The Plasma Blindspot
Astronomers have long struggled with a huge discrepancy. That is, the universe's visible components (i.e. stars, gas, dust, galaxies) do not provide enough gravitational pull to explain the observed motions of individual galaxies or vast clusters of galaxies. On a scale as small as the Solar System, no problem. The long-proven math of gravity's equations is sufficient, trustworthy, and accurate. But at the larger scales, the gravity-only ideal begins to fall apart. Since the force of gravity accompanies mass, then this discrepancy is perceived as a "missing mass" problem. In other words, there seems to be a lot of mass that is undetectable, yet providing gravity. At first this was thought to be objects (e.g. like planets) that don't produce their own light.
The motions observed infer this "missing mass." This anomaly was first quantified in the 1930s and led to the hypothesis of dark matter. Today, dark matter remains an ad hoc "fudge factor" and purely a mathematical construct added to Isaac Newton's or Albert Einstein's gravity equations just so the results of the math match the observed motions. But there is still yet no direct detection of such matter despite decades of relentless search and billions of dollars worth of research grants and equipment thrown at it! It is truly still yet... "dark."
Critics of dark matter argue this kind of "scientific" (mathematical) approach piles hypothetical objects on top unproven assumptions. What assumptions? Mainly that gravity is the only force shaping our universe. But any alternative explanations or hypotheses are usually "filtered out" by the adherents to the consensus Standard Model of the Big Bang, whether actual scientists or science news writers. Some of the critics, even though they are PhD scientists and astronomers, have even been black-balled from scientific journals and/or from using the big telescopes (see particularly, Dr. Halton Arp in his books, Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies and Seeing Red). But one particular alternate theory that is like the elephant in the living room is electromagnetic plasma dynamics (i.e. plasma cosmology). It offers a testable resolution without invoking exotic make-believe dark matter. But it does question the prevailing underlying assumptions of a gravity-only universe.
Early Hints: Redshift, Jan Oort, & the Milky Way's Disc (1930s)
Dutch astronomer, Jan Oort pioneered the issue while studying stars near the Sun. He used stellar spectra to measure the velocities of stars perpendicular to the galactic plane. What, you say?! Yeah, that sounds like a foreign language to most people. But it actually can be understood easily enough. Bear with me and you'll see.
You already know when you feed a light beam from your window through a prism you get rainbows on the wall; a spectrum of colors ranging from deep red to violet. However, this rainbow, if it is sharply focused, is crossed by many thin, dark lines known as "absorption lines." These occur because atoms in the Sun's cooler outer layers "absorb" specific wavelengths (colors) of light coming from the hotter interior. These lines directly correspond to the energy levels of electrons in particular elements. This is a really amazing thing! A gift, you might even say. Why? Well, have you ever wondered how scientists know what the Sun is made of? This is how. Each element listed in the Periodic Table of Elements leaves a unique set of absorption lines, acting like a fingerprint. Also, by contrast, if those same elements are heated up in the lab until they emit light themselves, and we pass that light through a prism, they produce bright "emission lines" at the very same wavelengths as the dark absorption lines.
So, by recognizing these absorption lines unique to hydrogen, we know that there is hydrogen in the Sun's atmosphere absorbing some of the Sun's light before it reaches us. With this understanding, astronomers then turned their prisms (spectrometers) to starlight, and discovered the same kind of thing. The stars are not all like the Sun. There are different kinds, emitting and absorbing different elements in different quantities.
But there's a bit more. You have experienced how when a police car goes by you with siren blaring, how the sound of the siren changes from a high pitch to a low pitch, right? This effect is called the Doppler shift (named after Christian Doppler, who proposed it in 1842). Because the siren is moving relative to you, the sound wave coming from the siren is getting crunched together as it approaches, so it is a higher pitch. As it passes by, the sound wave coming from the siren is getting stretched out, so it is a lower pitch.
The same thing can happen to light. For instance, a common absorption line of hydrogen occurs at 656.3 nanometers (don't worry about it). This line is called the "hydrogen alpha" line, or H-alpha. If we see this line, we know we are looking at hydrogen. However, if the object in space emitting this light is moving away from us at a high speed, this hydrogen line might be measured to be 660 nanometers instead (stretched). This is a longer wavelength, or a slower frequency, like the siren moving away from us. And since the redder light in the rainbow is a longer wavelength, we say the H-alpha line is "redshifted" (i.e. stretched). If the object emitting the light was coming toward us, it would be shifted toward the bluer colors. Thus it would be said to be "blue shifted" (i.e. crunched together).
Armed with this, you are now ready to understand how Jan Oort made his measurements. He measuring the Doppler shifts (redshifts) in star light spectra. This gave him the implied velocities of stars. He was particularly interested in the ones that were moving perpendicular (90°) to the Milky Way's galactic plane (i.e. its disc shape). Think of the galaxy as a pancake with a slightly thicker middle. He then calculated the mass density needed to keep those stars from escaping the Milky Way. Kind of like figuring out how thick a trampoline surface must be for you to jump as high as you just did. After doing the math, he discovered the visible matter only adds up to about half of what is needed to keep the stars from escaping. And since we don't see stars escaping he concluded the disk of the Milky Way must contain twice as much mass as we are able to see.
This local "missing mass" in the Milky Way disc became known as the Oort Limit.
Fritz Zwicky & the Coma Cluster of Galaxies (1933)
The virial theorem was developed in 1870 by Rudolf Clausius. It is a simple but powerful idea in physics and astronomy. It says that for any group of things (like stars or galaxies) held together by gravity and not flying apart or collapsing, there's a balance between how fast everything is moving and how strong gravity is pulling. In other words, it states that when a system is stable, the total kinetic energy (energy of motion) is equal to half the gravitational potential energy, but with the opposite sign. Basically, that means if gravity is pulling everything in very strongly, then the objects in question must be moving very fast to keep the system from collapsing. If the gravity is too weak, or the objects are too fast, then the system would fly apart.
Imagine a swarm of bees. If they're buzzing fast but not escaping the swarm, something strong must be holding them close. That swarm is the Coma Cluster, and the individual bees are the galaxies.
Vera Rubin & Kent Ford's Rotation Curves: A Decisive Anomaly (1960s-1970s)
This discrepancy she discovered demanded 5 to 10x more mass in extended invisible halo far beyond the apparent edge of the galaxy. She argued, it was either that, or a breakdown of Newtonian gravity and Kepler's laws at galactic scales! Astronomers chose to keep gravity and propose a missing mass.
Dark Matter: A Purely Mathematical Solution
Astronomers preserved Newton's laws by postulating this dark matter. This matter had to be non-baryonic (i.e. not made of normal atomic matter). Why? Because it wasn't emitting an type of radiation. It must be electromagnetically inert because it didn't reveal its presence in this manner. They proposed imaginary particles or objects, and the candidates multiplied:
- MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects): brown dwarfs? neutron stars? black holes?
- WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles): non-baryonic exotic particles.
- Variants: Hot (HDM, e.g., neutrinos), Cold (CDM), Warm (WDM), Self-Interacting (SIDM), Fuzzy (FDM), etc.
- FAIRIE DUST (Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories).
OK, that last one is made up to exaggerate a point regarding the rest of the list. Thank you, Dr. Donald E. Scott, an electrical engineer from his book, The Electric Sky. But after nearly 60 years, searches yield no definitive proof. MACHOs, which are deemed to be real baryonic objects (made of atoms), account for less than 5% of the required (inferred) mass. WIMPs remain undetected and only imaginary. Princeton cosmologist Jim Peebles called this situation an embarrassment, referring to the fact that the most dominant matter in the universe are merely hypothetical and not real.
And if you accept Big Bang cosmology, which requires a flat geometry and structured formation, things get worse! You then have to believe about 23% of the universe is dark matter, 73% dark energy (more ad hoc not covered in this article; even weirder; don't ask), leaving ordinary atomic matter at about 4% of the entire universe! Fully 96% of the universe is said to be unseen and unmeasured! This is what the gravity-only model gives you. Shocking, yes? It should be. Instead, it is touted as "scientific," and you will be labeled a kook if you doubt it. For, it is reasoned, how could the majority of all those astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, and mathematicians be wrong? They're smarter than you!
But seriously folks, is gravity the only tool in the astrophysics toolbox? In modern astronomy, apparently so. But is that the only tool in the real world's toolbox? Resoundingly no! One particular tool is being grossly neglected.
Mordechai Milgrom & MOND
An Alternative: Plasma
But what if the underlying assumptions were insufficient? In other words, what if gravity wasn't the only major force shaping the universe. A deeper critique targets the gravity-only paradigm and for a good reason. For instance, we know the universe is about 99.9% plasma; even gravity-only scientists say this. But what is plasma? Well, in this case, it's not the stuff in your blood. It was, however, named after that very thing by Irving Langmuir in 1928. But glad you asked about plasma. This might take a minute. Hang in there. You've made it this far!
Plasma is sometimes said to be the fourth state of matter. The other three you are very familiar with here on Earth. They are, of course, solid, liquid, and gas. Think of H2O in its states, ice, water, steam, and you have a good picture. But the fourth state is plasma. There may even be a fifth one at extremely cold temperatures called the Bose-Einstein condensate. Yeah, that's another story. But here on Earth, the three states are common, and the fourth state is indeed, rare. It's not unknown, however. For example, lightning is plasma. Welding arcs are plasma. The aurorae are plasma. Even neon signs and fluorescent light tubes are lit up with plasma. Or, you might be thinking of the toy we all love to play with... the plasma globe (see pic at the top of this article). When you touch the glass, the electrical plasma filament currents find easier paths to ground from the high voltage ball in the middle of the globe to your fingers. And if you hold your fingers on it, they snake around like they are alive!
What is this stuff really? Well, first off, the Sun is entirely a plasma ball. So, if someone asks you what plasma is, you can just point to the Sun. Every star you see at night... fully plasma. I know you've always heard the stars and the Sun were "balls of gas" but this is not accurate no matter what Pumbaa says to Timon. In The Lion King, after Timon tells Pumbaa that the stars are fireflies, Pumbaa responds, "Oh, gee. I always thought they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away." But this is not true. They are not gas (third state), they are plasma (fourth state). Would you point to an ice cube and say it is water? No. So, it is not entirely accurate. There's much more.
But in fact, more than 99.9% of everything you see in space is plasma. Every time you read "gas" or "dust" in articles on astronomy, I want you to understand, this is not accurate. It is not gas. It is not dust. It is plasma. Nebulae are not "gas clouds"; they're "plasma clouds." Some are in "glow mode" and some are in "dark mode," but they are still plasma. More on that mode stuff later.
Plasma may start out as a mere gas, just like steam may start out as water. And just like ice, water, and steam have extremely different properties, so plasma as compared to gas. But as voltage is applied to a gas and increased, the atoms of the gas get excited, bump into each other harder and harder, until they can no longer hold onto their electrons. This is called "ionization." When this happens, electrical current begin to flow through the gas. When this happens, the "gas" no longer acts like a gas, but something else. If it lights up, it looks like it's alive.
Plasma has three distinct modes: dark mode (current is flowing but it doesn't glow), glow mode (current is sufficient enough to cause it to light up), and arc mode (current is so high that the plasma becomes an extremely fantastic conductor of electricity). In arc mode, things get super weird and unpredictable. That's lightning. How unpredictable is it? Plasma plays by a different set of rules that are nothing like a gas, a liquid, or a solid. So, it is definitely wrong to refer to it as simply "an ionized gas." It's no longer gas. You wouldn't refer to ice as "hard water" would you? No.
In this nebula, those plasma filaments twirl around each other and stretch about 110 light-years! And believe it or not, though it is extremely faint, this famous nebula stretches about 3° across the sky. That's about 6x the size of the Moon in the sky!
Plasma & Electromagnetism
Maybe you remember in your physics class, that when electrical current flows through a conductor (e.g. a wire), it produces this magnetic field. And perhaps your class made small electromagnets as an experiment. And the opposite is also true. When a conductor is passed through a magnetic field, it produces a current flow in that conductor.
Now here's the kicker, and one of the main points of this article. You cannot have a magnetic field without electricity. But modern-day astronomy does. And you can't have electricity without a magnetic field. Modern-day astronomy hardly takes electricity into account at all. But because you cannot have one without the other, this is why this force was named "electromagnetism." It was once thought they were separate forces (magnetism vs electricity), but we now know they are one and the same force. You might be saying, "Yeah, but I have a natural permanent magnet that doesn't produce electricity!" But in reality, that magnet you have was magnetized by the flow of electricity somewhere in the Earth at one time in its history. The magnet just "remembers" it.
Think of speakers and mics. Believe it or not they are the same device! In one, you force current an audio signal (electrical) through the speaker wires and this causes the diaphragm of the speaker to move back and forth because it has a magnet attached to it). This produces the sound waves you enjoy. But mics are the opposite. You speak, making sounds waves, that hit the mic's diaphragm, which is attached to a magnet surrounded by a coil of wires. The movement of the magnet through the wires, produces electric current in them. In fact, you can use a speaker as a mic, and a mic as a speaker; old intercom systems did just that. They're physically the same thing. One is just made to do its job a little better than the other.
The same holds true for motors and generators. They are physically the same. If you put current in the wires, the motor will rotate. Or if you manually rotate it the wires will produce a current.
I said all that to say this: The amazing blind spot of astronomy is plasma's electromagnetism, which, by definition, is in all plasma. And since plasma makes up 99.9% of every thing in space, surely it plays a more than vital role in the way things work. By the way, electromagnetism is 1000 trillion trillion trillion times more powerful than gravity! That's a 1 followed by 39 zeros! It looks like this:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
So, do you think it is possible for the electromagnetism of plasma to have any say in the way things operate in space? Well, duh, yes. But you know what? Modern-day astronomy and astrophysics do not give it even a hair of consideration, almost to the point of completely ignoring it. How did this happen? It's quite a tale, and certainly unbelievable.
Kristian Birkeland & the Aurorae
You might be told, "But space is a vacuum, and vacuums are insulators, and therefore electricity cannot flow through the vacuum of space." This is false because its first premise is false. Space is certainly not a vacuum. It is a very thin plasma.
But did the scientists say it was an electrical current that connected them? Nope. Instead, even today, they call it "the solar wind," when it is not a wind at all! And notice, it was not "bad science" or "pseudo-science" that caused Birkeland to be ridiculed his whole life. Instead, "consensus science" was the critic.
Hannes Alfven & MHD
But his warnings were ignored.
Alfven would roll over in his grave if he saw how MHD is still being used today. In his lifetime, he regretted its widespread misuse because it ignores key features in real plasmas. In his 1977 paper, "Electric currents in the solar atmosphere" and following lectures, he emphasized that MHD is valid only under specific and ideal conditions, but that a full description of plasma's behavior must incorporate full electrodynamics. He taught that MHD was a tool, not the whole toolbox, lest physicists miss the electric currents driving the universe.
But today, they still miss it!
You can see how Alfven's cautions and ideas have been ignored in every single article about space news. You will never hear plasma mentioned. Instead, you will only hear the words, "gravity," "gas," "dust," and "magnetic fields." Yet today's astrophysics has magnetic fields without electricity, something that is impossible in the real world. The list of abuse can be shown to include:
- Treating all cosmic plasma as a perfectly conducting fluid with "frozen-in" magnetic fields (something Alfven himself said he regretted coming up with). Alfven intended MHD to merely approximate large-scale magnetic behavior in conducting fluids, not space plasmas, which are fundamentally different!
- Applying MHD to collisionless space plasma (99.9% of the universe!) when MHD is valid only when collisions dominate, like in space plasma.
- Erasing electric fields completely, treating them as negligible, or screening them out, when MHD's electric fields were explicitly included in the full theory.
- Smoothing over plasma's double-layers, currents, particle acceleration, as being central to plasma's behavior in space, and treating it as a mere "inert gas" with "frozen-in" magnetic fields.
By being blind to the electromagnetism shaping the universe, astronomers exclude it in simulating galaxy formation, star birth, black hole jets, and cosmic filaments. They further assume infinite conductivity (another misuse of MHD), ignore electric fields (despite plasma being made of charged particles!), and treat plasma like a "neutral gas" with some kind of magnetic garnish applied for flavor.
What they are missing because of this blind spot:
- Birkeland currents are what power galactic rotation & form spiral arms, all without dark matter.
- Double layers which accelerate particles & explode in solar/stellar flares.
- Pinch instabilities, which can form stars, jets, and dense cores. No need for the physical impossibility of "collapsing gas" to form stars.
- Electric fields along B-lines, which drive aurorae and cosmic rays
- Collisionless shocks which can shape supernova remnants, and the heliospheres of stars.
The things in the above list are not exotic (like dark matter). They are observed in labs here on Earth, seen in space, and reproduced in simulations that take electromagnetism and plasma's nature into consideration.
Alfven even said, "The difference between a plasma and a gas is as great as between a conductor and an insulator." He also said, "The use of MHD to describe cosmic plasmas must be done with great caution, because real plasmas are not continuous fluids, but collections of charged particles whose behavior can differ fundamentally from that predicted by fluid equations."
Star Formation
Consider a practical application. We are told by the current theory of stellar evolution that the interstellar medium is "gas." We are constantly being told that stars form from "gravitational collapse of molecular gas clouds." But this is impossible physically. First of all, if space is a vacuum, as they insist, then how is it that gas collapses on itself? This violates the most fundamental law of physics regarding gas. that is, Graham's Law of Effusion. This law states simply is a statement of why different gases spread out naturally at different rates; but nevertheless, they naturally spread out unless they are confined in a container. So in a vacuum, gas spreads out.
Also, if a gas is compressed as they say, by gravity, it heats up. This is the first law of thermodynamics. And as it heats up, it expands further.. spreads out more and faster. If you could somehow keep forcibly collapsing it, it will explode (think diesel)... which is a catastrophic "spreading out."
So, how can gases collapse to form stars? They can't. There are too many real physical impediments to this story.
But what about plasma? Remember the Z-pinch thing? Rather than relying solely on imaginary gravitational collapse of a gas in a vacuum, cosmic electric currents flowing through filamentary plasma in the interstellar medium generate powerful self-constricting magnetic fields. These Z-pinches rapidly compress plasma and embedded dust into dense, hot cores along current axes which could achieve incredible fusion-high temperatures, and could easily trigger star formation. In space, observed protostellar jets, hourglass nebulae, and filamentary structures in star-forming regions align with laboratory Z-pinch dynamics, suggesting electromagnetism, not gravity, is the driving force of star birth. Many nebulae in space show this hourglass shape that most likely is a Z-pinch.
Timeline of the Missing Mass Saga
| Year | Astronomer/Development | Key Observation | Response |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1930s | Jan Oort | Stellar motions in Milky Way require 2x visible mass | Local disk discrepancy |
| 1933 | Fritz Zwicky | Coma Cluster velocities demand 400x visible mass | "Dark matter" coined |
| 1960s-1970s | Rotation curves (e.g., Rubin & Ford) | Flat velocities in spirals | Massive dark halos |
| 1983 | Mordechai Milgrom | Proposes MOND | Modify gravity |
| Ongoing | Plasma models (Peratt et al.) | Electromagnetic forces fit data | No dark matter needed |
Galaxy Rotation Considering Plasma
Now, back to the original problem of galaxy rotation and dark matter. Anthony Peratt, a plasma physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, employed three-dimensional, fully electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations in the 1980s to model galaxy formation and dynamics within a plasma universe framework. By simulating interactions between massive, current-carrying Birkeland filaments (which are twisted plasma structures with currents up to 1018 amps!) these computations demonstrated how electromagnetic forces compress and reconfigure the plasma, forging elliptical, barred, and spiral galaxies without invoking dark matter. The pinch effect from self-generating magnetic fields not only produced observed morphologies of galaxies, synchrotron emissions, and HI distributions, but also yielded flat rotation curves, where orbital velocities remain constant with radius due to the filaments' azimuthal magnetic confinement, offering an electromagnetism-drive alternative to the gravity-only models.
Conclusion: Nothing Is Missing
Dark matter began as a fix for Newtonian discrepancies and evolved into cosmology's dominant component--all without tangible evidence. It safeguards gravity but at the cost of fabricating unobservable and exotic entities. Electromagnetic plasma dynamics, grounded in laboratory-tested physics, resolves galaxy rotation and structure formation straightforwardly. Newton's gravity works where applicable. But in plasma-dominated space, Maxwell, Lorentz, and Alfven reign. The "case of the missing matter" closes not with invisible gnomes and fairy tales, but by recognizing the right forces at play. Just plasma doing what plasma does and modern-day astronomy blind to it.
Dark matter isn't missing mass. It's the mass of evidence for electromagnetism that astronomy has chosen to ignore. Alfven didn't just predict it, he lived it. And the universe, glowing in plasma from auroras to quasars, is still trying to tell us:
It's electric.
Makes infinitely more sense than any of the explanations I’ve heard from mainstream grant receiving scientists
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