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 beyond the Solar System. In contrast, the current observations and models of cosmologists and astrophysicists explain the formation, development, and evolution of astronomical bodies and large-scale structures in the universe as influenced by gravity (including its formulation in Einstein's theory of general relativity) and baryonic physics. 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 beyond the Solar System. In contrast, the current observations and models of cosmologists and astrophysicists explain the formation, development, and evolution of astronomical bodies and large-scale structures in the universe as influenced by gravity (including its formulation in Einstein's theory of general relativity) and baryonic physics. Some theoretical concepts about plasma cosmology originated with Hannes Alfvén, who tentatively 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).