Radio astronomy is revealing a universe alive with structures that are invisible at optical wavelengths. Filaments, jets, lobes, rings and enormous diffuse radio structures repeatedly point to energetic processes operating through plasma on scales that would once have been difficult to imagine.

One particularly intriguing discovery is the class of objects known as Odd Radio Circles, or ORCs. First identified in observations made with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, these enormous, roughly circular radio structures appeared unlike any previously recognised class of astronomical object.

“We have found an unexpected class of astronomical objects which have not previously been reported, in the Evolutionary Map of the Universe Pilot survey, using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope. The objects appear in radio images as circular edge-brightened discs about one arcmin diameter, and do not seem to correspond to any known type of object.”

Their origin is still being investigated. What is already clear is that radio astronomy continues to reveal vast structures governed by energetic plasma processes that ordinary visible-light astronomy could not show us. The electrical environment of the universe is becoming increasingly difficult to regard as a minor detail.

Full paper: Odd Radio Circles

Light is observed to bend around massive objects in space, an effect conventionally interpreted through General Relativity as gravitational lensing. Yet wherever light passes through plasma, gas or an atmosphere, refraction can also alter its path. The important question is therefore not whether refraction occurs, but whether it may contribute more to some astronomical lensing observations than is generally assumed.

Ranitesh Gupta, professor of Electrical Engineering & Technology at Lucknow University, has explored this possibility mathematically, arguing that some effects attributed to gravity may instead be explained through optical refraction. See his paper here.

From the conclusion:

“It is suggested that Gravitation is only between material bodies and that the zero-rest mass photon is unaffected by gravity. The alternative novel approach to explain phenomena such as bending of light near a star and gravitational red/blue shift is based on refraction phenomenon of optics. Bending of light is due to bending of ray due to refraction within the star's atmosphere. The red/blue shift is due to optical-phenomenon of change of wavelength (frequency remaining same) due to change in velocity of light in the atmospheric medium. Other aspects such as blackhole and gravitational-lensing are also re-examined in the new perspective of refraction phenomenon. Interesting predictions are also made. In fact many of the general-relativity-tests are explained without general-relativity on the basis of refraction. The new approach could have important bearing on understanding of space-time, gravity and cosmology.”

A related argument has been developed by Dr. Edward Dowdye, a physicist and laser-optics engineer formerly with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Dowdye has presented mathematical treatments in which refraction through plasma and gaseous environments is used to explain at least some observations normally attributed to gravitational lensing. He presented this work at the EU 2012 conference. Paper: Gravitational Lensing in Empty Vacuum Space Does NOT Take Place

Dowdye draws particular attention to observations made close to the ionised atmosphere of the Sun and asks whether a refractive contribution has been underestimated. His broader argument is that optics should be exhausted before more elaborate explanations are invoked. YouTube - The Failed Attempts to Detect Macro Lensing

“Evidence of gravitational light bending at the site of Sagittarius A*, as is predicted by the light bending rule of General Relativity, is yet to be observed.”
Dr. Edward Dowdye

Refraction is one of the most familiar properties of light. A stick placed in water appears bent because light changes direction as it passes between media. Space is not a perfect vacuum, and many astronomical objects are surrounded by plasma and gas. That does not automatically replace gravitational lensing, but it gives us a straightforward reason to ask whether optical and plasma effects are always being given their proper weight. The principle of parsimony remains useful: KISS — keep it simple.

At school we are usually introduced first to solids, liquids and gases. Yet beyond the surface of planets, plasma is the dominant state of ordinary visible matter in the universe. Stars are plasma. Much of the interstellar and intergalactic environment is plasma. The solar wind, magnetospheres and many luminous astronomical structures are plasma phenomena.

Calling plasma simply an “ionised gas” is useful as a first description, but it can obscure what makes plasma distinctive. Because its charged particles respond collectively to electric and magnetic fields, plasma can organise itself into currents, filaments, sheets, sheaths, double layers and other structures with no close equivalent in an ordinary neutral gas.

This matters enormously for cosmology. If most of the visible universe exists in a state capable of carrying currents and organising itself electromagnetically, then plasma physics cannot sensibly be treated as a decorative addition to an otherwise gravitational universe.

Plasma is for everyone, as Anthony Peratt is fond of saying.

“[T]he professional tends to interpret the pictures by using the theory he was taught while the amateur tries to use the picture to arrive at a theory.”
Halton Arp, Seeing Red

Gravity works elegantly in the idealised two-body problem. Given two isolated masses and their initial positions and velocities, Newtonian mechanics can describe their motion exactly, producing stable and predictable orbits.

Introduce a third significant body, however, and the problem changes dramatically. Except in a limited number of special cases, there is no general analytical solution. Each body continually alters the motion of the other two, and tiny differences in the starting conditions can eventually produce very different outcomes.

The problem became so important that King Oscar II of Sweden offered a prize in 1885 for its solution. Henri Poincaré's work on the competition revealed the extreme sensitivity of such systems to their initial conditions and helped to lay the foundations of modern chaos theory.

This does not mean that every system of three or more bodies must quickly become unstable. Many configurations can remain orderly for extremely long periods. It does mean, however, that gravity alone does not provide the simple clockwork predictability often associated with the Solar System. Once several bodies interact, long-term behaviour must generally be explored through numerical approximation rather than exact solution.

The Solar System contains not three bodies, but the Sun, eight planets, numerous moons, asteroids, comets and other objects, all exerting gravitational influence upon one another. Its long-term stability is therefore not a straightforward consequence of a simple gravitational formula, but an inference drawn from complex models whose outcomes depend upon assumptions and initial conditions.

Wikipedia link

This is worth remembering when gravity is presented as a complete and self-sufficient explanation of cosmic structure. Even before we leave our own planetary neighbourhood, the mathematics becomes nonlinear, approximate and, over sufficiently long periods, potentially chaotic.

Within our own Solar System, gravitational models are extraordinarily useful. They allow spacecraft to navigate between planets with remarkable precision, and no serious alternative need deny that success.

The difficulty appears when the same gravitational framework is extended to galaxies and the universe as a whole. The visible matter in galaxies is insufficient, within conventional dynamics, to account for the motions we observe. Rather than abandon gravity, modern cosmology introduces an additional unseen component: dark matter.

Dark matter has not been directly detected despite decades of increasingly sensitive searches. Within the standard cosmological model it is inferred from gravitational effects and is estimated to make up most of the matter in the universe. Dark energy, introduced to account for the observed accelerated expansion, is still more mysterious and dominates the standard cosmic energy budget.

From a Plasma Cosmology perspective, this is precisely where assumptions should be re-examined. If the visible universe is overwhelmingly plasma, and plasma supports currents, electric fields, magnetic fields and long-range collective behaviour, how much of what is presently assigned to invisible gravitational components might instead reflect electrodynamic processes that have been underestimated?

Anthony Peratt's laboratory experiments and particle-in-cell simulations demonstrated that interacting plasma currents can organise matter into filamentary and galactic-scale forms. Whether this can replace every role assigned to dark matter or dark energy is a larger question. But it gives us a physical, testable reason to ask whether gravity is carrying more explanatory weight than it should.

“It is an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe remain hypothetical.”
Jim Peebles, Princeton cosmologist

In 1996, during the joint US–Italian TSS-1R mission, a satellite was deployed from the Space Shuttle Columbia on a conducting tether almost 20 kilometres long. Moving through Earth's magnetic field generated an electromotive force of several thousand volts, while the surrounding ionospheric plasma provided part of the electrical circuit.

Deployment was almost complete when the tether failed. The subsequent investigation found that a breach in the insulation allowed electrical arcing, which burned through much of the tether before the remaining material failed mechanically.

The mission nevertheless returned valuable data. During active operation, the collected current reached almost half an ampere and exceeded some pre-flight theoretical predictions by a factor of two to four. The experiment provided a dramatic demonstration that spacecraft, magnetic fields and ionospheric plasma can form a real electrodynamic system in space.

See also Measuring Electrical Differentials in Space.

Conventional diagrams can encourage us to imagine planets, stars and galaxies as separate objects moving through empty space. Plasma physics presents a more connected picture. Earth sits inside the solar wind. Its magnetosphere continually interacts with charged particles and fields arriving from the Sun. The heliosphere, in turn, moves through the local interstellar environment.

In other words, cosmic bodies are not truly isolated. They exist within larger plasma environments and exchange energy and momentum through them. Currents, fields, waves and particle flows connect regions across scales that appear separate when viewed only through the lens of gravity.

Plasma Cosmology therefore encourages a more holistic view of the universe. This does not require abandoning local physics. It means recognising that the environment surrounding an object may be an active participant in its behaviour rather than an empty backdrop.

Quasars — quasi-stellar radio sources — have long presented some of astronomy's most intriguing puzzles. One much-discussed example is NGC 7319, a Seyfert 2 galaxy with a measured redshift of approximately z = 0.0225.

Projected very close to it is a bright quasar with a redshift of z = 2.114 — enormously higher than that of the galaxy. In the standard cosmological interpretation the quasar is a far more distant background object seen by chance along almost the same line of sight.

Halton Arp and others asked a different question: are all such apparent associations merely projection effects? If even a small number of high-redshift quasars were shown to be physically associated with low-redshift galaxies, the assumption that cosmological redshift is primarily a distance indicator would require serious revision.

“...past 90% it [Dark Matter] begins to make observations irrelevant.”
Halton Arp

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Robertson Davies

Cases such as NGC 7319 became central to Arp's argument that redshift should not automatically be treated as a simple measure of distance in every circumstance. The conventional explanation is a chance alignment, but the deeper question remains scientifically legitimate: can redshift contain an intrinsic component as well as a cosmological one?

If a high-redshift quasar were demonstrated to be physically connected with a much lower-redshift galaxy, a purely distance-based interpretation would be impossible in that case. This is the central issue behind the long-running discussion of discordant redshifts.

Intrinsic Redshift

Arp documented numerous cases in which quasars appeared aligned with active galaxies, sometimes along preferred axes and sometimes close to features interpreted as bridges or connections. From these observations he proposed that at least part of a quasar's redshift might be intrinsic — related to its physical state or evolutionary stage — rather than arising solely from cosmic expansion.

In Arp's interpretation, quasars could represent young compact objects ejected from active galaxies, with their intrinsic redshift declining as they evolve. Over time, such objects might develop into companion or dwarf galaxies and eventually into more familiar galactic forms.

The Plasma Universe presents a profoundly dynamic picture of reality. Planets, stars and galaxies form, evolve and disappear, while the plasma environments from which they emerge continue to reorganise on every scale.

In Plasma Cosmology, large-scale structures such as clusters, superclusters and galaxies are explored in terms of interacting, magnetised plasma filaments and currents. The striking filamentary organisation of the observed universe is therefore not merely something to be accommodated after the fact; it is central to the plasma picture from the outset.

This approach leaves open the possibility of a universe without a unique beginning — a cosmos in continual transformation, where complexity develops through processes that remain active today. A universe not fixed in origin, but alive in process.

When the James Webb Space Telescope began observing the early universe, astronomers expected it to illuminate the gradual emergence of the first stars and galaxies. Instead, it quickly found surprisingly bright and well-developed galaxies at very high redshifts.

Some early photometric candidates appeared to lie at extreme redshifts, well beyond the range reached before JWST. Follow-up spectroscopy has confirmed several remarkably early galaxies while also showing why caution is essential: some apparently record-breaking candidates have turned out to be much closer objects whose colours mimic extreme redshift.

A striking recent example is the object nicknamed Capotauro. It was initially proposed as a possible galaxy at z ≈ 32, which would have placed it extraordinarily early in the conventional cosmic timeline. New multi-epoch JWST observations have now detected proper motion, demonstrating that Capotauro is not an early galaxy at all, but a very cool Y-type brown dwarf within our own Milky Way.

That correction does not erase the broader JWST story. Confirmed galaxies and active galactic nuclei are still being found surprisingly early, and their abundance, brightness and rapid development continue to challenge models of early galaxy and black-hole formation.

This is science working as it should. Observations overturn candidates, strengthen others and force models to evolve. The important point is not that every surprising object survives scrutiny, but that the observations themselves set the pace and theory must follow.

In 2015, Shyeh Tjing Loi and colleagues used the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia to produce the first direct wide-angle images of an extensive system of field-aligned plasma density ducts linking the upper ionosphere and inner plasmasphere.

The breakthrough came from treating apparent shifts in distant radio sources not merely as unwanted observational noise, but as information about the intervening plasma. By using the telescope's separated elements to obtain a parallax measurement, the team was able to determine the altitude and three-dimensional arrangement of the structures.

The resulting picture was striking: regularly spaced tubes of enhanced and depleted plasma density aligned with Earth's magnetic field. Once again, a feature that could easily have been dismissed as interference turned out to reveal organised plasma structure in near-Earth space.

The Geointeresting Podcast interview formerly linked here has recently been made private. The original URL is retained in case it becomes available again:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/z1yHghhBJGc

Cosmology provides the broad framework within which astronomy, galaxy formation and the history of the universe are interpreted. That gives its underlying assumptions enormous reach. A significant change in cosmology would therefore ripple through many other areas of science.

This helps explain why paradigm shifts at the cosmological level can be particularly difficult. The stakes are high, the theoretical structures are deeply interconnected, and generations of research may rest upon the prevailing framework. But that is also why foundational assumptions must remain open to examination.

See also Skepticism / Paradigm Shifts.