The Big Bang Never Happened

■ THE COSMOLOGICAL DEBATE "The obvious next step was to look at the system of electricalcurrents in the galaxy as a whole, which Alfven and Carlqvistturned to later that year. The galaxy, rotating around in an intergalacticmagnetic field, would generate extremely powerful electricalfields and potentials as high as a hundred million billionvolts (Fig. 5.13). This, in turn, would lead to the formation of asystem of filamentary currents along the plane of the galaxy,which would snake inward to the galactic center and "up" alongits axis—almost exactly the same as the current system in a solarsystem but a hundred million times larger. The currents are alsoa hundred million times bigger—a few billion amps for a solarsystem and nearly a billion billion amps for a galaxy.If double layers occur naturally in all filamentary currents asthey pinch together, reasoned Carlqvist, they can occur on a galacticscale as well. In the sun the sudden release of stored magneticenergy in a double layer would produce 10 34 ergs, but thestored energy of the galactic circuit is a whopping 10 57 ergs—asmuch energy as the galaxy produces in thirty million years. Thesudden release of this energy would accelerate a beam of electronsand ions along the galactic axis, radiating powerful radiowaves as the electrons spiral around the field lines.This is exactly what radio astronomers had observed for decadesin the mysterious "radio galaxies," objects that shoot outsingle or twin beams of energy to distant clouds in intergalacticspace. Since the mid-sixties most astronomers had believed thatthe radio galaxies' energy source is the same as the broadly similarbut still more spectacular quasars—some form of monstrous,large black hole. The received wisdom claimed that as streams ofmatter circle toward the black hole, accelerating to nearly thespeed of light, some are shot out along the rotational axis, formingbeams of glowing gas—the radio jets.Now here were Alfven and Carlqvist with a far less exoticexplanation. The galaxy as a whole acts as an ordinary electricalgenerator, and double layers, scaled-up versions of an explosionfound in Swedish generator plants, are the accelerators of thebeams. The jets themselves are just currents of high-energy particles,part of a vast current system surrounding the galaxy.By the late seventies Alfven and his colleagues had conqueredthe solar system with their theories of filaments, currents, anddouble layers, thanks to the evidence of Voyager and other space212