Young galaxy's magnetism surprises astronomers

[Suede]

Discovery challenges prevailing model!

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/nrao-ygm092908.php

Astronomers have made the first direct measurement of the magnetic field in a young, distant galaxy, and the result is a big surprise.

Looking at a faraway protogalaxy seen as it was 6.5 billion years ago, the scientists measured a magnetic field at least 10 times stronger than that of our own Milky Way. They had expected just the opposite.

The scientists reported their findings in the October 2 issue of the journal Nature.



Let us discuss these findings.

A galaxy "6.5 billion years ago" is found to have "a magnetic field at least 10 times stronger than that of our own Milky Way".

Now think about that one for a minute.

Let us also discuss what a magnetic field is comprised of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field
Magnetic fields surround and are created by electric currents, magnetic dipoles, and changing electric fields.

I for one, find the fact that a 6.5 billion year old galaxy has a magnetic field 10 times the strength of the Milky Way highly disturbing. Considering we know that magnetic fields are a product of current, It seems odd to me that we would find any magnetic fields at all in deep space, let alone massive amounts of them strung in all dimensions.


Looking at scholarpedia's definition of galactic magnetic fields:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Galactic_magnetic_fields
The origin of the first magnetic fields in the Universe is still a mystery (Widrow 2002).

So how is it that we can create models of scientific certainty that describe galactic formation when we still don't have a solid grasp on the mechanisms responsible for the creation of galactic magnetic fields?

Anyone else have any issues with this?

I also find it odd that the Hubble deep field images show fully formed spiral galaxies all the way out to the edge of the observable universe.

Anyone have any problems with that?

 

[Nereid]

This seems to be the paper associated with this report (link is to the preprint):

http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/0811.2408"

The magnetic field pervading our Galaxy is a crucial constituent of the interstellar medium: it mediates the dynamics of interstellar clouds, the energy density of cosmic rays, and the formation of stars. The field associated with ionized interstellar gas has been determined through observations of pulsars in our Galaxy. Radio-frequency measurements of pulse dispersion and the rotation of the plane of linear polarization, i.e., Faraday rotation, yield an average value B ~ 3 microGauss. The possible detection of Faraday rotation of linearly polarized photons emitted by high-redshift quasars suggests similar magnetic fields are present in foreground galaxies with redshifts z > 1. As Faraday rotation alone, however, determines neither the magnitude nor the redshift of the magnetic field, the strength of galactic magnetic fields at redshifts z > 0 remains uncertain. Here we report a measurement of a magnetic field of B ~ 84 microGauss in a galaxy at z =0.692, using the same Zeeman-splitting technique that revealed an average value of B = 6 microGauss in the neutral interstellar gas of our Galaxy. This is unexpected, as the leading theory of magnetic field generation, the mean-field dynamo model, predicts large-scale magnetic fields to be weaker in the past rather than stronger.

According to ADS, this paper has already been cited by three others; obviously a hot topic.

 

[Suede]

Hot topic indeed.

Perhaps the flow of electrons moving toward charge equalization will be considered as a possible cause this time around.