[renormalised (Carl)]

To add to what Steven has said, if you have a Z pinch and Birkeland currents occurring, in order to maintain those, you need to have an external source of energy providing power to the Z pinch, otherwise it gives out and the Birkeland currents fail. What has to be overcome is the natural tendency for the electrons within the Birkeland currents to lose energy through a process they call Compton Scattering. What happens there is you get electrons collide with other particles within the plasma being generated, or the gas through which they're moving, undergoing inelastic collisions and losing energy via bremsstrahlung. As they lose energy, the Z pinch (which is essentially an EM field within the plasma that confines the plasma...basically an application of the Lorentz force), gives out and the Birkeland currents collapse. So, no EM field, no Z pinch, no Birkeland currents.

In any case, the amount of energy that Peratt et al, believe is in these Birkeland currents, especially on a cosmologically large scale (let alone interstellar and galactic scales) would produce vasts amount of electrons moving at relativistic speeds creating what they call a Bennett Pinch. What then happens is you get vast amounts of synchrotron radiation and all sort of other emission right across the EM spectrum. Far more than what is observed in any situation, including synchrotron radiation generated by accelerated particles in the magnetic fields of neutron stars and jets produce by accretion processes via black holes. You'd be getting synchrotron radiation being given off by every single cloud of gas and dust in the galaxy, especially from the spiral arms of spiral galaxies. The nuclei of galaxies would be like beacons of synchrotron radiation, and every other radiation. How would life would even survive in such a situation...it would be worse than living beside a quasar. In actual fact, every galaxy in the universe would still be a quasar...a super-quasar in reality because it wouldn't just be the nucleus with the powerful activity but the entire galaxy. It would be almost impossible for the stars to form simply because all that radiation would heat the gas to tremendous temperatures. All you would actually have is a thin soup of ionised gas probably radiating at about 2million K or more. It would essentially look like the thin ionised gas that surrounds some large clusters of galaxies. And, if it that occurred, the whole edifice would collapse very quickly and you'd have no more high energy radiation being produced because the pinches would give out and eventually all you'd have left is a cold cloud of gas.

So, as we have repeated so often....it's not verifiable observationally, the theory is defunct and there is no evidence for its application on galactic or cosmological scales.