home • about • essential guide • picture of the day • thunderblogs • news • multimedia • predictions • products • get involved • contact

picture of the day             archive             subject index          


 The Electric Universe. Image credit: Mel Acheson

Sep 03, 2008
War of the Worldviews

In the consensus view, the structure of the observable universe is depicted by a filigree of galaxies filling the void with a foam of bubbles.

In previous Thunderbolts Picture of the Day articles, we have taken issue with the current theories of large-scale structure that are based on cosmological distance assumptions. Rather than interpreting a galaxy’s redshift to be an indicator of its distance, Halton Arp and others have shown that this assumption is untenable. Redshift is more likely an indicator of ancestry. If all the errant galaxies on the consensus depiction are brought back to their “genealogical distances,” what would the view of the observable universe look like?

The Electric Universe proposes that clusters of galaxies are pinches in a supergalactic Birkeland current. The usual morphology of a Birkeland current is a double helix, or a hierarchy of double helices. With greater resolution, each filament of a current is, at a smaller scale, a tube of filaments which, in pairs, tend to spiral around a common axis.

We can assume, based on rough approximations, that every galaxy, QSO, Abell Cluster, x-ray or radio-emitting cloud in the direction of the Virgo Supercluster is located in that supercluster. The Local Cluster, which includes the Andromeda galaxy (M31), M33, the higher-redshift dwarf and peculiar galaxies extending along the spin axis of M31, as well as the hydrogen clouds along that line (with which the higher-redshift objects are interacting), and including our Milky Way galaxy, appears to be an outlying member of the Virgo Supercluster.

On the opposite side of the sky lies the Fornax Supercluster, an apparent mirror image of the Virgo Supercluster. If we assume that it is approximately the same size as the Virgo Supercluster, its smaller angular diameter would indicate that it is farther away.

If the Fornax and Virgo Superclusters are pinches in the same largest-observable-scale Birkeland current, there could be more superclusters beyond Fornax and Virgo, but they would be obscured by Fornax and Virgo. Perhaps there would be other Birkeland currents, with pinched superclusters along them, running parallel to the Fornax-Virgo filament, but they would be too far away and too faint for us to see with present instruments.

We can imagine an infinite progression of such filaments or an arbitrary end with the one we see (in part). The part of the one we see must be part of a circuit, but from whence it comes and to whither it goes we can again only imagine. Somewhere there must be a generator or a coupling with another circuit, which leaves speculation piqued but unconstrained.

By Mel Acheson
___________________________________________________________________________

Please visit our Forum

The Electric Sky and The Electric Universe available now!

  EXECUTIVE EDITORS: David Talbott, Wallace Thornhill
     MANAGING EDITORS: Steve Smith, Mel Acheson
  CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Armstrong, Dwardu Cardona,
Ev Cochrane, C.J. Ransom, Don Scott, Rens van der Sluijs, Ian Tresman
  WEBMASTER: Brian Talbott

Copyright 2007: thunderbolts.info

home  •  thunderblogs  •   forum  •  picture of the day  •   resources  •  team  •  updates  •  contact us