“In 1945, local time, a primitive species of pre-intelligent primates on planet Earth detonated the first thermonuclear device. Unbeknownst to them, they created an echo in a super-cosmic web used for non-local communication and transmigration of souls by the civilizations of the Trans-galactic Union, a network that more mystical races call the "body of God."
Soon after, secret forces of representatives of intelligent races were sent to Earth to monitor the situation and prevent further electromagnetic destruction of the universal network."
The introduction in quotation marks looks like a plot for science fiction, but this is exactly the conclusion that can be drawn after reading this scientific article. The presence of this network permeating the entire Universe could explain a lot - for example, the UFO phenomenon, their elusiveness and invisibility, incredible possibilities, and besides, indirectly, this theory of the "body of God" gives us real confirmation that there is life after death.
We are at the very initial stage of development and in fact we are "pre-intelligent beings" and who knows if we can find the strength to become a truly intelligent race.
Astronomers have found that magnetic fields penetrate most of the cosmos. Latent magnetic field lines stretch for millions of light years across the entire universe.
Every time astronomers come up with a new way to search for magnetic fields in increasingly distant regions of space, they inexplicably find them.
These force fields are the same entities that surround the Earth, the Sun, and all galaxies. Twenty years ago, astronomers began to detect magnetism permeating entire clusters of galaxies, including the space between one galaxy and the next. Invisible field lines sweep through intergalactic space.
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Last year, astronomers finally managed to explore a much thinner region of space - the space between galaxy clusters. There, they discovered the largest magnetic field: 10 million light-years of magnetized space, spanning the entire length of this "filament" of the cosmic web. A second magnetized filament has already been seen elsewhere in space using the same techniques. “We're just looking at the top of the iceberg, probably,” said Federica Govoni of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Cagliari, Italy, which led the first discovery.
The question arises: where did these huge magnetic fields come from?
“It clearly cannot be related to the activity of individual galaxies or individual explosions or, I don’t know, winds from supernovae,” said Franco Vazza, an astrophysicist at the University of Bologna who does modern computer simulations of cosmic magnetic fields. all this."
One possibility is that cosmic magnetism is primary, tracing all the way back to the birth of the universe. In this case, weak magnetism should exist everywhere, even in the “voids” of the cosmic web - the darkest, most empty regions of the Universe. Omnipresent magnetism would sow stronger fields that flourished in galaxies and clusters.
Primary magnetism could also help solve another cosmological puzzle known as the Hubble stress - arguably the hottest topic in cosmology.
The problem underlying the Hubble tension is that the universe appears to be expanding significantly faster than expected from its known components. In an article published online in April and reviewed in conjunction with Physical Review Letters, cosmologists Karsten Jedamzik and Levon Poghosyan argue that weak magnetic fields in the early universe will lead to the faster rate of cosmic expansion seen today.
Primitive magnetism relieves Hubble's tension so easily that the article by Jedamzik and Poghosyan immediately attracted attention. “This is a great article and idea,” said Mark Kamionkowski, a theoretical cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University who has proposed other solutions to the Hubble tension.
Kamenkovsky and others say more tests are needed to ensure that early magnetism does not confuse other cosmological calculations. And even if this idea works on paper, researchers will need to find compelling evidence for primordial magnetism to be sure that it was the absent agent that shaped the universe.
However, in all these years of talk about Hubble tension, it is perhaps strange that no one has considered magnetism before. According to Poghosyan, who is a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, most cosmologists hardly think about magnetism. “Everyone knows this is one of those big mysteries,” he said. But for decades, there has been no way to tell if magnetism is indeed omnipresent and therefore the primary component of the cosmos, so cosmologists have largely stopped paying attention.
Meanwhile, astrophysicists continued to collect data. The weight of the evidence made most of them suspect that magnetism is indeed present everywhere.
The magnetic soul of the universe
In 1600, English scientist William Gilbert, studying mineral deposits - naturally magnetized rocks that humans have created in compasses for millennia - concluded that their magnetic force “imitates the soul.” “He correctly assumed that the Earth itself is.” a great magnet, "and that the magnetic pillars" look towards the poles of the Earth."
Magnetic fields are generated any time an electric charge is flowing. The Earth's field, for example, comes from its inner "dynamo" - a stream of liquid iron, seething in its core. The fields of fridge magnets and magnetic columns come from electrons orbiting their constituent atoms.
Cosmological simulations illustrate two possible explanations for how magnetic fields have penetrated galaxy clusters. On the left, the fields grow out of homogeneous “seed” fields that filled space in the moments after the Big Bang. On the right, astrophysical processes such as the formation of stars and the flow of matter into supermassive black holes create magnetized winds that blow out of galaxies.
However, as soon as a “seed” magnetic field arises from charged particles in motion, it can become larger and stronger if weaker fields are combined with it. Magnetism "is a bit like a living organism," said Thorsten Enslin, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, "because magnetic fields connect to every free source of energy that they can hold onto and grow from. They can spread and to influence other areas with their presence, where they also grow.”
Ruth Durer, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Geneva, explained that magnetism is the only force besides gravity that can shape the large-scale structure of the cosmos, because only magnetism and gravity can “reach you” over great distances. Electricity, on the other hand, is local and short-lived, since the positive and negative charges in any region will be neutralized as a whole. But you cannot cancel magnetic fields; they tend to fold and survive.
And yet, for all their might, these force fields have low profiles. They are immaterial and are perceived only when they act on other things. “You can't just photograph a magnetic field; it doesn't work that way, said Reinu Van Veren, an astronomer at Leiden University who was involved in the recent discovery of magnetized filaments.
In a paper last year, Wang Veren and 28 co-authors hypothesized a magnetic field in the filament between the galaxy clusters Abell 399 and Abell 401 by the way the field redirects high-speed electrons and other charged particles passing through it. As their trajectories twist in the field, these charged particles emit a faint "synchrotron radiation."
The synchrotron signal is strongest at low RF frequencies, making it ready for detection with LOFAR, an array of 20,000 low-frequency radio antennas scattered across Europe.
The team actually collected data from the filament back in 2014 over a single eight-hour chunk, but the data sat on hold as the radio astronomy community spent years figuring out how to improve the calibration of LOFAR's measurements. The earth's atmosphere refracts radio waves passing through it, so LOFAR views space as if from the bottom of a swimming pool. The researchers solved the problem by tracking the fluctuations of the "beacons" in the sky - radio emitters with precisely known locations - and correcting the fluctuations to unblock all the data. When they applied the deblurring algorithm to the filament data, they immediately saw the synchrotron radiation glow.
LOFAR consists of 20,000 individual radio antennas scattered throughout Europe.
The filament appears to be magnetized everywhere, not just near clusters of galaxies that are moving towards each other from either end. The researchers hope the 50-hour dataset they are now analyzing will reveal more detail. Recently, additional observations have found magnetic fields propagating along the entire length of the second filament. The researchers plan to publish this work soon.
The presence of huge magnetic fields in at least these two strands provides important new information. "It caused quite a lot of activity," Wang Veren said, "because we now know that magnetic fields are relatively strong."
Light through the void
If these magnetic fields originated in the infant universe, the question arises: how? “People have been thinking about this issue for a long time,” said Tanmai Vachaspati of Arizona State University.
In 1991, Vachaspati suggested that magnetic fields could have arisen during an electroweak phase transition - the moment, a split second after the Big Bang, when electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces became distinguishable. Others have suggested that magnetism materialized microseconds later when protons were formed. Or shortly thereafter: the late astrophysicist Ted Harrison argued in the earliest primordial theory of magnetogenesis in 1973 that a turbulent plasma of protons and electrons may have caused the first magnetic fields to appear. Yet others have suggested that this space had become magnetized even before all this, during cosmic inflation - an explosive expansion of space that supposedly jumped up - launched the Big Bang itself. It is also possible that this did not happen until the growth of structures a billion years later.
The way to test the theories of magnetogenesis is to study the structure of magnetic fields in the most pristine regions of intergalactic space, such as quiescent parts of filaments and even more empty voids. Some details - for example, whether the field lines are smooth, spiral, or “curved in all directions, like a ball of yarn or something else” (according to Vachaspati), and how the picture changes in different places and at different scales - carry rich information that can be compared to theory and modeling, for example, if magnetic fields were generated during an electroweak phase transition, as Vachaspati suggested, then the resulting lines of force should be spiral, “like a corkscrew,” he said.
The catch is that it is difficult to detect force fields that have nothing to press on.
One of the methods, first proposed by the English scientist Michael Faraday back in 1845, detects a magnetic field by the way it rotates the direction of polarization of light passing through it. The amount of "Faraday rotation" depends on the strength of the magnetic field and the frequency of light. Thus, by measuring the polarization at different frequencies, you can infer the strength of the magnetism along the line of sight. “If you do it from different places, you can make a 3D map,” Enslin said.
Researchers have begun to make rough measurements of Faraday's rotation with LOFAR, but the telescope has trouble picking out an extremely weak signal. Valentina Vacca, an astronomer and colleague of Govoni at the National Institute of Astrophysics, developed an algorithm several years ago to statistically process Faraday's subtle rotation signals by adding together many dimensions of empty spaces. “Basically, this can be used for voids,” said Vacca.
But Faraday's method will really take off when the next generation radio telescope, a giant international project called an "array of square kilometers", is launched in 2027. “SKA has to create a fantastic Faraday grid,” Enslin said.
So far, the only evidence of magnetism in the voids is that observers cannot see when they look at objects called blazars located behind the voids.
Blazars are bright beams of gamma rays and other energetic sources of light and matter, powered by supermassive black holes. When gamma rays travel through space, they sometimes collide with ancient microwaves, resulting in an electron and a positron. These particles then hiss and turn into low-energy gamma rays.
But if the blazar light passes through a magnetized void, then low-energy gamma rays will seem absent, reasoned Andrei Neronov and Evgeny Vovk of the Geneva Observatory in 2010. The magnetic field will deflect electrons and positrons from the line of sight. When they decay into low-energy gamma rays, those gamma rays will not be directed towards us.
Indeed, when Neronov and Vovk analyzed data from a suitably located blazar, they saw its high-energy gamma rays, but not the low-energy gamma signal. “This is the absence of a signal, which is a signal,” Vachaspati said.
The lack of signal is unlikely to be a smoking weapon, and alternative explanations for the missing gamma rays have been proposed. However, subsequent observations increasingly point to the hypothesis of Neronov and Vovk that the voids are magnetized. “This is the opinion of the majority,” said Durer. Most convincingly, in 2015, one team superimposed many blazars measurements behind the voids and managed to tease the faint halo of low-energy gamma rays around the blazers. The effect is exactly what one would expect if the particles were scattered by weak magnetic fields - measuring only about one millionth of a trillion as strong as a refrigerator magnet.
The biggest mystery of cosmology
It is striking that this amount of primary magnetism may be exactly what is needed to resolve the Hubble stress - the problem of the surprisingly rapid expansion of the universe.
This is what Poghosyan realized when he saw the recent computer simulations of Carsten Jedamzik from the University of Montpellier in France and his colleagues. The researchers added weak magnetic fields to a simulated, plasma-filled young universe and found that protons and electrons in the plasma flew along magnetic field lines and accumulated in areas of weakest field strength. This clumping effect caused the protons and electrons to combine to form hydrogen - an early phase change known as recombination - earlier than they might otherwise have.
Poghosyan, reading Jedamzik's article, realized that this could relieve Hubble's tension. Cosmologists are calculating how quickly space should expand today by observing the ancient light emitted during recombination. The light reveals a young universe dotted with blobs that were formed from sound waves splashing around in the primordial plasma. If the recombination occurred earlier than expected due to the effect of thickening of the magnetic fields, then the sound waves could not propagate that far forward, and the resulting drops would be smaller. This means that the spots we've seen in the sky since recombination should be closer to us than the researchers thought. The light emanating from the clumps had to travel a shorter distance to reach us, which means that the light had to travel through a faster expanding space.“It's like trying to run on an expanding surface; you cover less distance, - said Poghosyan.
The result is that smaller droplets mean a higher estimated speed of cosmic expansion, which brings the estimated speed much closer to measuring how quickly supernovae and other astronomical objects actually appear to be flying apart.
“I thought, wow,” Poghosyan said, “this may indicate to us the real presence of [magnetic fields]. So I immediately wrote to Carsten.” The two met in Montpellier in February, just before the prison was closed. Their calculations showed that, indeed, the amount of primary magnetism required to solve the Hubble tension problem also agrees with the blazar observations and the assumed size of the initial fields required to grow huge magnetic fields encompassing galaxy clusters and filaments. “It means that all this somehow fits together,” said Poghosyan, “if it turns out to be true.”