A compressed-spring model of spiral galaxy formation (initial email version)

"A compressed-spring model of jet-driven spiral galaxy formation (initial email version)" is a blog post published on the Substack platform by Julian Gough, at the custom domain theeggandtherock.com, at the specific web address https://theeggandtherock.com/p/a-compressed-spring-model-of-spiral on May 29th 2026. The blog post is the primary publication; this Zenodo PDF day-of-publication snapshot of the Substack post provides a citable archived version. The blog post is, in turn, a version of an email already sent to several scientists laying out a new, comprehensive, coherent theory of spiral galaxy formation. Building on the earlier Blowtorch Theory, it proposes a huge initial wave of direct-collapse supermassive black holes, from the smooth gas of the extremely early universe, occurring between redshifts 35 and 25. (Between just 80 and 130 million years after the Big Bang.) No stars yet, no galaxies yet. The model then shows how spiral galaxies can be generated by the plasma jets from these extremely early direct-collapse supermassive black holes. As the head of the jet is drastically slowed by the far denser, cooler plasma that surrounds the black hole, the jet blows up a hot, overpressured cocoon (hot plasma bubble). Crucially, the jet’s helical fieldlines peel off into the cocoon along with the plasma. After the jet finally breaks free of the cocoon, the cocoon rapidly cools (thanks to the rapid inverse-Compton cooling of that era) and collapses, to form a disc (or oblate spheroid). That collapse compresses the strong 3D helical fieldlines of the cocoon into an even stronger 2D spiral field (more accurately, compressed helical field) in the disc. That field, at hundreds of microgauss or even milligauss levels, is strong enough to quickly lock the plasma of the disc into solid body rotation, redistributing angular momentum through magnetic torque, and delaying star formation through magnetic support. The resulting dynamics explain thick and thin disc formation; the differing stellar ages, metallicities, radii, and stellar kinematics of the thick and thin disc; the different stellar kinetics of bulge and disc; an initial surprisingly flat rotation curve; the peculiar structure, and spectra, of Little Red Dots; etc. This all happens in a single, active, dynamic process that starts less than a hundred million years after the Big Bang, but plays out coherently over the next billion or more years. Elliptical galaxies are the high-mass failure mode; irregulars are the low-mass failure mode.