Astronomers Find Secret Planet-Making Ingredient: Magnetic Fields

Imagine writing the whole article without ever so much as mentioning ions or plasma, never mind plasma fluid dynamics. What matter is supposed to be affected by magnetic fields? What generates them? What effects do electric currents induced by varying fields have on mixing and segregation?

That plasma fluid effects are routinely neglected is a disgrace, an indictment of everybody who pretends to be serious about studying the topic.

The article abstract mentions MHD, the trivial cousin of plasma fluid dynamics. MHD mostly occurs only in artificially stabilized environments designed to prevent mathematically intractable phenomena. Modeling while avoiding general PFD is looking for your keys under the streetlamp solely because the light is better there.

That's an interesting idea. A couple of thoughts spring to mind.

First is that the heaviest of the "natural" fusion byproducts is iron. Iron is magnetic. How significant is that? Does that make it more likely iron will form into clumps? Given the seeming importance of iron to an industrialized society, at least based on our own experience, this bears more investigation.

The second is that you know other substance has a whole bunch of magnetic properties, particularly at low temperatures and/or high pressures? Oxygen.

Does anyone have a link to the original article?

Quanta and outfits like it (eg Atlas) have this incredibly sad tactic of explaining around research and quoting the authors without ever citing the paper.

This seems like something smart people should have come up with a long time ago.

ah yes, the standard fallback answer in graduate level astro classes. If you can't explain something... magnetic fields?