Model of the Plasma Universe

This paper is a review of a number of publications during the last ten years about those changes in our views of the cosmic environment that are the result of advances in plasma physics. To a large extent, these originate from new observational material that space research has supplied. An attempt is made to construct a model of the "plasma universe" which is claimed to be an alternative to the traditional " visual universe" based mainly on observations in the visual octave. Besides the Hubble expansion there is also a "knowledge expansion," which means that knowledge originating from plasma experiments in the laboratory is spreading to the magnetospheres and, it is predicted, sooner or later will also penetrate astrophysics in general. As an example of the usefulness of this model, it is applied to cosmogony, and a review is given of new results from an analysis of the Saturnian rings. The recent reconstruction of certain cosmogonic events with an accuracy better than 1 percent is reviewed and developed.