--- title: The Electric Galaxy — Birkeland Currents, No Dark Matter --- A spiral galaxy is one of the most beautiful objects in nature — and, for the standard model, one of the most troublesome. Its stars orbit so fast that gravity from the visible matter should fling them apart; to hold them in, astronomers invoke a vast halo of **dark matter** that has never been directly detected. At its heart sits something four million times the Sun's mass crammed into a point: a **supermassive black hole**. The Electric Universe proposes a different galaxy entirely — one wired together by **electric currents**, needing no dark matter to spin and no black hole at its core. This page presents that picture on its own terms. ## The galaxy as a circuit The model descends directly from the [plasma-universe](plasma-universe) lineage. **Hannes Alfvén** argued that because the cosmos is almost entirely plasma — an electrical conductor — it must carry **electric currents**, and that those currents flow along magnetic field lines as **Birkeland currents**, the same field-aligned currents that power Earth's aurora (observed, real, ~10⁵–10⁶ amperes). Scale that physics up, the school says, and a galaxy becomes a node in a circuit: energy and angular momentum are *delivered electromagnetically* along filamentary "cosmic power lines" and released locally at **double layers**, rather than assembled slowly by gravity. The galaxy doesn't *fall* together — it gets *wired* together. ## Peratt's galaxies in the supercomputer The model's centerpiece is **Anthony Peratt's** work at Los Alamos. He ran fully electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations of **two parallel Birkeland filaments**, each carrying ~10¹⁸ amperes, interacting across cosmic distances. The filaments attract and twist, and over hundreds of millions of simulated years the plasma evolves through forms resembling **double radio galaxies → quasars → spiral galaxies** — published in *IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science* ([Part I](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1986ITPS...14..639P/abstract) and [Part II](https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6932536), Dec. 1986) and collected in [*Physics of the Plasma Universe*](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-7819-5) (Springer, 2nd ed. 2015). The claim that matters here: Peratt reported his simulated spirals had **flat rotation curves arising electromagnetically — no dark-matter halo required.** Peratt's simulation modeled a region about 10 kpc across — a computational proof of concept rather than a whole galaxy — and the flat rotation curve it produced was qualitative. What it demonstrates is a *mechanism*: that interacting current filaments can grow galaxy-like forms and flat rotation profiles with no dark-matter halo anywhere in the calculation. ## Scott's "cosmic power lines" The one genuinely **peer-reviewed** galactic-current result is **Donald Scott's** [*"Birkeland Currents: A Force-Free Field-Aligned Model"*](https://www.ptep-online.com/2015/PP-41-13.PDF) (*Progress in Physics*, 2015). Working from the standard force-free-field equations, Scott derives a striking structure: a Birkeland current is not a simple wire but a set of **nested, counter-rotating cylindrical shells**, the magnetic field winding the axis with ever-steeper pitch as you move outward. He points to observed counter-rotating structures in galaxies and around planets as the visible signature of these currents. > Precision worth keeping: Scott's *paper* derives field structure and predicts counter-rotation — it does **not** itself claim to explain rotation curves or replace dark matter. That larger framing ("dark matter? no — Birkeland currents") lives in his conference talks and interviews below, not in the peer-reviewed text. We keep the two apart. - [**Donald E. Scott: Cosmic Power Lines Part 1 | EU2015**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JST8NHoAAcA) and [**Part 2**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPNMoalTTVE) — the model presented in full. - [**Donald E. Scott: Dark Matter? No. Birkeland Currents? Yes! | Space News**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdYrgJrBFr0) — the most direct statement of the no-dark-matter claim. - [**Dr. Donald Scott: Intergalactic Birkeland Currents**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6VUy5Bt5Es) (Electric Universe UK) — the galaxy-to-galaxy transmission-line idea. ## The center: a plasmoid, not a black hole If a galaxy is a z-pinch — a current filament squeezing plasma to enormous density — then its core, in **Wal Thornhill's** reading, is not a black hole but a **plasmoid**: a self-confined, ultra-dense knot of stored electromagnetic energy, a structure well known in plasma laboratories (the dense plasma focus). The plasmoid stores energy and periodically *releases* it, firing collimated jets and — the model says — **ejecting matter as quasar "children"** along the spin axis. Thornhill reads Sgr A\*'s high-energy emission as synchrotron radiation from the circulating plasmoid, and its roughly periodic X-ray flares as the beat of a circuit rather than the chaos of infall. This is the same object the [black-holes](black-holes) page treats from the relativity side; here it is the galaxy's power plant. The model leans on **Halton Arp's** claim that high-redshift quasars are *ejected from the nuclei of nearby low-redshift galaxies* — the galactic plasmoid giving birth to quasars in pairs — which, if true, would also dismantle the redshift-distance ladder behind the [big-bang](big-bang) (Arp's [own statement of the case](https://www.haltonarp.com/articles/intrinsic_redshifts_in_quasars_and_galaxies.pdf)). - [**Evolution of Galaxies in the Plasma Universe**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6rCfQpSaMs) (See the Pattern) — a clear walkthrough of Peratt's filament-to-spiral sequence. - [**Wal Thornhill: Black Hole or Plasmoid? | Space News**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4NffTr_GMk) — the core-as-plasmoid argument. - [**Gareth Samuel: Halton Arp Quasar Model Verified | Thunderbolts**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qhd_TibDIs) — the ejected-quasar reading. ## Filaments that define structure On the largest scale the school reads the **cosmic web** as a network of Birkeland-current filaments, and points to a striking discovery near our own galactic center: the **Yusef-Zadeh radio filaments**, a population of nearly a thousand magnetized, often evenly spaced, harp-like strands threading the inner galaxy, mapped by the MeerKAT array ([Yusef-Zadeh et al. 2022](https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10552)). To EU eyes these magnetized, current-like filaments are field-aligned currents made visible. ## Related pages ## Sources & further reading - Anthony L. Peratt, "Evolution of the Plasma Universe" [I](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1986ITPS...14..639P/abstract) & [II](https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6932536), *IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci.* (1986); [*Physics of the Plasma Universe*](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-7819-5) (Springer, 2015) - Donald E. Scott, ["Birkeland Currents: A Force-Free Field-Aligned Model"](https://www.ptep-online.com/2015/PP-41-13.PDF), *Progress in Physics* (2015) - Wal Thornhill, ["The Black Hole at the Heart of Astronomy"](https://www.holoscience.com/wp/the-black-hole-at-the-heart-of-astronomy/) — the plasmoid model - [Galaxy formation (Peratt model)](https://www.plasma-universe.com/galaxy-formation/) — proponent detail page, including the disk-not-demonstrated caveat