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THE FOLLOWING IS A PRESS RELEASE FOR DISTRIBUTION FROM THE 2000
Electric-Plasma Universe Workshop, Beaverton, OR.

IMMENSE FLOWS OF CHARGED PARTICLES DISCOVERED BETWEEN THE STARS

BEAVERTON, OR.--A plasma scientist and a radio astronomer announced
the discovery of charged particle flows in interstellar space at the
1999 International Conference on Plasma Science in Monterey,
California. The discovery culminated decades of speculation and debate
whether or not electricity existed on the scale of hundreds of
thousands of light years in the interstellar space between the stars.

According to Anthony Peratt, Scientific Advisor to the United States
Department of Energy and a plasma researcher at Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico, the discovery was made by computer analyzing
large amounts of data gathered by radio telescopes from regions in
space known to be occupied by 'neutral clouds of hydrogen.' The data
was processed and the results obtained by radio astronomer Gerrit
Verschuur, Physics Department, University of Memphis. Verschuur found
that the 'neutral hydrogen clouds' were not completely a neutral gas
of hydrogen and other elements, but rather consisted of charged
particles of electrons and ions, called 'plasma.'

The name plasma as applied to charged particles was borrowed from
blood-plasma by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir in 1923 because the
particles interacted collectively in a lifelike manner in his
laboratory experiments. "Verschuur analyzed nearly two thousand
clouds, principally from the Aericibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico,
but also from other radio telescopes scattered around the globe," said
Peratt. Verschuur had previously found, under high resolution computer
processing, that the 'clouds' were not clouds at all but were instead
filaments of material which twisted and wound like helices over
enormous distances between the stars.

Peratt said that the filaments between the stars are not visible
themselves but are observable with radio telescopes that can observe
space at much longer wavelengths than are visible to the human eye.
Prof. Per Carlqvist, a researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology
in Stockholm, estimated that the interstellar filaments found by
Verschuur conducted electricity with currents as high as ten-thousand
billion amperes.

"The individual filaments in space are often called Z-pinches. These
Z-pinches occur when current-carrying plasma 'pinches' itself into a
filament by a magnetic field the current produces around the plasma.
Z-pinches, such as those produced on the Sandia National Laboratories
'Z' machine, are among the most prolific producers of X-rays known,Ó
cited Peratt.

The United States Department of Energy funded Z-machine at Sandia has
surprised the scientific community during the last few years by
breaking all records in the production of high intensity X-rays from
wire filaments converted into plasmas by million-volt pulses. Such
filaments have already been discovered in our own solar system. For
example, the aurora on Earth is known to be caused by million ampere
currents flowing down the Earth's magnetic field lines at the northern
and southern poles while similar were found by planetary explorer
spacecraft to connect the planet Jupiter with its closest satellite
Io.

That such currents existed on a much larger scale outside the solar
system and beyond the reach of spacecraft has been a topic of
conjecture among astronomers and space plasma scientists. According to
Igor Alexeff, President of the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society,
"It's not unusual that neutral hydrogen in space should show such well
organized current structures; plasma also acts in a lifelike and
intelligent way in laboratory experiments and in naturally occurring
plasmas such as lightning."

Plasma scientists have long known that 99.999 percent of all
observable matter in the universe is matter in the plasma state, often
referred to as the fourth, or fundamental, state of matter. In
contrast to the first three states of matter most familiar to us on
Earth: gases, liquids, and solids; plasmas generate and react strongly
to electromagnetic fields. Plasmas are also prodigious producers of
electromagnetic radiation. The Sun is a plasma, as are all of the
stars and interstellar space, although for the latter, it was thought
that the plasma was quite tenuous and spread out until the discovery
of the filaments.

On Earth plasma exists in the form of lightning, fluorescent bulbs,
flames, the flow of currents in conductors and semiconductors, and the
aurora. The earth actually is encased in a protective shell of plasma
called the ionosphere and magnetosphere, shielding life from
high-energy cosmic and other electromagnetic rays from space.

The discovery was called "Exciting," by S. T. Lai, a researcher at the
Air Force Research Laboratory in Hanscom, MA. Lai, an authority on a
phenomena called "critical ionization velocity," who noted that the
data fell precisely where predicted by the late physics Nobel laureate
Hannes Alfvén (1908-1995), who in his theory about the origin of
planets in 1942, calculated that if a neutral cloud in space fell
through a magnetized plasma, the neutral gas would itself become
ionized at discrete velocities.

Alfvén predicted that the signature of his plasma theory in space
would be the observation of filaments and his discrete velocities.
AlfvÈn calculated that the critical velocity of all the elements in
the periodic table could be grouped into just four velocity bands, the
first at 51 kilometers per second from hydrogen, the second at 34
kilometers per second from helium, the third centered around 14
kilometers per second from oxygen, neon, and carbon, and a fourth
centered around 6 kilometers per second from calcium, sodium, and
other heavy elements. ÒThe observed data show precisely these
velocities,Ó remarked Peratt. ÒDiscrete velocity components are seen
51, 32, 14, and 5 kilometers per second. Moreover the lines cascade
from higher velocity to lower velocity, as they must as the
radiotelescope is sighted closer to a filament according to the
theory,Ó he said.

M. Garcia, a physicist and electrical engineer at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory and C. Chan, director of the Plasma Science
Laboratory at Northeastern University suggested the possibility of of
using new high-power laser and generator facilities at the National
Laboratories to further study the filamentation processes and critical
velocity effects occurring in the interstellar medium. In any event, a
consensus that space is far more electric than earlier imagined
suggests a revision of our understanding physical processes in space
as far ranging as the formation of planets to the sources of high
energy particles and radiation.

ÒElectrical currents seem to play a significant role,Ó concluded
Peratt. A full description of the discovery will appear In the
September 1999 issue of the Astronomical Journal and the December 2000
issue of the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science.

The observation that the ÔcloudsÕ of galactic neutral hydrogen (0.0001
degree of ionization) are actually filamentary in high resolution
radiotelescope data led to the discovery that the linewidths of the
atomic species in the presence of the self-field of the
current-conducting filaments (cosmic z-pinches) fall precisely where
predicted by the CIV effect.

The figure shows a histogram of the HI emission linewidths of the
Leiden-Dwingeloo 1996 Survey (black bars).

The colored bars represent CIV data tabulated in Physics of the Plasma
Universe, A. L. Peratt, Springer-Verlag, 1992.

Critical Ionization Velocity/Neutral Hydrogen Cloud data