Physics of the Plasma Universe
Anthony L. Peratt
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In one page
Anthony Peratt spent thirty-seven years doing plasma physics at Livermore and Los Alamos and for the United States Department of Energy, and this book is his case that the same physics runs the sky. Stars, nebulae and the thin stuff between galaxies are plasma — gas whose electrons have been pulled loose — and plasma does not behave like an ordinary gas. It carries electric current, it pinches itself into filaments along its own magnetic field, it builds double layers that accelerate particles to high energy, and it radiates synchrotron light that tells you the magnetic field is there. Peratt walks from the fundamentals through Birkeland currents in cosmic plasma, the Biot-Savart law at galactic scale, electric fields and double layers in astrophysics, synchrotron radiation and cosmic-ray transport, and on into supercomputer particle-in-cell simulations that take a laboratory pinch and scale it up to a galaxy. The second edition of 2015 adds interstellar hydrogen filaments and galactic Bennett pinches drawn from Gerrit Verschuur’s Green Bank radio observations.
Why it matters hereChapter 9 is about self-organised plasma objects — plasmoids, filaments, pinches, the things the orbs are argued to be — and this is the standard reference that treats those objects as the ordinary furniture of the universe rather than as curiosities, at every scale from a laboratory electrode to a galaxy. Chapter 16 gets the cosmological half: a book-length argument that the large-scale structure of the sky is shaped by currents and magnetic fields in a conducting medium, which is the observational company the vacuum-at-cosmic-scale story keeps.
What it claims
01The organising idea of the book is that cosmic plasma is a current-carrying medium and that the electrodynamics of currents — not gravity alone — shapes what we see. The chapter order states it: fundamentals, then Birkeland currents in cosmic plasma, then the Biot-Savart law in cosmic plasma, then electric fields in cosmic plasma, before any astrophysical application is attempted.Second edition, chapters 1 to 4, pages 1 to 174
Published and peer-reviewed02Field-aligned currents are treated as one phenomenon across a range of scales spanning many orders of magnitude — the same dynamics in a laboratory device, in the auroral current system above the Earth, and in galactic space. The second edition gives that argument a chapter of its own.Second edition, chapter 12, Dynamics of Field-Aligned Currents in the Laboratory, Aurorae, and Galactic Space, pages 341 to 360
Published and peer-reviewed03Cosmic plasma sustains electric fields and double layers, thin structures across which a voltage drop accelerates particles. Peratt gives double layers in astrophysics a full chapter in both editions, immediately after the chapter on electric fields — the pairing that makes particle acceleration a plasma-electrical process rather than a purely magnetic one.Second edition, chapters 4 and 5, pages 139 to 203; first edition, chapters 4 and 5, pages 137 to 196
Published and peer-reviewed04The observational handle on all of it is radiation. Synchrotron radiation, the light relativistic electrons emit as they spiral along a magnetic field, gets the longest chapter in the book, followed by the transport of cosmic radiation — together about a quarter of the text, and the part that turns the model into something a telescope can test.Second edition, chapters 6 and 7, pages 205 to 287
Settled physics05The method is laboratory plasma experiment plus supercomputer particle-in-cell simulation, scaled up. Both editions close on particle-in-cell simulation of cosmic plasma, and the second edition adds a further chapter on developments in plasma simulation before its concluding chapter on plasma astrophysics. The publisher records the contents as the result of the author’s thirty-seven years of research at the Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories and the United States Department of Energy.Second edition, chapters 10, 11 and 13, pages 311 to 339 and 361 to 371; Springer’s description of the second edition
On the bench now06What the second edition adds, and what to watch in it: chapters 8 and 9 are built on Gerrit Verschuur’s research into interstellar neutral hydrogen filaments observed with the 100-metre Green Bank telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and Springer’s own description says the book presents detailed information for a non-cosmological origin of the quadrupole moment of the cosmic microwave background.Second edition, chapters 8 and 9, pages 289 to 309; Springer’s description of the second edition
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2780-9TWO EDITIONS, ONE RECORD. The DOI carried by this record, 10.1007/978-1-4612-2780-9, is Springer’s record for the FIRST edition, New York 1992, eight chapters and 283 numbered pages of text. The second edition is a separate Springer record, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7819-5, Springer New York 2015, print ISBN 978-1-4614-7818-8 and electronic ISBN 978-1-4614-7819-5, thirteen chapters running to page 371 plus an erratum to chapter 13. This sheet describes the work across both, and every locator below names the edition it belongs to. The author is Anthony L. Peratt, sole author of both editions. SOURCE NOT REACHED. The book is closed at the publisher and no copy of it was reached, so no text of it is reproduced here and none was read. SpringerLink answers automated requests for both the book page and the chapter pages with a client-challenge page rather than content, and the Crossref deposits for the individual chapters carry no abstracts. WHAT WAS READ INSTEAD, AND WHERE EACH CLAIM COMES FROM. The table of contents used here is the publisher’s own, reconstructed from the twenty-two chapter records Springer deposited with Crossref under the two book DOIs — each giving a chapter number, a chapter title and a page range — which is why the claims below are located by chapter title and pages rather than by any sentence of the book. The publisher’s description of the second edition, quoted in part in the claims, was read from the Open Library record for the work, OL4088680W, which carries Springer’s own blurb; the biographical detail of thirty-seven years at Livermore and Los Alamos and the Department of Energy, the reliance on Gerrit Verschuur’s research in chapters 8 and 9, the Green Bank 100-metre telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and the statement about the cosmic microwave background quadrupole moment all come from that description and are attributed to it, never to a page of the book. FIRST EDITION CONTENTS as deposited: 1 Cosmic Plasma Fundamentals, 1 to 41; 2 Birkeland Currents in Cosmic Plasma, 43 to 91; 3 Biot-Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma, 93 to 135; 4 Electric Fields in Cosmic Plasma, 137 to 170; 5 Double Layers in Astrophysics, 171 to 196; 6 Synchrotron Radiation, 197 to 252; 7 Transport of Cosmic Radiation, 253 to 283; 8 Particle-in-Cell Simulation of Cosmic Plasma, 285 to 303. SECOND EDITION CONTENTS as deposited: 1 Cosmic Plasma Fundamentals, 1 to 40; 2 Birkeland Currents in Cosmic Plasma, 41 to 91; 3 Biot-Savart Law in Cosmic Plasma, 93 to 137; 4 Electric Fields in Cosmic Plasma, 139 to 174; 5 Double Layers in Astrophysics, 175 to 203; 6 Synchrotron Radiation, 205 to 257; 7 Transport of Cosmic Radiation, 259 to 287; 8 Critical Ionization Effect in Interstellar Clouds, 289 to 298; 9 Neutral Hydrogen Filaments and Dynamics of Galactic Bennett Pinches, 299 to 309; 10 Particle-in-Cell Simulation of Cosmic Plasma, 311 to 330; 11 Further Developments in Plasma Simulation, 331 to 339; 12 Dynamics of Field-Aligned Currents in the Laboratory, Aurorae, and Galactic Space, 341 to 360; 13 Plasma Astrophysics, 361 to 371; 14 Erratum to Plasma Astrophysics, E1 to E2.
How to cite it
Anthony L. Peratt (1992) Physics of the Plasma Universe. doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-2780-9
Where it sits in the curriculum
Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbsThe vacuum at cosmic scale