How Space Research Changes our View of the Universe
Alfvén, Hannes Olof Gösta
Three years before the present lecture, in 1979, Hannes Alfvén gave a talk on ”Observations and Cosmology” at the Lindau Meeting. In his talk, he rejected the Big Bang theory and instead advocated a model of the Universe symmetric in matter and anti-matter. In 1982 he came back to Lindau, this time with a more general lecture title about space research and its results. In particular he wanted to describe the implications for cosmology of the discoveries made in 25 years of space research. In his introduction, Alfvén quotes the Chairman of the session, Bengt Nagel, at that time the Scientific Secretary to the Nobel Committee for Physics, as saying ”one should not believe in what is believed today, because that may very well change rapidly”. Even though I was not present at the lecture, I think that I can warrant that this is a correct quotation. Nagel was my predecessor as secretary to the Nobel Committee and it is true that he used to say things like that. After the introduction, as a true plasma physicist, Alfvén then spends most of his lecture describing and explaining electric currents and magnetic fields in space. In particular the emphasis is on the then recently discovered electric double layers. These were well known from laboratory plasma physics, but had only recently been discovered by spacecrafts exploring our solar system. He then makes a rather large extrapolation from these interplanetary discoveries to space in general and in particular to a hierarchically structured universe, with stars, galaxies, galactic clusters and superclusters, etc., etc. If this extrapolation is accepted, there is a mechanism that would give rise to a cellular structure in space, where the matter content of each cell would be separated from that in the surrounding cells by double layers. So the main result for Alfvén turns out to be a physical mechanism that would allow a universe symmetric in matter and anti-matter, as described by him in 1979. Always somewhat of a showman, at the very end of his lecture, Alfvén again quotes the Chairman and ends by giving as advise to the young 500 students in the audience: Don’t go for a curriculum of General Relativity but chose Plasma Physics instead! Anders Bárány
 I am going to report about the achievements of space research, 25 years of space research, and its application to the more distant regions of space. And I will concentrate on the change it has produced in plasma physics. I think this is an illustration of what Professor Nagel said that you should not believe in what is accepted today, because that may very well change very rapidly. First of all, you may ask, is plasma physics of very much importance in astrophysics? If you read the usual textbooks in astrophysics, you don't think this is the case. But in reality, the stars consist of plasmas and the interstellar medium also of plasmas. And it seems that the universe consists more than 99% of plasma, in fact, at least by the volume, more than 99.9999999999% of plasma. Plasma physics should not be considered to be completely irrelevant to the research how the universe is structured. To be more specific, the plasma physics extends from the laboratory. Typically this is in a logarithmic scale, that is typically one tenth of a meter for a not normal experiment, up to the magnetosphere, the magnetic field surrounding the Earth and the other planets and the Sun, that is about 10 to the 8 meters. And then we come up, this is a jump of 9 orders of magnitude by another jump by the factor of 1 billion. You come up to the galactic phenomena and the third jump, this is a cosmic triple jump, brings you up to the Hubble distance, which is what the Big Bang believers call the size of the universe. This is 27 orders of magnitude and laser fusion has extended it downwards to by 5 orders of magnitude more. There are reasons to believe that the basic properties of a plasma is the same in the whole region. This is by no means certain. We can trust that it is so in the laboratory and in the magnetosphere because there we have reliable measurements. We are out to this limit, outside this the field is necessarily more speculative because what is called high quality diagnostics, that is an investigation of the properties of a plasma is possible in the laboratory and as far out as the spacecrafts go, but it is not possible further out. Whether we should believe, accept that plasma changes its properties at the outer reach or spacecraft or not, this is a thing which we cannot prove, but I think there are good reasons to suppose so. What has happened in this field during the last years? It is especially that the space research has made the magnetosphere accessible to detailed analysis by high quality instruments which are sent out here and going up and down, up and down and sending signals to the earth which have been interpreted in detail. The result of this is at the same time laboratory research has made a great step forward to some extent favored by, to a large extent favored by the fusion work which is going on there so far the fusion research has not given us any energy, but it has given us very valuable information which can be used for clarifying the structure of the universe. There has also been much work spent in the translation between laboratory work and the magnetosphere. And the result of this is that we have got a drastic change in our concept of what the plasmas are in space are like. In reality there are half a dozen different respects in which this change has taken place and I'm going to select a few of them and try to discuss them more in detail. One of the important things is that our concept of the structure of interplanetary interstellar and intergalactic space has changed drastically. Fifty years ago it was generally believed that the space between the stars, between the planets, satellites, commerce and so on was absolutely empty. It is from that point of view absolutely empty, but not absolutely empty. It is rather empty, but the little matter which is between is very important. Twenty-five years ago it was real. The attention was drawn to the interstellar interplanetary matter and this was then considered to be a homogeneous nebulous gas with dust in it. Space research has given us a new view which you can call the space age concept of space, namely that space is highly structureized, it is penetrated by a network of electric currents and this is something which is of importance in all fields of plasma physics. We know that this is so after this limit that there are good reasons to suppose that the whole universe is penetrated by, has this structure, highly structureized, penetrated by electric currents. More specifically what does structureized mean? It means that we have discovered a number of phenomena which are strongly inhomogeneous. There are electric double layers which you find everywhere in space. These were not believed to exist up to something like five years ago. Now they are very popular. There was a few weeks ago a symposium in Denmark where there were 50 of the most prominent people working in this field who discussed the properties of double layers. What is a double layer? If we have an electric current in this direction then under certain conditions we have a density of the plasma which is fairly homogeneous. This is the density and this line gives the electric potential, the voltage which increases slowly, there is an electric field which drives the current through the plasma. However, when a double layer is produced, the conditions is changed like this. Here is the voltage. It makes a sudden jump and then has another constant value and the density changes in a corresponding way. Such double layers were well known in the laboratory since the time of Langmuir about 50 years ago. It was denied by the belief that they could be of any importance in space until they were actually discovered. There are such double layers at the height of something like one or two Earth radii above the Earth. This is a picture of the Earth and these are magnetic field lines. Here in the equatorial plane at a distance of 5 or 6 Earth radii you have a plasma flow, a sunward plasma flow. This is seen from the night side and that produces an electromotive force here. This produces electric currents which flow along magnetic field lines to the Earth, then through the ionosphere and back again to the equatorial plane. So we are here discussing an astrophysical problem not in terms of magnetic fields as has usually been done but to the same extent in terms of electric currents and these electric currents may produce double layers. Here is a double layer at one or two Earth radii and that means that we have a sudden jump in the voltage there which produces in which auroras or auroral electrons are accelerated. Here we have the electromotive force, here the auroral electrons are accelerated and the energy is transferred by the circuit. This is not a theoretical hypothetical picture, it is something which is actually measured by spacecrafts which have penetrated many times. Of course there are many details which are still obscure. These double layers may have voltage differences of kilovolts which you have here, solar flares it is megavolts or gigavolts and they may be still higher. Then the currents produce filaments. In cosmical physics we are accustomed to the Newtonian attraction, the general gravitation which typically produce aims at producing spheres like stars and planets and so on. However we have also electromagnetic forces and these electromagnetic forces they tend to produce filaments. The basic phenomenon is known for a very long time, it is actually the Osavars law that two parallel currents attract each other and this produces electric pinches and filamentary structures. Such filamentary structures are common in the universe, can I have the slides here? We have good reasons to suppose that whenever you have observed a filament that is just an indication that we have electric currents, pinching electric currents there. Can I have the first slide? Yes, this is the sun, this is the solar corona and if you sharpen the picture a little you will see that this has thin, thin, thin filaments in every direction. The sun goddess actually has a beautiful hair which you see here and these filaments are likely to be due to electric currents which produce the so called pinch effect, produce filaments out of it. Next slide. Here is a comet and here you see striations, filaments of the same kind. The tail of a comet is obviously a plasma phenomenon, this was first pointed out by professor Biermann here in Germany. Next slide. Here are photographs of interstellar space far out in the galaxy, you see thin filaments everywhere. Next slide. Here are other filaments of the same kind. Next slide. Here is an ordinary cosmic cloud which seems to be homogeneous structure but if you subject it to what is called contrast enhancement technology you get this picture, that is you put it into a computer and ask the computer to look for contrast and then you see it is penetrated by filaments which is a strong indication that filamentary structure, that there are electric currents in also there. And I have one more slide. Here you have dark lanes which probably are also due to filaments. This is just some arbitrary examples to show you how important the formation of filaments are and what is likely to be due to then comes surface currents in space which are also very traumatic. It is actually to me it was the most important, the most shocking discovery namely that if you go out from the earth, measure the magnetic field out from the earth, you observe, this is now the distance from the earth, this is the magnetic field, you observe that it decreases approximately as r to the minus 3 as it should do out to something like 7 or 8 radii. Then it may suddenly change its sign and this is made very abruptly in a very, very short distance, some 100 kilometers less than the distance from here to Paris for example. And what space craft records here is that you have constant value here with some fluctuation and then suddenly it jumps over in this way. This demonstrates that there is a thin current layer which separates the earth's plasma controlled by the earth's magnetic field from the plasma controlled by the solar magnetic field. And such double layers, they are found on many places on the Jupiter, Saturn, quite a few other places, comets and so on. We have something like 10 different cases where we have such thin, thin filaments. They separate regions which may have different magnetizations, it goes here like that and outside it goes like this. It also, the regions may also have different temperature, different density, different chemical composition and if we go out in space further on it may be that similar layer separates regions of ordinary matter from antimatter if we extrapolate it. The awkward thing with such layer is that you cannot observe it until you penetrate it. I attended the meeting in, I attended the arrival of the space probe to Saturn and then it was dramatic, dramatic. No one saw it and certainly everybody in the big hall saw it. Here it comes. And this makes it awkward because if you go out to the interplanetary, to the intergalactic, to the interstellar and intergalactic regions, you may have similar structures there and they cannot be observed. Now it is very unpleasant to introduce the searcher concept if you cannot observe it. But it is still more unpleasant to me to postulate that at the outer edge of the reach of the spacecraft, space changes its properties. And this has far reaching consequences for astrophysics in general and not the least for cosmology. Now if we try to apply all this to see what changes it, this makes for astrophysics in general, I think many people are mostly interested in the application to the cosmology and I have tried to concentrate on it. I don't think there is time enough to develop, present a new cosmology here. The application is first of all that space has a cellular structure and this means that the existence of antimatter is not excluded. There are a number of very nice arguments for against the existence of antimatter in the universe but these are all based on a concept which we know now is not valid. So we cannot exclude the existence of antimatter and the universe may very well be symmetric with regard to ordinary matter and antimatter. Then comes an analysis of the redshift, the redshift demonstrates without any question, it must be a Doppler shift, I think it is impossible to avoid that. The redshift demonstrates that the universe, the or to be more correct use the old term metagalaxy, that means all the galaxies we can observe, it is a synonym to what the big bang believers call the universe. If you plot the redshift that is the velocity of galaxies and here is the size, the distance to the galaxies, you get this famous Hubble diagram and people conclude that this proves that there is a linear relation between the expansion and the distance. This and that the deviations from a straight line here is due to observational errors. This may very well be so but it is not necessary to make such a conclusion. If you take each individual point and extrapolate backwards in time, you see here that this is now and from here you extrapolate backwards in time and then this is the distance from the earth or in the reference system, you see that these do not necessarily coincide in one point. They spread here over a large region and it does not exclude that everything could converge in one point but it does not prove it. It proves that the metagalaxy presence is expanding and that it was once about 10 billion years ago, one tenth of the present size that is one billion years ago, one billion light years but this is not proved at all. Furthermore it has been discovered that space has a hierarchical structure. The hierarchical model was introduced by Charlier long before the Big Bang around in the beginning of this century and it said that stars are aggregated to galaxies, galaxies to what we now should call clusters of galaxies and clusters of galaxies to superclusters and superclusters to some larger units and if this hierarchical structure follows some general law then we can satisfy some conditions, the Albert objection and the Zealiger objection to an infinite universe. This was not believed in until 1970, the Vocular Demonstrated, he is a very famous observer, that this really is true, the universe has the galaxies and so on are arranged into a hierarchical structure and this is how the Vocalers diagram looks actually, it is plotted in different coordinates, this is the size of a structure and this is the mass of it. You see that the stars are here, this limit which is very important that is the Laplace-Svartschild limit, it means actually that on the other side up here we have black holes. You see here that stars go down and neutron stars may approach the Schwarzschild limit rather much but if we go out to galaxies and clusters of galaxies and so on they are very far from the Schwarzschild limit, this is actually given in escape velocity, it is actually two orders of magnitude in density here, so they are four or five orders of magnitude from the Schwarzschild limit, it means that the general theory of relativity comes in here as a correction which is negligible, ten to the minus four or ten to the minus five as far out as we know. Then if we extrapolate to the Meta-Galaxy using the same formalism, it comes here four orders of magnitude in density from the Schwarzschild limit. So the hierarchical structure of space which the Vokkler introduced 1970, that was not believed until at the end of the 1970s it was general pebbles and collaborators make a less sophisticated statistical analysis and did confirm this. So you can say that the hierarchical structure of space is now an observationally confirmed structure and there is a large void region here which makes it very unlikely that space is closed which it should be if it is on the other side of the Laplace Schwarzschild limit. I think this is approaching its end, this is the Sand Reckoner which Archimedes has titled for one of his most famous books. And if I should conclude this, I think that we should not take the generally accepted Big Bang hypothesis as confirmed by observations. Instead, I should like to quote once again what Professor Nagel said and I think that space research has given us so much new information about it, about what the space structures are like and it is as far as I can see unavoidable that this will shake the concepts of the basic concepts of astrophysics in a rather drastic way. So if I should conclude this by giving an advice to the 500 students here, it is that those of you who are interested in astrophysics should not take the curriculum in the general theory of relativity but instead a very good course in modern plasma physics. Thank you.
 I am going to report about the achievements of space research, 25 years of space research,  and its application to the more distant regions of space.  And I will concentrate on the change it has produced in plasma physics.  I think this is an illustration of what Professor Nagel said that you should not believe in  what is accepted today, because that may very well change very rapidly.  First of all, you may ask, is plasma physics of very much importance in astrophysics?  If you read the usual textbooks in astrophysics, you don't think this is the case.  But in reality, the stars consist of plasmas and the interstellar medium also of plasmas.  And it seems that the universe consists more than 99% of plasma, in fact, at least by the  volume, more than 99.9999999999% of plasma.  Plasma physics should not be considered to be completely irrelevant to the research how  the universe is structured.  To be more specific, the plasma physics extends from the laboratory.  Typically this is in a logarithmic scale, that is typically one tenth of a meter for  a not normal experiment, up to the magnetosphere, the magnetic field surrounding the Earth and  the other planets and the Sun, that is about 10 to the 8 meters.  And then we come up, this is a jump of 9 orders of magnitude by another jump by the factor  of 1 billion.  You come up to the galactic phenomena and the third jump, this is a cosmic triple jump,  brings you up to the Hubble distance, which is what the Big Bang believers call the size  of the universe.  This is 27 orders of magnitude and laser fusion has extended it downwards to by 5 orders  of magnitude more.  There are reasons to believe that the basic properties of a plasma is the same in the  whole region.  This is by no means certain.  We can trust that it is so in the laboratory and in the magnetosphere because there we  have reliable measurements.  We are out to this limit, outside this the field is necessarily more speculative because  what is called high quality diagnostics, that is an investigation of the properties of a  plasma is possible in the laboratory and as far out as the spacecrafts go, but it is  not possible further out.  Whether we should believe, accept that plasma changes its properties at the outer reach  or spacecraft or not, this is a thing which we cannot prove, but I think there are good  reasons to suppose so.  What has happened in this field during the last years?  It is especially that the space research has made the magnetosphere accessible to detailed  analysis by high quality instruments which are sent out here and going up and down, up  and down and sending signals to the earth which have been interpreted in detail.  The result of this is at the same time laboratory research has made a great step forward to  some extent favored by, to a large extent favored by the fusion work which is going  on there so far the fusion research has not given us any energy, but it has given us very  valuable information which can be used for clarifying the structure of the universe.  There has also been much work spent in the translation between laboratory work and the  magnetosphere.  And the result of this is that we have got a drastic change in our concept of what the  plasmas are in space are like.  In reality there are half a dozen different respects in which this change has taken place  and I'm going to select a few of them and try to discuss them more in detail.  One of the important things is that our concept of the structure of interplanetary interstellar  and intergalactic space has changed drastically.  Fifty years ago it was generally believed that the space between the stars, between  the planets, satellites, commerce and so on was absolutely empty.  It is from that point of view absolutely empty, but not absolutely empty.  It is rather empty, but the little matter which is between is very important.  Twenty-five years ago it was real.  The attention was drawn to the interstellar interplanetary matter and this was then considered  to be a homogeneous nebulous gas with dust in it.  Space research has given us a new view which you can call the space age concept of space,  namely that space is highly structureized, it is penetrated by a network of electric  currents and this is something which is of importance in all fields of plasma physics.  We know that this is so after this limit that there are good reasons to suppose that the  whole universe is penetrated by, has this structure, highly structureized, penetrated  by electric currents.  More specifically what does structureized mean?  It means that we have discovered a number of phenomena which are strongly inhomogeneous.  There are electric double layers which you find everywhere in space.  These were not believed to exist up to something like five years ago.  Now they are very popular.  There was a few weeks ago a symposium in Denmark where there were 50 of the most prominent people  working in this field who discussed the properties of double layers.  What is a double layer?  If we have an electric current in this direction then under certain conditions we have a density  of the plasma which is fairly homogeneous.  This is the density and this line gives the electric potential, the voltage which increases  slowly, there is an electric field which drives the current through the plasma.  However, when a double layer is produced, the conditions is changed like this.  Here is the voltage.  It makes a sudden jump and then has another constant value and the density changes in  a corresponding way.  Such double layers were well known in the laboratory since the time of Langmuir about  50 years ago.  It was denied by the belief that they could be of any importance in space until they were  actually discovered.  There are such double layers at the height of something like one or two Earth radii above  the Earth.  This is a picture of the Earth and these are magnetic field lines.  Here in the equatorial plane at a distance of 5 or 6 Earth radii you have a plasma flow,  a sunward plasma flow.  This is seen from the night side and that produces an electromotive force here.  This produces electric currents which flow along magnetic field lines to the Earth, then  through the ionosphere and back again to the equatorial plane.  So we are here discussing an astrophysical problem not in terms of magnetic fields as  has usually been done but to the same extent in terms of electric currents and these electric  currents may produce double layers.  Here is a double layer at one or two Earth radii and that means that we have a sudden  jump in the voltage there which produces in which auroras or auroral electrons are accelerated.  Here we have the electromotive force, here the auroral electrons are accelerated and  the energy is transferred by the circuit.  This is not a theoretical hypothetical picture, it is something which is actually measured  by spacecrafts which have penetrated many times.  Of course there are many details which are still obscure.  These double layers may have voltage differences of kilovolts which you have here, solar flares  it is megavolts or gigavolts and they may be still higher.  Then the currents produce filaments.  In cosmical physics we are accustomed to the Newtonian attraction, the general gravitation  which typically produce aims at producing spheres like stars and planets and so on.  However we have also electromagnetic forces and these electromagnetic forces they tend  to produce filaments.  The basic phenomenon is known for a very long time, it is actually the Osavars law that  two parallel currents attract each other and this produces electric pinches and filamentary  structures.  Such filamentary structures are common in the universe, can I have the slides here?  We have good reasons to suppose that whenever you have observed a filament that is just  an indication that we have electric currents, pinching electric currents there.  Can I have the first slide?  Yes, this is the sun, this is the solar corona and if you sharpen the picture a little you  will see that this has thin, thin, thin filaments in every direction.  The sun goddess actually has a beautiful hair which you see here and these filaments are  likely to be due to electric currents which produce the so called pinch effect, produce  filaments out of it.  Next slide.  Here is a comet and here you see striations, filaments of the same kind.  The tail of a comet is obviously a plasma phenomenon, this was first pointed out by  professor Biermann here in Germany.  Next slide.  Here are photographs of interstellar space far out in the galaxy, you see thin filaments  everywhere.  Next slide.  Here are other filaments of the same kind.  Next slide.  Here is an ordinary cosmic cloud which seems to be homogeneous structure but if you subject  it to what is called contrast enhancement technology you get this picture, that is you  put it into a computer and ask the computer to look for contrast and then you see it is  penetrated by filaments which is a strong indication that filamentary structure, that  there are electric currents in also there.  And I have one more slide.  Here you have dark lanes which probably are also due to filaments.  This is just some arbitrary examples to show you how important the formation of filaments  are and what is likely to be due to then comes surface currents in space which are also very  traumatic.  It is actually to me it was the most important, the most shocking discovery namely that if  you go out from the earth, measure the magnetic field out from the earth, you observe, this  is now the distance from the earth, this is the magnetic field, you observe that it decreases  approximately as r to the minus 3 as it should do out to something like 7 or 8 radii.  Then it may suddenly change its sign and this is made very abruptly in a very, very short  distance, some 100 kilometers less than the distance from here to Paris for example.  And what space craft records here is that you have constant value here with some fluctuation  and then suddenly it jumps over in this way.  This demonstrates that there is a thin current layer which separates the earth's plasma  controlled by the earth's magnetic field from the plasma controlled by the solar magnetic  field.  And such double layers, they are found on many places on the Jupiter, Saturn, quite  a few other places, comets and so on.  We have something like 10 different cases where we have such thin, thin filaments.  They separate regions which may have different magnetizations, it goes here like that and  outside it goes like this.  It also, the regions may also have different temperature, different density, different  chemical composition and if we go out in space further on it may be that similar layer separates  regions of ordinary matter from antimatter if we extrapolate it.  The awkward thing with such layer is that you cannot observe it until you penetrate it.  I attended the meeting in, I attended the arrival of the space probe to Saturn and then  it was dramatic, dramatic.  No one saw it and certainly everybody in the big hall saw it.  Here it comes.  And this makes it awkward because if you go out to the interplanetary, to the intergalactic,  to the interstellar and intergalactic regions, you may have similar structures there and  they cannot be observed.  Now it is very unpleasant to introduce the searcher concept if you cannot observe it.  But it is still more unpleasant to me to postulate that at the outer edge of the reach of the  spacecraft, space changes its properties.  And this has far reaching consequences for astrophysics in general and not the least  for cosmology.  Now if we try to apply all this to see what changes it, this makes for astrophysics in  general, I think many people are mostly interested in the application to the cosmology and I  have tried to concentrate on it.  I don't think there is time enough to develop, present a new cosmology here.  The application is first of all that space has a cellular structure and this means that  the existence of antimatter is not excluded.  There are a number of very nice arguments for against the existence of antimatter in  the universe but these are all based on a concept which we know now is not valid.  So we cannot exclude the existence of antimatter and the universe may very well be symmetric  with regard to ordinary matter and antimatter.  Then comes an analysis of the redshift, the redshift demonstrates without any question,  it must be a Doppler shift, I think it is impossible to avoid that.  The redshift demonstrates that the universe, the or to be more correct use the old term  metagalaxy, that means all the galaxies we can observe, it is a synonym to what the big  bang believers call the universe.  If you plot the redshift that is the velocity of galaxies and here is the size, the distance  to the galaxies, you get this famous Hubble diagram and people conclude that this proves  that there is a linear relation between the expansion and the distance.  This and that the deviations from a straight line here is due to observational errors.  This may very well be so but it is not necessary to make such a conclusion.  If you take each individual point and extrapolate backwards in time, you see here that this  is now and from here you extrapolate backwards in time and then this is the distance from  the earth or in the reference system, you see that these do not necessarily coincide  in one point.  They spread here over a large region and it does not exclude that everything could converge  in one point but it does not prove it.  It proves that the metagalaxy presence is expanding and that it was once about 10 billion  years ago, one tenth of the present size that is one billion years ago, one billion light  years but this is not proved at all.  Furthermore it has been discovered that space has a hierarchical structure.  The hierarchical model was introduced by Charlier long before the Big Bang around in the beginning  of this century and it said that stars are aggregated to galaxies, galaxies to what we  now should call clusters of galaxies and clusters of galaxies to superclusters and superclusters  to some larger units and if this hierarchical structure follows some general law then we  can satisfy some conditions, the Albert objection and the Zealiger objection to an infinite universe.  This was not believed in until 1970, the Vocular Demonstrated, he is a very famous observer,  that this really is true, the universe has the galaxies and so on are arranged into a  hierarchical structure and this is how the Vocalers diagram looks actually, it is plotted  in different coordinates, this is the size of a structure and this is the mass of it.  You see that the stars are here, this limit which is very important that is the Laplace-Svartschild  limit, it means actually that on the other side up here we have black holes.  You see here that stars go down and neutron stars may approach the Schwarzschild limit  rather much but if we go out to galaxies and clusters of galaxies and so on they are very  far from the Schwarzschild limit, this is actually given in escape velocity, it is actually  two orders of magnitude in density here, so they are four or five orders of magnitude  from the Schwarzschild limit, it means that the general theory of relativity comes in  here as a correction which is negligible, ten to the minus four or ten to the minus five  as far out as we know.  Then if we extrapolate to the Meta-Galaxy using the same formalism, it comes here four  orders of magnitude in density from the Schwarzschild limit.  So the hierarchical structure of space which the Vokkler introduced 1970, that was not  believed until at the end of the 1970s it was general pebbles and collaborators make  a less sophisticated statistical analysis and did confirm this.  So you can say that the hierarchical structure of space is now an observationally confirmed  structure and there is a large void region here which makes it very unlikely that space  is closed which it should be if it is on the other side of the Laplace Schwarzschild limit.  I think this is approaching its end, this is the Sand Reckoner which Archimedes has  titled for one of his most famous books.  And if I should conclude this, I think that we should not take the generally accepted  Big Bang hypothesis as confirmed by observations.  Instead, I should like to quote once again what Professor Nagel said and I think that  space research has given us so much new information about it, about what the space structures  are like and it is as far as I can see unavoidable that this will shake the concepts of the basic  concepts of astrophysics in a rather drastic way.  So if I should conclude this by giving an advice to the 500 students here, it is that  those of you who are interested in astrophysics should not take the curriculum in the general  theory of relativity but instead a very good course in modern plasma physics.  Thank you.
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I am going to report about the achievements of space research, 25 years of space research, and its application to the more distant regions of space. And I will concentrate on the change it has produced in plasma physics. I think this is an illustration of what Professor Nagel said that you should not believe in what is accepted today, because that may very well change very rapidly. First of all, you may ask, is plasma physics of very much importance in astrophysics? If you read the usual textbooks in astrophysics, you don't think this is the case. But in reality, the stars consist of plasmas and the interstellar medium also of plasmas. And it seems that the universe consists more than 99% of plasma, in fact, at least by the volume, more than 99.9999999999% of plasma. Plasma physics should not be considered to be completely irrelevant to the research how the universe is structured. To be more specific, the plasma physics extends from the laboratory. Typically this is in a logarithmic scale, that is typically one tenth of a meter for a not normal experiment, up to the magnetosphere, the magnetic field surrounding the Earth and the other planets and the Sun, that is about 10 to the 8 meters. And then we come up, this is a jump of 9 orders of magnitude by another jump by the factor of 1 billion. You come up to the galactic phenomena and the third jump, this is a cosmic triple jump, brings you up to the Hubble distance, which is what the Big Bang believers call the size of the universe. This is 27 orders of magnitude and laser fusion has extended it downwards to by 5 orders of magnitude more. There are reasons to believe that the basic properties of a plasma is the same in the whole region. This is by no means certain. We can trust that it is so in the laboratory and in the magnetosphere because there we have reliable measurements. We are out to this limit, outside this the field is necessarily more speculative because what is called high quality diagnostics, that is an investigation of the properties of a plasma is possible in the laboratory and as far out as the spacecrafts go, but it is not possible further out. Whether we should believe, accept that plasma changes its properties at the outer reach or spacecraft or not, this is a thing which we cannot prove, but I think there are good reasons to suppose so. What has happened in this field during the last years? It is especially that the space research has made the magnetosphere accessible to detailed analysis by high quality instruments which are sent out here and going up and down, up and down and sending signals to the earth which have been interpreted in detail. The result of this is at the same time laboratory research has made a great step forward to some extent favored by, to a large extent favored by the fusion work which is going on there so far the fusion research has not given us any energy, but it has given us very valuable information which can be used for clarifying the structure of the universe. There has also been much work spent in the translation between laboratory work and the magnetosphere. And the result of this is that we have got a drastic change in our concept of what the plasmas are in space are like. In reality there are half a dozen different respects in which this change has taken place and I'm going to select a few of them and try to discuss them more in detail. One of the important things is that our concept of the structure of interplanetary interstellar and intergalactic space has changed drastically. Fifty years ago it was generally believed that the space between the stars, between the planets, satellites, commerce and so on was absolutely empty. It is from that point of view absolutely empty, but not absolutely empty. It is rather empty, but the little matter which is between is very important. Twenty-five years ago it was real. The attention was drawn to the interstellar interplanetary matter and this was then considered to be a homogeneous nebulous gas with dust in it. Space research has given us a new view which you can call the space age concept of space, namely that space is highly structureized, it is penetrated by a network of electric currents and this is something which is of importance in all fields of plasma physics. We know that this is so after this limit that there are good reasons to suppose that the whole universe is penetrated by, has this structure, highly structureized, penetrated by electric currents. More specifically what does structureized mean? It means that we have discovered a number of phenomena which are strongly inhomogeneous. There are electric double layers which you find everywhere in space. These were not believed to exist up to something like five years ago. Now they are very popular. There was a few weeks ago a symposium in Denmark where there were 50 of the most prominent people working in this field who discussed the properties of double layers. What is a double layer? If we have an electric current in this direction then under certain conditions we have a density of the plasma which is fairly homogeneous. This is the density and this line gives the electric potential, the voltage which increases slowly, there is an electric field which drives the current through the plasma. However, when a double layer is produced, the conditions is changed like this. Here is the voltage. It makes a sudden jump and then has another constant value and the density changes in a corresponding way. Such double layers were well known in the laboratory since the time of Langmuir about 50 years ago. It was denied by the belief that they could be of any importance in space until they were actually discovered. There are such double layers at the height of something like one or two Earth radii above the Earth. This is a picture of the Earth and these are magnetic field lines. Here in the equatorial plane at a distance of 5 or 6 Earth radii you have a plasma flow, a sunward plasma flow. This is seen from the night side and that produces an electromotive force here. This produces electric currents which flow along magnetic field lines to the Earth, then through the ionosphere and back again to the equatorial plane. So we are here discussing an astrophysical problem not in terms of magnetic fields as has usually been done but to the same extent in terms of electric currents and these electric currents may produce double layers. Here is a double layer at one or two Earth radii and that means that we have a sudden jump in the voltage there which produces in which auroras or auroral electrons are accelerated. Here we have the electromotive force, here the auroral electrons are accelerated and the energy is transferred by the circuit. This is not a theoretical hypothetical picture, it is something which is actually measured by spacecrafts which have penetrated many times. Of course there are many details which are still obscure. These double layers may have voltage differences of kilovolts which you have here, solar flares it is megavolts or gigavolts and they may be still higher. Then the currents produce filaments. In cosmical physics we are accustomed to the Newtonian attraction, the general gravitation which typically produce aims at producing spheres like stars and planets and so on. However we have also electromagnetic forces and these electromagnetic forces they tend to produce filaments. The basic phenomenon is known for a very long time, it is actually the Osavars law that two parallel currents attract each other and this produces electric pinches and filamentary structures. Such filamentary structures are common in the universe, can I have the slides here? We have good reasons to suppose that whenever you have observed a filament that is just an indication that we have electric currents, pinching electric currents there. Can I have the first slide? Yes, this is the sun, this is the solar corona and if you sharpen the picture a little you will see that this has thin, thin, thin filaments in every direction. The sun goddess actually has a beautiful hair which you see here and these filaments are likely to be due to electric currents which produce the so called pinch effect, produce filaments out of it. Next slide. Here is a comet and here you see striations, filaments of the same kind. The tail of a comet is obviously a plasma phenomenon, this was first pointed out by professor Biermann here in Germany. Next slide. Here are photographs of interstellar space far out in the galaxy, you see thin filaments everywhere. Next slide. Here are other filaments of the same kind. Next slide. Here is an ordinary cosmic cloud which seems to be homogeneous structure but if you subject it to what is called contrast enhancement technology you get this picture, that is you put it into a computer and ask the computer to look for contrast and then you see it is penetrated by filaments which is a strong indication that filamentary structure, that there are electric currents in also there. And I have one more slide. Here you have dark lanes which probably are also due to filaments. This is just some arbitrary examples to show you how important the formation of filaments are and what is likely to be due to then comes surface currents in space which are also very traumatic. It is actually to me it was the most important, the most shocking discovery namely that if you go out from the earth, measure the magnetic field out from the earth, you observe, this is now the distance from the earth, this is the magnetic field, you observe that it decreases approximately as r to the minus 3 as it should do out to something like 7 or 8 radii. Then it may suddenly change its sign and this is made very abruptly in a very, very short distance, some 100 kilometers less than the distance from here to Paris for example. And what space craft records here is that you have constant value here with some fluctuation and then suddenly it jumps over in this way. This demonstrates that there is a thin current layer which separates the earth's plasma controlled by the earth's magnetic field from the plasma controlled by the solar magnetic field. And such double layers, they are found on many places on the Jupiter, Saturn, quite a few other places, comets and so on. We have something like 10 different cases where we have such thin, thin filaments. They separate regions which may have different magnetizations, it goes here like that and outside it goes like this. It also, the regions may also have different temperature, different density, different chemical composition and if we go out in space further on it may be that similar layer separates regions of ordinary matter from antimatter if we extrapolate it. The awkward thing with such layer is that you cannot observe it until you penetrate it. I attended the meeting in, I attended the arrival of the space probe to Saturn and then it was dramatic, dramatic. No one saw it and certainly everybody in the big hall saw it. Here it comes. And this makes it awkward because if you go out to the interplanetary, to the intergalactic, to the interstellar and intergalactic regions, you may have similar structures there and they cannot be observed. Now it is very unpleasant to introduce the searcher concept if you cannot observe it. But it is still more unpleasant to me to postulate that at the outer edge of the reach of the spacecraft, space changes its properties. And this has far reaching consequences for astrophysics in general and not the least for cosmology. Now if we try to apply all this to see what changes it, this makes for astrophysics in general, I think many people are mostly interested in the application to the cosmology and I have tried to concentrate on it. I don't think there is time enough to develop, present a new cosmology here. The application is first of all that space has a cellular structure and this means that the existence of antimatter is not excluded. There are a number of very nice arguments for against the existence of antimatter in the universe but these are all based on a concept which we know now is not valid. So we cannot exclude the existence of antimatter and the universe may very well be symmetric with regard to ordinary matter and antimatter. Then comes an analysis of the redshift, the redshift demonstrates without any question, it must be a Doppler shift, I think it is impossible to avoid that. The redshift demonstrates that the universe, the or to be more correct use the old term metagalaxy, that means all the galaxies we can observe, it is a synonym to what the big bang believers call the universe. If you plot the redshift that is the velocity of galaxies and here is the size, the distance to the galaxies, you get this famous Hubble diagram and people conclude that this proves that there is a linear relation between the expansion and the distance. This and that the deviations from a straight line here is due to observational errors. This may very well be so but it is not necessary to make such a conclusion. If you take each individual point and extrapolate backwards in time, you see here that this is now and from here you extrapolate backwards in time and then this is the distance from the earth or in the reference system, you see that these do not necessarily coincide in one point. They spread here over a large region and it does not exclude that everything could converge in one point but it does not prove it. It proves that the metagalaxy presence is expanding and that it was once about 10 billion years ago, one tenth of the present size that is one billion years ago, one billion light years but this is not proved at all. Furthermore it has been discovered that space has a hierarchical structure. The hierarchical model was introduced by Charlier long before the Big Bang around in the beginning of this century and it said that stars are aggregated to galaxies, galaxies to what we now should call clusters of galaxies and clusters of galaxies to superclusters and superclusters to some larger units and if this hierarchical structure follows some general law then we can satisfy some conditions, the Albert objection and the Zealiger objection to an infinite universe. This was not believed in until 1970, the Vocular Demonstrated, he is a very famous observer, that this really is true, the universe has the galaxies and so on are arranged into a hierarchical structure and this is how the Vocalers diagram looks actually, it is plotted in different coordinates, this is the size of a structure and this is the mass of it. You see that the stars are here, this limit which is very important that is the Laplace-Svartschild limit, it means actually that on the other side up here we have black holes. You see here that stars go down and neutron stars may approach the Schwarzschild limit rather much but if we go out to galaxies and clusters of galaxies and so on they are very far from the Schwarzschild limit, this is actually given in escape velocity, it is actually two orders of magnitude in density here, so they are four or five orders of magnitude from the Schwarzschild limit, it means that the general theory of relativity comes in here as a correction which is negligible, ten to the minus four or ten to the minus five as far out as we know. Then if we extrapolate to the Meta-Galaxy using the same formalism, it comes here four orders of magnitude in density from the Schwarzschild limit. So the hierarchical structure of space which the Vokkler introduced 1970, that was not believed until at the end of the 1970s it was general pebbles and collaborators make a less sophisticated statistical analysis and did confirm this. So you can say that the hierarchical structure of space is now an observationally confirmed structure and there is a large void region here which makes it very unlikely that space is closed which it should be if it is on the other side of the Laplace Schwarzschild limit. I think this is approaching its end, this is the Sand Reckoner which Archimedes has titled for one of his most famous books. And if I should conclude this, I think that we should not take the generally accepted Big Bang hypothesis as confirmed by observations. Instead, I should like to quote once again what Professor Nagel said and I think that space research has given us so much new information about it, about what the space structures are like and it is as far as I can see unavoidable that this will shake the concepts of the basic concepts of astrophysics in a rather drastic way. So if I should conclude this by giving an advice to the 500 students here, it is that those of you who are interested in astrophysics should not take the curriculum in the general theory of relativity but instead a very good course in modern plasma physics. Thank you.
space research, 25 years of space research, and has produced in plasma physics. I think this is you should not believe in what is accepted today, because that may very well change very rapidly. plasma. Plasma physics should not be considered believe that the basic properties of a plasma is laboratory and in the magnetosphere because there laboratory and as far out as the spacecrafts go, the same time laboratory research has made a valuable information which can be used for of the important things is that our concept of interplanetary matter and this was then currents and this is something which is of layers which you find everywhere in space. These a corresponding way. Such double layers were well known in the laboratory since the time of then through the ionosphere and back again to the electric currents may produce double layers. Here controlled by the solar magnetic field. And such astrophysics in general and not the least for all that space has a cellular structure and this the universe may very well be symmetric with regard to ordinary matter and antimatter. Then universe, the or to be more correct use the old such a conclusion. If you take each individual here that this is now and from here you system, you see that these do not necessarily Furthermore it has been discovered that space has a hierarchical structure. The hierarchical model was introduced by Charlier long before the Big superclusters and superclusters to some larger true, the universe has the galaxies and so on are You see that the stars are here, this limit which to galaxies and clusters of galaxies and so on general theory of relativity comes in here as a Schwarzschild limit. So the hierarchical 1970, that was not believed until at the end of can say that the hierarchical structure of space there is a large void region here which makes it which Archimedes has titled for one of his most accepted Big Bang hypothesis as confirmed by information about it, about what the space structures are like and it is as far as I can see the basic concepts of astrophysics in a rather giving an advice to the 500 students here, it is astrophysics should not take the curriculum in the general theory of relativity but instead a