The Big Bang Never Happened

■ THE COSMOLOGICAL DEBATE ■tiny spiral galaxies (Fig. 1.12)—a phenomenon that, Peratt laterlearned, had first been observed in the fifties. Curious aboutthese tiny plasma "galaxies," he used a recently developed computerprogram to simulate the action of plasma on a galactic scale.In his model he created two filaments of current, each ahundred thousand light-years in thickness, and brought themtogether to see what would happen. The results were dramatic:the two filaments merged, generating the graceful forms of spiralgalaxies (Fig. 1.13). As Alfven had predicted, the simulationshowed currents streaming along slender filaments toward thegalactic core, from which intense bursts of radiation wereemitted.When Peratt compared the details of his simulation with observationsof real galaxies, there was excellent agreement: "I foundin photographic atlases of galaxies examples of just about everyth i n g I saw in simulations—the shapes, the radio emission, allwere the same as in the computer."Astrophysicists either ignored the work or remained skepticalthat such large currents existed. But in the summer of 1984Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Columbia University, and colleagues atthe Very Large Array radio telescope in Zoccoro, New Mexico,discovered large-scale magnetic vortex filaments at the heart ofour own Milky Way galaxy. Hundreds of light-years long, theywere a textbook example of Alfven and Peratt's vortices: an outerlayer of spiraling helixes and an inner layer running almoststraight along the axis of a cylinder (as on the jacket of this book),the whole pattern arcing out of the plane of the galaxy straight upinto its axis of rotation. Their magnetic field strength, at least afew ten-thousandths that of the earth's surface, was also just whatPeratt's simulations predicted—and far above what most astrophysiciststhought possible on such a scale.This discovery convinced a number of astrophysicists, especiallythose already familiar with the work on solar systemplasma, of the reality of current filaments in space. The alignmentsand shape of the galactic filaments simply could not havebeen created by gravity.Following up his 1977 work on magnetic storms at the galacticcore, Alfven hypothesized in 1978 that the universe itself musthave an inhomogeneous, cellular structure. In any plasma, fromlaboratory to intergalactic scale, filaments form naturally. Cur-48