Plasma cosmology

Plasma cosmology is a non-standard cosmology whose central postulate is that the dynamics of ionized gases and plasmas play important, if not dominant, roles in the physics of the universe at interstellar and intergalactic scales. In contrast, the current observations and models of cosmologists and astrophysicists explain the formation, development, and evolution of large-scale structures as dominated by gravity (including its formulation in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity). The original form of the theory, Alfvén–Klein cosmology, was developed by Hannes Alfvén and Oskar Klein in the 1960s and 1970s, and holds that matter and antimatter exist in equal quantities at very large scales, that the universe is eternal rather than bounded in time by the Big Bang, and that the expansion of the observable universe is caused by annihilation between matter and antimatter rather than dark energy. Cosmologists and astrophysicists who have evaluated plasma cosmology reject it because it does not match the observations of astrophysical phenomena as well as the currently accepted Big Bang model. Very few papers supporting plasma cosmology have appeared in the literature since the mid-1990s. The term plasma universe is sometimes used as a synonym for plasma cosmology, as an alternative description of the plasma in the universe. Plasma cosmology should not be confused with the pseudo-scientific ideas of the Electric Universe, which, for example, states that electric currents flow into stars and power them like light bulbs. In the 1960s, the theory behind plasma cosmology was introduced by Alfvén, a plasma expert who won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics. He proposed the use of plasma scaling to extrapolate the results of laboratory experiments and plasma physics observations and scale them over many orders of magnitude up to the largest observable objects in the universe (see box).