http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Ancie ... d_999.html
M82 Magnetic Field
Mining the far reaches of the universe for clues about its past, a team of scientists including Philipp Kronberg of Los Alamos National Laboratory has proposed that magnetic fields of ancient galaxies like ours were just as strong as those existing today, prompting a rethinking of how our galaxy and others may have formed.
With powerful telescopes and sophisticated measurements, the team probed back in time to see the ancient universe as it existed some 8 to 9 billion years ago. Their research was published in the July 17 edition of Nature.
By measuring how far the radio waves were pulled toward the red end of the spectrum-known as "redshift"-Kronberg and his colleagues homed in on the location of magnetic fields in the distant universe.
What allowed the team to take a more detailed look at the ancient universe in this Nature letter was the addition of high-resolution optical spectra by Martin Bernet, Francesco Miniati, and Simon Lilly at the ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) from the European Southern Observatory's 8-meter telescope, located in Chile's Atacama Desert.
"It was thought that, looking back in the past, earlier galaxies would not have generated much magnetic field," Kronberg said.
"The results of this study show that the magnetic fields within Milky Way-like galaxies have been every bit as strong over the last two-thirds of the Universe's age as they are now-and possibly even stronger then."
This research suggests that the magnetic fields in galaxies did not arise due to a slow, large-scale dynamo effect, which would have taken 5 billion to 10 billion years to reach their current measured levels. "There must be some other explanation for a much quicker and earlier amplification of galactic magnetic fields," Kronberg said.
With this in mind, what type of a Universe are we looking at now? Expanding, Electric, Cyclic? Something completely different? Can we start to look for other types of fields encircling larger structures? Would a cluster of galaxies (like the Virgo Cluster) contain Magnetic field lines in such a monstrous scale that all the galaxies within that cluster interact somehow? What about merging galaxies and those magnetic fields? Can those galactic magnetic fields have any impact on smaller objects like the stars and planets within the galaxy? The sun produces some pretty CME's and awesome loops that follow its own magnetic lines, so do galaxies take their structures from field lines of this size and type on a galactic scale?This realization brings a new focus on the broader question of how galaxies form. Instead of the commonly held view that magnetic fields have little relevance to the genesis of new galaxies, it now appears that they are indeed important players. If so, strong magnetic fields a long time ago are one of the essential ingredients that explain the very existence of our galaxy and others like it.
More questions than answers..!! D'oh!
