Contrabang! #11 Incidental Electricity

In this edition, we'll be diving into a single Starts With a Bang! post, because it is deserving of some extra scrutiny.

Scientists Discover Space’s Largest Intergalactic Bridge, Solving A Huge Dark Matter Puzzle (link)

The subtitle is

Dark matter’s naysayers latched onto one tiny puzzle. This new find may have solved it completely.

and it is deceptive. Skeptics have not latched onto "one tiny puzzle." As one of Ethan's foremost naysayers (I don't know of another site that dedicates a weekly series to debunking his claims) I routinely demonstrate how dark matter amounts to a fudge factor of the discrepancies between theory and observations. It is fairy dust that gets sprinkled wherever necessary to make the numbers work. I, for one, have not latched onto the particular tiny puzzle he alludes to, and, even after reading the article a few times, I'm still not entirely sure what he's talking about, but that it has to do with the relative velocities of galaxies in two neighboring galactic clusters which are believed to be merging.

The gas within these [merging] clusters can heat up, interact, and develop shocks, causing the emission of spectacularly energetic radiation. Dark matter can pass through everything else, separating its gravitational effects from the majority of the normal matter.

This language arises because scientists believe that the gravitational mass of the galaxies does not coincide with the observed matter.

And, in theory, charged particles can accelerate tremendously, creating coherent magnetic fields that could span millions of light-years. For the first time, such an intergalactic bridge between two colliding clusters has been discovered, with tremendous implications for our Universe.

For decades, the electric universe people have been proclaiming to anyone who will listen that electrical forces dominate galactic-level dynamics. The mainstream scientific community has always responded that the cosmos are neutrally charged, and thus electricity plays a very minor role. They normally allow language like magnetic field and charged particle, but stop short of uttering anything that sounds like electric field or electricity. The recent observation of a massive electric flow between two galactic clusters spanning ten million light years is a major win for the electric universe advocates. The gist of this article is that Ethan will try to twist the results from a confirmation of plasma cosmology - which predicted such massive intergalactic current flows - to a confirmation of mainstream dark matter theories - which did not make such a prediction.

When we include simulations with gravitation alone, the fastest colliding clusters we predict move slower than the Bullet cluster does. [...] Either the observations were wrong, or something else — some physical mechanism — is causing this normal matter to accelerate beyond what the gravitational effects alone would indicate.

Next, he will - incredibly! - virtually propose plasma cosmology as one possible answer to the question.

One possibility for this would be a large-scale electric or magnetic field. When charged particles (like protons and electrons, which help make up the normal matter in the Universe) encounter an electromagnetic field, they accelerate. While galaxy clusters typically form at the intersection of cosmic filaments and are driven by dark matter, there’s normal matter present as well, much of which is in the form of an ionized plasma.

He even says electric field! And, indeed, it would be the most obvious cause of charged-particle acceleration. He uses the term "ionized plasma" which is redundant, as plasmas are inherently ionized. However, one would tend to downplay that fact when trying to discredit an electric hypothesis for an unexpected observation. He hopes to insinuate that there is some ionized plasma in this particular situation, when in fact all the cosmos are dominated by ionized plasma. Even in our own stable solar system, the sun is so dominant that the masses of all the other objects are nearly negligible.

These two galaxy clusters are separated in space by a distance of approximately 10 million light-years, which would make this magnetic field and the electrons lining it one of the largest known such structures in the Universe.

He does't say current flow or electricity. It is a magnetic field "lined" with elections.

This radio ridge is also larger than most naive simulations predict, but that’s an extremely good thing for dark matter theories.

This is the dark matter mindset in a nutshell. Failed predictions are an "extremely good thing for dark matter theories." Last week we described dark matter as the margin of error between theory and observation. The more the theory is wrong, the more dark matter there must be. In this case, the incorrect "naive" predictions were off, which means more dark matter! The usage of the term naive here that not enough dark matter has been stuffed into the right places.

The big puzzle for some of the colliding clusters we’ve observed is to explain how these particles can accelerate to such large speeds. Meanwhile, this enormous magnetic field and electron bridge between the two clusters suggests a mechanism to re-accelerate the particles present in the intergalactic gas: shock waves generated in the merger.

Now that they've managed to accept - but only in synonyms - that vast intergalactic electric currents have been observed, they must try to explain it. Any "naive" person with some education in electromagnetic physics would try to look for an electric field. Electric fields accelerate charged particles, thus accelerating charged particles is evidence of an electric field. But Ethan and the other standard cosmologists are more sophisticated than we are, and assume that large electric fields do not exist in the universe, and that the observed electric flows are only incidental. That is, the particles are being accelerated by some mechanical process, and they only so happen to be charged, which sets up the production of a long, filamentary magnetic field.

Govoni and her colleagues performed exactly this type of simulation. Her team showed that the electrons located between the galaxy clusters, already moving at speeds close to the speed of light, could be re-accelerated owing to these shock waves. If we apply this finding to the Bullet cluster, it stands to reason that we’d expect to find shock waves there, too, if we look at the X-ray emitting gas.

This is written in a way to insinuate that they made a theoretical prediction about shock waves, and then, lo and behold, came the confirming observation. Ethan always goes out of his way to convince us that observations were predicted by theory, even though usually they weren't. Dark matter scientists have been looking at these kinds of shock waves for years.

Lo and behold, these shocks are some of the first things you notice if you look at the Chandra images of the Bullet cluster on their own! The fact that we’ve identified relativistic charged particles in the presence of a large-scale magnetic field in one pair of colliding clusters is strongly suggestive of the same effects existing in other clusters. If this same type of structure that exists between Abell 0399 and Abell 0401 also exists between other colliding clusters, it could solve this minor anomaly of the Bullet cluster, leaving dark matter as the sole unchallenged explanation for the displacement of gravitational effects from the presence of normal matter.

A computer simulation where a shock wave might somehow accelerate a charged particle is taken as the "sole unchallenged explanation." He himself posited the electric field theory earlier in the article, but then referenced a computer simulation, whereby all other theories cease to exist. He has found what he is looking for, and seeks no more. That isn't scientific scrutiny; it is religious conviction. He hasn't even tried to refute the electric field argument, but merely ceased acknowledging its existence. As long as there is an explanation, somewhere, that includes dark matter, then it must be correct, and all the others ignored.

The existence of shock waves does not somehow automatically refute the plasma cosmologists, either. They themselves prattle on at length about shock waves, describing them as electrical effects. Even our sun's own heliopause is said to be a shock wave formed by the negatively charged solar wind encountering the relatively positively charged pressure of the interstellar medium.

He desperately claws to find any angle where dark matter is affirmed. Overall, a conversation between Ethan and an Electric Universe (EU) advocate goes something like this.

EU: There are vast intergalactic electric currents throughout the universe.
Ethan: No way man, Dark Matter Theory doesn't predict anything like that, and it's the sole unchallenged explanation. All observations have been predicted by Dark Matter Theory, so you're definitely wrong, bro.
EU: Well, what about this enormous electric current right over here, which spans ten million light years between two galactic clusters?
Ethan: Well, that's not really electricity, it just seems like it, and that was just caused by dark matter anyway. In fact, the observation itself is actually a spectacular victory for Dark Matter Theory.

We'll let Ethan have a last word, with his own last paragraph, and then the EU take on the story.

It’s always an enormous step forward when we can identify a new phenomenon. But by combining theory, simulations, and the observations of other colliding galaxy clusters, we can push the needle forward when it comes to understanding our Universe as a whole. It’s another spectacular victory for dark matter, and another mystery of the Universe that might finally be solved by modern astrophysics. What a time to be alive.