Is there an average filament width in NGC 346? And if so, what are the implications for an Electric vs Gravitational cosmology?
Data & Analysis
This beautiful image comes from the JWST. The region is about 200,000 light years away. The field of view here is about 227 light years.
We used ImageJ, and sliced through filaments, like so
We chose the FWHM of all clearly delineated peaks. Collecting 580 such profiles, we obtain the following histogram of filament widths, converting to meters:
The average value is 16.7 E15 meters. Though, from looking at the histogram, the AVERAGE is not very narrowly defined.
What does this tell us?
My main motivation for looking at this is see if electric current flowing in space is responsible for the formation of such filaments. Flowing electricity naturally forms filaments. The first step is to determine the width of the filament. Then we need to know more about the ambient environment: temperature, the density, the surrounding magnetic field. My model for such analysis is G. Verschuur, for example, this paper ( HIGH-RESOLUTION OBSERVATIONS AND THE PHYSICS OF HIGH-VELOCITY CLOUD A0, Gerrit L. Verschuur, The Astrophysical Journal, 766:113 (17pp), 2013 April, 1 doi:10.1088/0004-637X/766/2/113)
Clearly I have much more to do on this.
ANNNNND…. JWST just published this of Cassiopeia A, which has filaments just crying out to be measured.
Verschuur doesn’t mention Bessel function fields, only models the axial background field and the supposed generated toroidal field. Yet the “magnetic turbulence” he mentions, is described in the literature as magnetic field directions “reversing on regular distance scales”, fitting the Bessel model proposed by Don Scott. So the question first is what determines the boundary conditions in that model.