including titanium, and some fruits that contain more sugar than salts, including grapes, failed to adhere in some situations. A final experiment showed that EA can occur completely underwater, revealing an even wider range of possible applications. The team says that this work could help create new batteries, enable biohybrid robotics, enhance biomedical implants and much more.

The authors do not acknowledge a funding source for this work.

The paper’s abstract will be available on Mar. 13 at 8 a.m. Eastern time here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.3c01593

For more of the latest research news, register for our upcoming meeting, ACS Spring 2024. Journalists and public information officers are encouraged to apply for complimentary press registration by completing this form. 

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JOURNAL

ACS Central Science

DOI

10.1021/acscentsci.3c01593 

ARTICLE TITLE

Reversibly Sticking Metals and Graphite to Hydrogels and Tissues

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Mar-2024

Astronomers Are Uncovering the Magnetic Soul of the Universe

Researchers are discovering that magnetic fields permeate much of the cosmos. If these fields date back to the Big Bang, they could solve a cosmological mystery.

VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT 
IT'S AN ELECTROMAGNETIC UNIVERSE

Hidden magnetic field lines stretch millions of light years across the universe.
ILLUSTRATION: PAULINE VOSS/QUANTA MAGAZINE

ANYTIME ASTRONOMERS FIGURE out a new way of looking for magnetic fields in ever more remote regions of the cosmos, inexplicably, they find them.

These force fields—the same entities that emanate from fridge magnets—surround Earth, the sun, and all galaxies. Twenty years ago, astronomers started to detect magnetism permeating entire galaxy clusters, including the space between one galaxy and the next. Invisible field lines swoop through intergalactic space like the grooves of a fingerprint.

Last year, astronomers finally managed to examine a far sparser region of space—the expanse between galaxy clusters. There, they discovered the largest magnetic field yet: 10 million light-years of magnetized space spanning the entire length of this “filament” of the cosmic web. A second magnetized filament has already been spotted elsewhere in the cosmos by means of the same techniques. “We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg, probably,” said Federica Govoni of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Cagliari, Italy, who led the first detection.

The question is: Where did these enormous magnetic fields come from?

“It clearly cannot be related to the activity of single galaxies or single explosions or, I don’t know, winds from supernovae,” said Franco Vazza, an astrophysicist at the University of Bologna who makes state-of-the-art computer simulations of cosmic magnetic fields. “This goes much beyond that.”


One possibility is that cosmic magnetism is primordial, tracing all the way back to the birth of the universe. In that case, weak magnetism should exist everywhere, even in the “voids” of the cosmic web—the very darkest, emptiest regions of the universe. The omnipresent magnetism would have seeded the stronger fields that blossomed in galaxies and clusters.

The cosmic web, shown here in a computer simulation, is the large-scale structure of the universe. Dense regions are filled with galaxies and galaxy clusters. Thin filaments connect these clumps. Voids are nearly empty regions of space.ILLUSTRATION: SPRINGEL & OTHERS/VIRGO CONSORTIUM

Primordial magnetism might also help resolve another cosmological conundrum known as the Hubble tension

The problem at the heart of the Hubble tension is that the universe seems to be expanding significantly faster than expected based on its known ingredients. In a paper posted online in April and under review with Physical Review Letters, the cosmologists Karsten Jedamzik and Levon Pogosian argue that weak magnetic fields in the early universe would lead to the faster cosmic expansion rate seen today.

Primordial magnetism relieves the Hubble tension so simply that Jedamzik and Pogosian’s paper has drawn swift attention. “This is an excellent paper and idea,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University who has proposed other solutions to the Hubble tension.

Kamionko

Meanwhile, astrophysicists kept collecting data. The weight of evidence has led most of them to suspect that magnetism is indeed everywhere.
The Magnetic Soul of the Universe

In the year 1600, the English scientist William Gilbert’s studies of lodestones—naturally magnetized rocks that people had been fashioning into compasses for thousands of years—led him to opine that their magnetic force “imitates a soul.” He correctly surmised that Earth itself is a “great magnet,” and that lodestones “look toward the poles of the Earth.”

Magnetic fields arise anytime electric charge flows. Earth’s field, for instance, emanates from its inner “dynamo,” the current of liquid iron churning in its core. The fields of fridge magnets and lodestones come from electrons spinning around their constituent atoms.

Cosmological simulations illustrate two possible explanations for how magnetic fields came to permeate galaxy clusters. At left, the fields grow from uniform “seed” fields that filled the cosmos in the moments after the Big Bang. At right, astrophysical processes such as star formation and the flow of matter into supermassive black holes create magnetized winds that spill out from galaxies.

However, once a “seed” magnetic field arises from charged particles in motion, it can become bigger and stronger by aligning weaker fields with it. Magnetism “is a little bit like a living organism,” said Torsten Enßlin, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, “because magnetic fields tap into every free energy source they can hold onto and grow. They can spread and affect other areas with their presence, where they grow as well.”

Ruth Durrer, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Geneva, explained that magnetism is the only force apart from gravity that can shape the large-scale structure of the cosmos, because only magnetism and gravity can “reach out to you” across vast distances. Electricity, by contrast, is local and short-lived, since the positive and negative charge in any region will neutralize overall. But you can’t cancel out magnetic fields; they tend to add up and survive.

Yet for all their power, these force fields keep low profiles. They are immaterial, perceptible only when acting upon other things. “You can’t just take a picture of a magnetic field; it doesn’t work like that,” said Reinout van Weeren, an astronomer at Leiden University who was involved in the recent detections of magnetized filaments.

In their paper last year, van Weeren and 28 coauthors inferred the presence of a magnetic field in the filament between galaxy clusters Abell 399 and Abell 401 from the way the field redirects high-speed electrons and other charged particles passing through it. As their paths twist in the field, these charged particles release faint “synchrotron radiation.”

The synchrotron signal is strongest at low radio frequencies, making it ripe for detection by LOFAR, an array of 20,000 low-frequency radio antennas spread across Europe.

The team actually gathered data from the filament back in 2014 during a single eight-hour stretch, but the data sat waiting as the radio astronomy community spent years figuring out how to improve the calibration of LOFAR’s measurements. Earth’s atmosphere refracts radio waves that pass through it, so LOFAR views the cosmos as if from the bottom of a swimming pool. The researchers solved the problem by tracking the wobble of “beacons” in the sky—radio emitters with precisely known locations—and correcting for this wobble to deblur all the data. When they applied the deblurring algorithm to data from the filament, they saw the glow of synchrotron emissions right away.
 
LOFAR consists of 20,000 individual radio antennas spread across Europe.
PHOTOGRAPH: ASTRON

The filament looks magnetized throughout, not just near the galaxy clusters that are moving toward each other from either end. The researchers hope that a 50-hour data set they’re analyzing now will reveal more detail. Additional observations have recently uncovered magnetic fields extending throughout a second filament. Researchers plan to publish this work soon.

The presence of enormous magnetic fields in at least these two filaments provides important new information. “It has spurred quite some activity,” van Weeren said, “because now we know that magnetic fields are relatively strong.”
A Light Through the Voids

If these magnetic fields arose in the infant universe, the question becomes: how? “People have been thinking about this problem for a long time,” said Tanmay Vachaspati of Arizona State University.

In 1991, Vachaspati proposed that magnetic fields might have arisen during the electroweak phase transition—the moment, a split second after the Big Bang, when the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces became distinct. Others have suggested that magnetism materialized microseconds later, when protons formed. Or soon after that: The late astrophysicist Ted Harrison argued in the earliest primordial magnetogenesis theory in 1973 that the turbulent plasma of protons and electrons might have spun up the first magnetic fields. Still others have proposed that space became magnetized before all this, during cosmic inflation—the explosive expansion of space that purportedly jump-started the Big Bang itself. It’s also possible that it didn’t happen until the growth of structures a billion years later.

The way to test theories of magnetogenesis is to study the pattern of magnetic fields in the most pristine patches of intergalactic space, such as the quiet parts of filaments and the even emptier voids. Certain details—such as whether the field lines are smooth, helical, or “curved every which way, like a ball of yarn or something” (per Vachaspati), and how the pattern changes in different places and on different scales—carry rich information that can be compared to theory and simulations. For example, if the magnetic fields arose during the electroweak phase transition, as Vachaspati proposed, then the resulting field lines should be helical, “like a corkscrew,” he said.

The hitch is that it’s difficult to detect force fields that have nothing to push on.

One method, pioneered by the English scientist Michael Faraday back in 1845, detects a magnetic field from the way it rotates the polarization direction of light passing through it. The amount of “Faraday rotation” depends on the strength of the magnetic field and the frequency of the light. So by measuring the polarization at different frequencies, you can infer the strength of magnetism along the line of sight. “If you do it from different places, you can make a 3D map,” said Enßlin.

ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL VELASCO/QUANTA MAGAZINE

Researchers have started to make rough Faraday rotation measurements using LOFAR, but the telescope has trouble picking out the extremely faint signal. Valentina Vacca, an astronomer and a colleague of Govoni’s at the National Institute for Astrophysics, devised an algorithm a few years ago for teasing out subtle Faraday rotation signals statistically, by stacking together many measurements of empty places. “In principle, this can be used for voids,” Vacca said.

But the Faraday technique will really take off when the next-generation radio telescope, a gargantuan international project called the Square Kilometer Array, starts up in 2027. “SKA should produce a fantastic Faraday grid,” Enßlin said.

For now, the only evidence of magnetism in the voids is what observers don’t see when they look at objects called blazars located behind voids.

Blazars are bright beams of gamma rays and other energetic light and matter powered by supermassive black holes. As the gamma rays travel through space, they sometimes collide with other passing photons, morphing into an electron and a positron as a result. These particles then collide with other photons, turning them into low-energy gamma rays.

But if the blazar’s light passes through a magnetized void, the lower-energy gamma rays will appear to be missing, reasoned Andrii Neronov and Ievgen Vovk of the Geneva Observatory in 2010. The magnetic field will deflect the electrons and positrons out of the line of sight. When they create lower-energy gamma rays, those gamma rays won’t be pointed at us.

ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL VELASCO/QUANTA MAGAZINE

Indeed, when Neronov and Vovk analyzed data from a suitably located blazar, they saw its high-energy gamma rays, but not the low-energy gamma-ray signal. “It’s the absence of a signal that is a signal,” Vachaspati said.

A nonsignal is hardly a smoking gun, and alternative explanations for the missing gamma rays have been suggested. However, follow-up observations have increasingly pointed to Neronov and Vovk’s hypothesis that voids are magnetized. “It’s the majority view,” Durrer said. Most convincingly, in 2015, one team overlaid many measurements of blazars behind voids and managed to tease out a faint halo of low-energy gamma rays around the blazars. The effect is exactly what would be expected if the particles were being scattered by faint magnetic fields—measuring only about a millionth of a trillionth as strong as a fridge magnet’s.

Cosmology’s Biggest Mystery

Strikingly, this exact amount of primordial magnetism may be just what’s needed to resolve the Hubble tension—the problem of the universe’s curiously fast expansion.

That’s what Pogosian realized when he saw recent computer simulations by Karsten Jedamzik of the University of Montpellier in France and a collaborator. The researchers added weak magnetic fields to a simulated, plasma-filled young universe and found that protons and electrons in the plasma flew along the magnetic field lines and accumulated in the regions of weakest field strength. This clumping effect made the protons and electrons combine into hydrogen—an early phase change known as recombination—earlier than they would have otherwise.

Pogosian, reading Jedamzik’s paper, saw that this could address the Hubble tension. Cosmologists calculate how fast space should be expanding today by observing ancient light emitted during recombination. The light shows a young universe studded with blobs that formed from sound waves sloshing around in the primordial plasma. If recombination happened earlier than supposed due to the clumping effect of magnetic fields, then sound waves couldn’t have propagated as far beforehand, and the resulting blobs would be smaller. That means the blobs we see in the sky from the time of recombination must be closer to us than researchers supposed. The light coming from the blobs must have traveled a shorter distance to reach us, meaning the light must have been traversing faster-expanding space. “It’s like trying to run on an expanding surface; you cover less distance,” Pogosian said.

The upshot is that smaller blobs mean a higher inferred cosmic expansion rate—bringing the inferred rate much closer to measurements of how fast supernovas and other astronomical objects actually seem to be flying apart.

“I thought, wow,” Pogosian said, “this could be pointing us to [magnetic fields’] actual presence. So I wrote Karsten immediately.” The two got together in Montpellier in February, just before the lockdown. Their calculations indicated that, indeed, the amount of primordial magnetism needed to address the Hubble tension also agrees with the blazar observations and the estimated size of initial fields needed to grow the enormous magnetic fields spanning galaxy clusters and filaments. “So it all sort of comes together,” Pogosian said, “if this turns out to be right.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Correction: 7-6-2020 6:15 PM EST: An earlier version of this article stated that gamma rays from blazars can turn into electrons and positrons after striking microwaves. In fact, the change can happen when gamma rays strike many different kinds of photons. The text and the accompanying graphic have been changed.

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