ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews plasma physics from the point of view of plasma astrophysics. It considers the long-range nature of the Coulombic or electromagnetic interaction and the gravitational interaction. Important feature in plasma astrophysics is the interplay between the gravitational and electromagnetic interactions. As is well known, there are four fundamental forces: the strong interaction, the electromagnetic force, the weak interaction, and the gravitation, in descending order of strength. The recombination the main agent to drive the evolution of the Universe is the gravitational interaction. The electromagnetic interaction and plasma effects play indispensable roles in this process in more subtle ways than during the plasma epoch. The chapter shows typical hierarchy of time scales of plasma physics. It discusses the level of electromagnetic thermal fluctuations in much detail with rigorous theory of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. The chapter describes a representation of ideal magnetohydrodynamics that employs singular structures as its fundamental objects.
