I dabble in Astronomy like I do in everything else, such as History, Geology and Law, (and I make my money from Law) but I really only know enough to be a danger to myself and others.
But even back in 1979, it just seemed to me a logical explanation. The professor said that a magnetic field could not be strong enough to define the location of massive objects like stars. My point was that the field didn’t have to be that strong, only strong enough to “herd” the interstellar gas and dust into “clouds” that conformed to the magnetic field. The stars then formed where the gas was.
He still rejected the idea. I did get top grade in his class, though. And it was thoroughly enjoyable otherwise. In the first week, when the ditzy sorority girl asked if there were any stars between the earth and the moon, I knew I was in good shape.
I like this thread because I like seeing the posts of people like you who follow astronomy a lot more than my scattered time resources allow.
“My point was that the field didn’t have to be that strong, only strong enough to “herd” the interstellar gas and dust into “clouds” that conformed to the magnetic field. The stars then formed where the gas was.”
Yes, and also, the electromagnetic effects and gravitational effects don’t have to be exclusive causes. They’re complimentary phenomena, so their effects can combine together and both be responsible, in part, for our observations.
Also, plasma can exhibit self-organizing behavior, when it is arranged in such a way to create recursive feedback. That’s not exclusive to plasma, but is common to all sorts of things that can be so arranged. The principle of induction means that an ionized plasma exposed to a moving magnetic field will result in a current induced in the plasma. When an electrical current is induced, that itself creates a magnetic field surrounding the plasma, which can interact with both the inducing magnetic field and the charged plasma itself, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. This type of recursion, mathematically, is always present any time you see fractal shapes appearing, like we see in the galaxies. It’s the key to non-conscious matter and energy arranging itself into optimal patterns.
So, if a cloud of weakly ionized gas passes by a star, galaxy, cluster or any body with a magnetic field, it is like knocking over a domino. It can start a chain reaction of electromagnetic interactions which can result in the plasma changing from a disordered cloud, moving unguided in one direction, to an oscillating magnetically contained body that is subject to a whole variety of subtle, harmonically arranged, electromagnetic interactions.
One of those interactions, the “pinch” phenomenon, can itself compress matter, even to the point of fusion, without the need for gravitational compression. So, starting a simple domino effect caused by induction, a gas cloud could conceivably begin taking the shape of a galaxy and kickstart the process of star formation. That’s not to say that all the gravitational interactions that could cause star formation and self-organization wouldn’t also be happening, just that the two could be working together in tandem.