ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Plasma cosmology

Plasma cosmology is like playing with a really cool science experiment. Do you remember playing with magnets and seeing how they attract or repel each other? That’s kind of like what plasma cosmologists do, but instead of magnets, they use something called plasma.

Plasma is a gas that has been heated so much that it becomes charged. This means it has a bunch of tiny particles inside of it, called ions and electrons, that are moving around really fast. Plasma is all around us, like in lightning bolts or in the sun.

Plasma cosmologists use plasma to try to understand how the universe works. They think that the universe is made up of plasma, and that plasma plays a really big role in how everything works. Plasma can create magnetic fields, which can affect the movement of stars and planets.

Imagine if you were playing with a bunch of marbles on a big table. You could move the marbles around and they would collide with each other, making patterns and moving in different directions. Plasma cosmologists study how this happens in the universe, with stars and planets instead of marbles.

They use special tools called telescopes to look at the different patterns and movements of plasma in the universe. By studying all of this, they hope to understand more about how the universe was created and how it continues to work.

So, to sum it up, plasma cosmologists use plasma and telescopes to study how the universe works and how it was created. They try to understand how plasma affects the movement of stars and planets, kind of like how marbles can create patterns on a big table.