Plasma Cosmology as the fourth form of matter (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, July 01, 2019, 18:07 (1950 days ago) @ xeno6696

Plasma is a very unusual form if energy/matter:

https://aeon.co/ideas/plasma-the-mysterious-and-powerful-fourth-phase-of-matter?utm_sou...

" When I was at elementary school, my teacher told me that matter exists in three possible states: solid, liquid and gas. She neglected to mention plasma, a special kind of electrified gas that’s a state unto itself. We rarely encounter natural plasma, unless we’re lucky enough to see the Northern lights, or if we look at the Sun through a special filter, or if we poke our head out the window during a lightning storm, as I liked to do when I was a kid. Yet plasma, for all its scarcity in our daily lives, makes up more than 99 per cent of the observable matter in the Universe.

***

"First, though, how do you make a plasma? Imagine heating up a container full of ice, and watching it pass from solid, to liquid, to gas. As the temperature climbs, the water molecules get more energetic and excitable, and move around more and more freely. If you keep going, at something like 12,000 degrees Celsius the atoms themselves will begin to break apart. Electrons will be stripped from their nuclei, leaving behind charged particles known as ions that swirl about in the resulting soup of electrons. This is the plasma state.

***

"Plasma is also entangled with the physics of the space around Earth, where the stuff gets carried through the void on the winds generated in the upper atmosphere of the Sun. We’re lucky that the Earth’s magnetic field shields us from the charged plasma particles and damaging radiation of such solar wind, but our satellites, spacecraft and astronauts are all exposed. Their capacity to survive in this hostile environment relies on understanding and accommodating ourselves to the quirks of plasma.

"In a new field known as ‘space weather’, plasma physics plays a role similar to that of fluid dynamics in terrestrial, atmospheric conditions. I’ve devoted much of my research to something called magnetic reconnection, where the magnetic field lines in the plasma can tear and reconnect, which leads to a rapid release of energy. This process is believed to power the Sun’s eruptive events, such as solar flares, although detailed comprehension remains elusive.

***

"Looking backward, not forward, in space and time, my hope is that plasma physics will offer insights into how stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters first formed. According to the standard cosmological model, plasma was pervasive in the early Universe; then everything began to cool, and charged electrons and protons bound together to make electrically neutral hydrogen atoms. This state lasted until the first stars and black holes formed and began emitting radiation, at which point the Universe ‘reionised’ and returned to a mostly plasma state.

"Finally, plasmas help to explain some of the most spectacular phenomena we’ve observed in the remotest regions of the cosmos. Take far-away black holes, massive objects so dense that even light can’t escape them. They’re practically invisible to direct observation. However, black holes are typically encircled by a rotating disk of plasma matter, which orbits within the black hole’s gravitational pull, and emits high-energy photons that can be observed in the X-ray spectrum, revealing something about this extreme environment."

Comment: Energy and matter are always equivalent in that they are both the same thing, but as the author notes in the opening paragraph, plasma is not matter as we usually think of it. It is the purest form of energy we can see as a gaseous state of pure charged ions. I've always thought of God as pure energy, but I don't know if He is in this gaseous form. One would think He is in a more organized form. But His form must remain as an unknown.