Recent discoveries have caused cosmologists to rethink the structure of the Milky Way. In the last two years, they've found mysterious filaments along the spiral arms of the galaxy that are made up of dense regions of star formation. Perhaps even more intriguing is that they align with the magnetic field of the galaxy. The field itself seems to challenge our conventional ideas about magnetism. It flows toward the center of the galaxy on some arms, and outward on others. We aren't used to thinking of magnets creating reverse spiral fields like this; to my knowledge a galaxy is the only thing in nature that has dipoles spiraling toward and away from each other.
Magnets essentially work in two ways: permanent and electromotive. In order for a magnetic field to exist, there needs to be some configuration of electrons propagating it, whether it be electric current or just plain electric charge. Electromotive magnetism already has a current creating it, such as the type you'd see in a generator. In a permanent magnet, such as a regular iron bar magnet, there is no electric current; rather, the angular momentum of the electrons are aligned so that it creates the illusion of current. This illusion has mystified scientists for centuries, and many of them today still have a hard time explaining this fundamental force.
In these galactic filaments there clearly aren't any freeways of current running through their dense clouds of dust. Therefore, the magnetism created by our galaxy has to be permanent (unless there's a third form of magnetism we aren't aware of yet). The illusion of current created by the permanent magnet makes one wonder how this force can operate over such long distances. Forget about the force between bar magnets, which is amazing in itself; the force between particles thousands of light-years away from each other is nothing short of remarkable. Is galactic magnetism operating with gravity on some level we have yet to identify? Is Quantum Entanglement responsible for the alignments of electrons across thousands of light-years? Does dark matter play a role in the magnetic field distribution of the galaxy? If so, is dark matter causing the magnetism needed to sustain the amazing rotation velocities we are seeing at the edges of galaxies?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions yet. All I can surmise is that the dust left over from supernova explosions must have a high number of conductive atoms in them, like iron. The special property of conductors used to generate current, or quasi (static) current, is probably what allowed these filaments to form. They tend to form wherever the density of this nebulous dust is greatest, which makes sense because most of it is made of supernova remnants. There is also a great amount of hydrogen and helium around the filaments, which must be gathered in by gravitational clogs: i.e., dense nodes where gravity is stronger than in outlying regions. All these things are probably what create the ideal parameters for star formation. Considering that, I might be persuaded that iron in new stars- at least in the ones we see being born today- won't come about after eons of fusion into heavy elements in star cores, as is traditionally thought. But that it is already a key element in star formation, and probably settles in the core of these stars once it is born. I can't say whether this is true for our own star, but if its ingredients came from the remnant of a supernova then perhaps its iron was already in the core when it began fusing hydrogen into helium.
One way of tying all this together is by considering dark matter and magnetism to be different ways of explaining the same thing. Permanent magnetism may also be using Quantum Entanglement in ways that only dark matter could explain (if we had access to studying it). I find it an unlikely coincidence that magnetism is influenced by the angular momentum of electrons while dark matter influences the angular momentum of whole galaxies. This connection would suggest that dark matter as a whole may be describing magnetism on an ultra large scale. There's even a fractal that emerges if you consider these galactic filaments as being made of the same material as the filaments between galaxies. The filaments between galaxies are famously thought to be made of dark matter, so it wouldn't surprise me if cosmologists find these interior filaments behaving in ways that depend on their exterior "parents". In such a scenario, in an almost eerie way, the dark matter would creep into our galaxy using these magnetic filaments, do a dance with the black hole at the center for a while, then make its way out of the galaxy and back into the exterior filament, where it would travel along to the next galaxy down the line.*
*I say this is eerie because electrochemicals interact with neurons across a human brain in a similar way.
