A Beginner's View of Our Electric Universe - New

As development progressed in radio astronomy, due to encouragement from the discovery of a whole spectrum
of radio waves by the first space probes with appropriate sensing equipment, an even greater focus was applied
to the activity as its truly huge potential began to be appreciated. Previous to all of this, radio waves were not
even suspected to exist out there because space was thought by most to be totally empty. This aspect was what
Reber had always thought was not the case due to his own science background and his knowledge that our upper
ionised atmosphere would have kept certain radio waves from us by blocking or attenuating most of them from
being detected by the relatively crude equipment we had in those days. This was what Reber saw as his personal
challenge, so, in the spirit of radio amateurs everywhere, he got down to learning more about and proving the
correctness of his ideas. The important things to note for our purposes are that radio waves can be blocked by
ionised plasma; that plasma surrounding all bodies in space will do precisely the same things that we know it
does with Earth and that the properties of these plasma barriers can change depending on the density of charged
particles present at any point in time.
I briefly described this electric (electrostatic) barrier when I mentioned in chapter five the man who discovered
it, Irving Langmuir, who also gave it the more commonly used label of Double Layer or DL. These DLs
will exist between all charged bodies and between those bodies and the plasma environment of space. The
presence of DLs as regions where voltages of often enormous value are separated from each other, sets the scene
for powerful electrical interaction to take place, should the difference between the voltages involved become
extreme. This is the case between the positive plasma environment of the Sun and that of Earth’s more negative
plasmasphere. It is also the case between the solar plasma and the significant negative charge possessed by
comets as they travel in their eccentric journeys around the Sun. (We shall be looking closely at comets shortly.)
Think many millions and on a galactic scale, even billions of volts of difference here. DLs are very important
indeed, so keep them in mind [6-19] .
We learned previously that electric current flow in a conductor
forms an associated magnetic field around it. Where this happens
with plasma as the conductor, the magnetic field constricts the
cross-section of the plasma into filaments that entwine in the
pairs we call Birkeland currents [6-20] . The magnetic fields that
hold Birkeland currents together cannot be observed but the
filaments inside can be detected due to the EM radiation they
emit. We said before that plasma is not a perfect conductor;
this means that when current flows within a plasma filament
some energy will be dissipated (lost) in the form of heat, radio
waves and X-ray radiation.
The magnetic forces that keep Birkeland currents together © author
10 | The Electric Universe answers I see