Thursday 30 November 2023

Plasma

"Starfog."

I have tried in earlier posts to summarize conditions inside the Cloud Universe. One factor is as follows:

"'...irradiation keeps a goodly fraction of the interstellar medium in the plasma state. Thus we get electromagnetic action of every sort...'" (p. 759)

Plasma is one of the four states of matter. Electromagnetism is one of the four forces of nature. That is an unusual symmetry, now that I have googled and become aware of it. I do not understand what plasma is. I gather from its Wikipedia article that plasma is common inside stars and throughout space but apparently it is even commoner inside the Cloud Universe. What this amounts to is that space inside the Cloud Universe is full of matter and energy in a dynamic and turbulent state that is qualitatively completely dissimilar to any of the solids, liquids or gasses that we encounter on a planetary surface. 

3 comments:

Jim Baerg said...

The difference between a gas and a plasma is that in a gas the electrons are bound to atomic nuclei in neutral atoms, while in a plasma a large fraction (or maybe all) of the atoms have some (or all of the) electrons separated from the atomic nuclei.
This means the plasma is a good conductor of electricity, unlike a non-plasma gas.
This results in lots of weird and wonderful phenomena involving electromagnetic fields and the plasma.

Does that help?

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Thank you. It helps some.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

It does. But I don't have your knowledge of science.

Ad astra! Sean