Jan
01, 2007
Temperatures in Space
The Chandra X-Ray Telescope has found anomalous
temperatures at the core of the Milky Way, but the anomalies disappear
in the light of plasma lab experiments.
The Chandra news release announcing this new image
of the center of the Milky Way said that the X-ray spectrum of the gases
"is consistent with a hot gas cloud that contains two components--10-
million-degree Celsius gas and 100-million-degree gas."
This result was unexpected and difficult to
explain. The press release describes the problem in greater detail:
"Shock waves from supernova explosions are the most likely explanation
for heating the 10-million-degree gas, but how the 100-million-degree
gas is heated is not known. Ordinary supernova shock waves won't work,
and heating by very high-energy particles produces the wrong spectrum of
X-rays. Also, the observed Galactic magnetic field appears to rule out
confinement and heating by magnetic turbulence."
Plasma cosmologists expected temperature
discrepancies, because they've seen the same thing in plasma
experiments. In the opening paragraph of his 1981 monograph, _Cosmic
Plasma_, Hannés Alfvén discusses some of the oddities of plasma behavior
that showed up in the lab but not in the simplified theories of
physicists and astronomers: "The plasma exhibited striations, double
layers, and an assortment of oscillations and instabilities. The
electron temperature was often found to be one or two orders of
magnitude larger than the gas temperature, with the ion temperature
intermediate."
What Chandra has discovered is that the
temperatures of plasma at the core of the Milky Way behave exactly the
way they behave in plasma experiments on Earth. Some measurements show
temperatures as expected, but others indicate temperatures ten to a
hundred times higher. If astronomers had taken plasma lab results as
seriously as they take hot gas cloud models, they wouldn't have been
surprised.
_______________________
Please check out Professor Don Scott's
new book The Electric Sky.
NOTE TO
READERS: Wallace Thornhill, David Talbott, and Anthony
Peratt will share the stage with other investigators of
planetary catastrophe at the British Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies “Conference 2007” August
31-September 2.
GET INFO