Thursday, July 8, 2010

Electric Universe: More data refuting the EU galaxy model

This is a followup to Still no electric currents powering the galaxies....

A new full-sky dataset has been released that creates more problems for the Electric Universe (EU) supporters clinging to the galaxy model formerly advocated by Anthony Peratt of LANL (see Scott Rebuttal. II. The Peratt Galaxy Model vs. the Cosmic Microwave Background).

As noted in the previous posts, one of the predictions of the Peratt galaxy model is that these galaxy-powering current streams should be strong emitters of synchrotron radiation in the microwave band, at an energy density level equivalent to the cosmic microwave background radiation. They were expected to appear as spaghetti-like streams across the sky. You would expect to see these structures clearly associated with the nearer galaxies.

The Planck satellite (Wikipedia, ESA) has been operating at the Sun-Earth L2 point for six months now and has published a preliminary skymap of their data. The sky survey will eventually improve on the WMAP results with about three times higher angular resolution and ten times higher sensitivity in the microwave band. The two instruments on the satellite are the LFI (Low Frequency Instrument), covering 30-70 GHz, and HFI (High Frequency Instrument), covering 100-857 GHz. Note that these frequencies are beyond the 1.42GHz emission of neutral hydrogen gas (Wikipedia), sometimes labelled HI, so direct HI contamination is avoided.

On the BBC news site, Planck telescope reveals ancient cosmic light, the story includes a checkbox on the graphic where you can overlay locations of some better known objects, such as the Andromeda galaxy and the Magellanic clouds. In the graphic, the blue/white structures are from the HFI channels and reveal dust and gas in the Milky Way.  Many of these HFI bands will be used to determine the concentration of this foreground material so the its contribution to the LFI channels can be calculated and subtracted, leaving a net CMB map.

Another cool web-tool for exploring this dataset online is Chromoscope. Turn on the sky labels by pressing the letter 'l'. Then zoom in close to the locations of the Andromeda galaxy or the Magellanic clouds. Using the vertical controller in the upper right, you can step through different all-sky datasets from radio wavelengths to gamma-rays. In all these wavelengths, these extragalactic objects don't exhibit the connection to long structures required by the EU galaxy model.

Here's a snapshot from Chromoscope of the region around the Andromeda galaxy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Galaxy cluster magnetic fields from radio polarized emission", by Bonafede et al. (arXiv 1009.1233) is an "Invited talk at ISKAF2010 Science Meeting "A Golden Age for radio astronomy", June 10 -14 2010. Assen, the Netherlands", and contains a brief review of "the newest results on galaxy cluster magnetic fields, both focusing on single objects and aimed at describing the magnetic field general properties".

The only feature from Peratt's simulations which has some resemblance to what's actually observed in galaxy clusters is the occasional DRAGN (Double Radio Source Associated with a Galactic Nucleus); his simulations predict no radio relics, no radio halos (and DRAGNs are simulated only wrt morphology). Furthermore, there is no spaghetti of ~35 kpc wide/35 Mpc to 3.5 Gpc long cosmic filaments threading through galaxy clusters.

And the estimated magnetic fields - strengths and alignments - in the intracluster medium do not seem to be consistent with Peratt's models.

APODNereid

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