NASA scientists say they‘ve made key discoveries about
the northern lights after a fleet of satellites and ground-based stations
captured “spectacular eruptions” of the mysterious phenomenon above Canada
earlier this year. The NASA project is called THEMIS (Time History of Events and
Macroscales Interactions during Substorms.)
An unusual magnetic storm offered the first clear evidence of colossal magnetic
columns that run between Earth and the Sun and offer a “conduit for energy” that
manifests as bursts of northern lights. In a statement the team described the
magnetic columns behaving like ropes, a twisted bundle of magnetic fields
organized much like the twisted hemp of a mariner’s rope.
Several other astronomic observations reveal the presence of “magnetic flux
ropes” in space: comet tails, solar coronal streamers and polar plumes,
interstellar nebulas’ filamentary structures, twisting plasma filaments spiking
out of galaxy cores some 60 000 light years in length. The existence of a
mega-ampere flux tube of current, connecting the Jovian satellite Io to its
mother planet Jupiter, was verified with the passage of the Voyager spacecraft.
Regardless of scale, the motion of charged particles produces a self-magnetic
field that can act on other collections of particles or plasmas, internally or
externally. Plasmas in relative motion are coupled via currents that they drive
through each other. Currents are therefore expected in a universe of
inhomogeneous astrophysical plasmas of all sizes.
Two major perspective shift about life and our place in the universe emanate
from this discovery.
First, empty space is not empty, but filled with channels
of energy very much like our body is a dense network of veins, arteries, fluid
channels and nerves.
Second, a shared characteristic of any “life” form is the minimal presence of
information and energy flow through organized channels. The electricity flowing
through our nerves and magnetic field emerging from our heart, hands and brain
are the same plasma flux as that being observed in outer space, albeit on a
different scale.
Our universe now appears very much interwoven, like living organisms, and why not hypothesize it may have
mental capacities of another order?
