Plasmoid Life

Plasmoid life is a hypothesis under active discussion rather than a settled finding. It proposes that certain plasma structures can pass from self-organization to genuine life, acquiring the properties used to define living systems. The existence of plasmoids is established physics. Whether any plasmoid has crossed the threshold into life remains an open question, and the distance between those two statements is the subject of this entry.

The established physics of plasmoids

What a plasmoid is

Plasma makes up an estimated 99 percent of the visible matter in the universe, including stars and interstellar space.¹ Within that medium plasma does not stay uniformly spread out. It can gather into bounded structures in which internal gas pressure and magnetic pressure are balanced by an external confining pressure, producing a discrete object with a measurable magnetic moment, size, and translational speed.² That physical behavior, and nothing biological, is what the word plasmoid names.

Laboratory plasmoids

Plasmoids are produced and studied in laboratory devices. Named configurations include compact toroids, spheromaks, field-reversed configurations, and the filamentary plasmoids observed in dense plasma focus machines.² These are engineered, reproducible structures central to fusion and plasma research. Their organization can be intricate, but it is fully accounted for by electromagnetism and the dynamics of ionized gas.

Plasmoids in space and the magnetosphere

Plasmoids also form naturally beyond the laboratory. They have been proposed to explain magnetic bubbles in Earth's magnetosphere, structures in cometary tails, features of the solar wind, and formations in the solar atmosphere.² In Earth's magnetotail, magnetic reconnection rearranges magnetic field lines and can pinch off plasmoids that are ejected down the tail. NASA describes reconnection, the focus of its Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, as a process that explosively transfers energy between magnetic fields and occurs throughout the universe.³ None of this involves or implies life. It is the ordinary physics of plasma and magnetic fields.

Self-organizing plasma and the search for inorganic life

Complex and dusty plasma

A specialized branch of the field studies complex plasmas, also called dusty plasmas, in which small solid particles are suspended in an ionized gas. The particles acquire electric charge and interact through the plasma around them. Under suitable conditions they arrange themselves into ordered patterns: plasma crystals, waves, filaments, and helical strings. This self-organization is documented laboratory physics, and it is the setting in which the strongest scientific form of the plasma-life question arose.

The Tsytovich 2007 paper

In 2007 a group led by V. N. Tsytovich, with G. E. Morfill, V. E. Fortov, N. G. Gusein-Zade, B. A. Klumov, and S. V. Vladimirov, published a paper in the New Journal of Physics, the peer-reviewed journal of IOP Publishing, titled From Plasma Crystals and Helical Structures Towards Inorganic Living Matter.⁴ Working from theory and numerical modeling, the authors argued that complex plasmas can self-organize into stable helical structures whose behavior overlaps with features usually reserved for living matter. The abstract states that these structures "exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as 'memory marks', self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics," and concludes that they "exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally."⁴

The work drew on the General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and the University of Sydney.⁵ It is genuine peer-reviewed physics, and it is often misread. The authors did not report observing living plasma. They presented a theoretical and simulation-based case that non-carbon plasma structures could in principle satisfy several formal criteria for life. In a statement issued with the publication, Tsytovich said the structures "exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," and that "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve."⁵ The operative word is candidates. The paper opened a question that remains open, and independent confirmation of self-replicating plasma life has not yet followed.

The plasma-life hypothesis applied to luminous UAP

The idea that plasma can be alive has been carried from the laboratory to the sky. The most cited recent example is a 2024 paper whose lead author is Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, titled Extraterrestrial Life in the Thermosphere: Plasmas, UAP, Pre-Life, Fourth State of Matter, with a long coauthor list that includes Chris Impey of the University of Arizona.⁶ The paper analyzes footage from ten NASA space shuttle missions and argues that luminous plasmas up to a kilometer in size, recorded more than 200 miles above Earth in the thermosphere, behave like organisms. It describes them as self-illuminated, attracted to electromagnetic radiation, and moving in ways the authors read as swarming, congregating, and predatory, including sharp directional shifts and approaches to spacecraft. The authors present these structures as a form of pre-life and a fourth state of matter that could account for historical UFO and UAP sightings.⁶

The venue and reception of that paper are part of its record. It appeared in the Journal of Modern Physics, published by Scientific Research Publishing, a publisher whose review standards have been criticized by academic indexing services and compilers of publishing watchlists.⁷ Publication there does not carry the same peer-review standing as the journal that published the Tsytovich work. Independent analysts who reviewed the same shuttle footage read the objects as ice crystals, orbital debris, and particles close to the camera, the kind of ordinary-source check that careful observers apply to any orbital imagery.⁸ The living-plasma reading has not gained mainstream scientific acceptance, and the footage itself remains open to more than one interpretation.

Ball lightning and Hessdalen as partial analogues

Two better-documented phenomena show that luminous, self-contained, plasma-like structures do occur in nature and can persist far longer than an instantaneous discharge. Neither has been shown to be an organism. Both are studied primarily as physics, and both are frequently raised as partial analogues in discussions of plasmoid life.

Ball lightning

Ball lightning is described as luminous spherical objects ranging from pea-sized to several meters across, most commonly 10 to 20 centimeters, usually associated with thunderstorms and lasting from about a second to more than a minute, far longer than an ordinary lightning flash.⁹ There is no widely accepted explanation for it.⁹ In January 2014, scientists from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou reported the optical spectrum of what appeared to be natural ball lightning, captured at about 900 meters on the Tibetan Plateau in July 2012. The spectrum showed emission lines of silicon, calcium, iron, nitrogen, and oxygen, consistent with the vaporization of soil.⁹ That points to a physical, non-biological mechanism for at least some events.

The Hessdalen lights

The Hessdalen lights are recurring luminous phenomena seen in a roughly 12-kilometer stretch of the Hessdalen valley in central Norway. Activity was especially high between December 1981 and mid-1984, when the lights were observed 15 to 20 times per week, and by 2010 it had fallen to 10 to 20 sightings a year.¹⁰ Project Hessdalen began in 1983, and an automatic measurement station was installed in the valley in 1998, with research led by Ostfold University College in Norway and the Italian National Research Council.¹⁰ Proposed explanations include incompletely understood combustion of airborne dust and dusty-plasma models based on Coulomb crystals, and some sightings have been identified as astronomical objects, aircraft, or headlights. There is no consensus explanation.¹⁰ Hessdalen matters because it shows that unusual lights can recur in a fixed place and be studied with instruments, which is the kind of sustained field record any serious plasma-life inquiry would ultimately need.

What would make a plasmoid alive

Life-like motion is not life. Flames, storms, whirlpools, and self-catalyzing chemical reactions all produce complex, changing, self-maintaining patterns without being alive. A plasmoid that moves, divides, and brightens can look purposeful while remaining an entirely physical process.

Definitions of life set a higher bar. A widely used working definition adopted by NASA calls life "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution," while researchers acknowledge that life has resisted any single agreed definition.¹¹ Applied to plasma, that standard implies several requirements that appearance alone cannot meet.

• Metabolism: a way to draw energy from the environment and use it to maintain internal organization against decay, in a thermodynamically open system.
• Information: a heritable structure that stores organization and passes it from one generation to the next.
• Reproduction: the production of new structures that carry that information, not merely splitting driven by external fields.
• Evolution: variation among offspring together with selection over many generations, so that a population changes over time.

The Tsytovich paper argued, at the level of theory, that helical plasma strings could meet several of these criteria, including memory-like marks, self-duplication, and metabolic exchange.⁴ Showing that any of it actually happens in a real plasmoid, in a laboratory or in the sky, would require repeatable measurement of information storage, inheritance, and evolution that known plasma dynamics cannot already explain. That measurement has not yet been made.

Leading interpretations

These interpretations are not mutually exclusive. A single luminous event may involve more than one, and different reports may have different causes.

Documentation and research record

The record on plasmoid life has been built in several distinct layers. The physics of plasmoids rests on laboratory measurement, spacecraft data, and reproducible experiment gathered over seven decades. The case for plasma life rests on peer-reviewed theory and simulation, on interpretive analyses of orbital footage, and on instrumented field studies of recurring luminous phenomena.

The Tsytovich result is a modeling argument published in a peer-reviewed physics journal.⁴ The thermosphere study is an interpretation of archived NASA shuttle video, and independent analysts have published a competing ordinary-source reading of the same frames.^6,8 Ball lightning and the Hessdalen lights contribute genuine instrumented data, including a recorded optical spectrum and a permanent automated measurement station.^9,10 No specimen, culture, or reproducible experiment has yet demonstrated a plasmoid that metabolizes, inherits information, and evolves, and that measurement is what the inquiry still needs. The space between life-like organization, which is documented, and life, which is an open question, is where the hypothesis now sits.

The record and open questions

Documented: Plasmoids are real, coherent structures of plasma and magnetic fields. They are produced in laboratories, form in Earth's magnetosphere and elsewhere in space, and are described by established physics.^2,3 Complex plasmas self-organize into crystals, filaments, and helical strings, and a 2007 peer-reviewed paper argued that such structures could in principle meet formal criteria for inorganic life.⁴

Reported: Researchers and observers describe luminous plasma structures that appear to move, merge, divide, and respond in ways they interpret as living or intelligent, including a 2024 paper that reads NASA shuttle footage as thermospheric plasma organisms.^6,7 Independent analysts read the same footage as ice, debris, and camera artifacts, and the competing readings of that footage have not yet been reconciled.⁸

Open questions: Whether any plasmoid meets the requirements for life, meaning metabolism, heritable information, reproduction, and evolution, is a question researchers can now pose precisely and are working to test. Whether any luminous UAP is a plasma organism, a natural plasma structure, a misidentification, or a technological object is a live problem that better instrumented data can help resolve.

Frequently asked questions

What is a plasmoid?

A plasmoid is a coherent, self-contained structure of plasma and magnetic fields. Plasmoids are produced and studied in laboratory fusion devices, and they form naturally in Earth's magnetosphere, in the solar wind, and in cometary tails.^1,2 Their existence and behavior are established physics.

Is plasmoid life real?

There is no confirmed case of a living plasmoid. Plasma can self-organize into complex, life-like structures, and some researchers have proposed that certain structures could qualify as inorganic life, but that remains a hypothesis rather than scientific consensus.

What did the Tsytovich 2007 paper actually claim?

Published in the peer-reviewed New Journal of Physics, the paper used theory and simulation to argue that helical structures in complex plasma could display features associated with living matter, including memory-like marks, self-duplication, and metabolism, making them candidates for inorganic living matter under the right conditions.⁴ It did not report observing living plasma.

How should the 2024 thermosphere plasma paper be read?

The paper reads NASA shuttle footage as evidence of kilometer-scale plasma organisms in the thermosphere.⁶ It appeared in the Journal of Modern Physics, a venue whose review standards have been criticized by academic indexing services.⁷ Independent analysts read the same footage as ice, debris, and camera artifacts, so the living-plasma interpretation is a live hypothesis rather than an established finding.⁸

Can ball lightning or the Hessdalen lights be alive?

Both are real luminous phenomena studied primarily as physics. Ball lightning has no single accepted explanation, though spectral data link some cases to vaporized soil.⁹ The Hessdalen lights are investigated with instruments and remain unexplained, with dusty plasma among the proposed mechanisms.¹⁰ Neither has been shown to be a living organism, and neither has been fully explained.

What would prove a plasmoid is alive?

Repeatable evidence that a plasmoid sustains itself through metabolism, stores and inherits information, reproduces, and evolves across generations, in ways that known plasma physics cannot already explain.¹¹ Life-like motion by itself is not enough, because ordinary physical processes also generate complex, self-maintaining patterns.

Sources and further reading

1. U.S. Department of Energy. "DOE Explains...Plasma." https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsplasma
2. Wikipedia. "Plasmoid." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmoid
3. NASA. "Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS)." https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mms/
4. V. N. Tsytovich, G. E. Morfill, V. E. Fortov, N. G. Gusein-Zade, B. A. Klumov, and S. V. Vladimirov. "From Plasma Crystals and Helical Structures Towards Inorganic Living Matter." New Journal of Physics 9 (2007): 263. https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/9/8/263
5. Institute of Physics. "Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities." ScienceDaily, August 15, 2007. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070814150630.htm
6. R. Joseph, C. Impey, O. Planchon, et al. "Extraterrestrial Life in the Thermosphere: Plasmas, UAP, Pre-Life, Fourth State of Matter." Journal of Modern Physics 15, no. 3 (2024): 322-374. https://doi.org/10.4236/jmp.2024.153015
7. Wikipedia. "Scientific Research Publishing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing
8. Metabunk. "Study in the Journal of Modern Physics claiming that intelligent plasma is the source of many UFO sightings and that NASA is aware of this." https://www.metabunk.org/threads/study-in-the-modern-journal-of-physics-claiming-that-intelligent-plasma-is-the-source-of-many-ufo-sightings-and-that-nasa-is-aware-of-this.13409/
9. Wikipedia. "Ball lightning." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
10. Wikipedia. "Hessdalen lights." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessdalen_lights
11. NASA Astrobiology Program. "Life Detection." https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/research/life-detection/about/