Re: Electric fields
yet there is still a culture of describing space as "hot gases" rather than "plasmas".
Except those descriptions weren't used in this Register article. Further, the NASA news report it referenced stuck to the term "plasma". It once mentioned "gas" but only to define "plasma": "Plasma is much like a gas, but each particle is electrically charged so movement is governed as much by the laws of electromagnetics as it is by the fundamental laws of gravity and motion we more regularly experience on Earth."
The lack of understanding is due to the non-acceptance of there being electric fields in space
The presence of electric fields in space is pretty widely accepted. After all, a major part of the payload of deep space payloads for the last 50 years have been magnetic and plasma sensors. The Voyagers are still delivering science on the sun's magnetic fields and charged particles (see: bow shock), while the recently-launched Van Allen probes are examining the Earth's local environment. Quite famously (among planetary scientists), Jupiter and Io are linked by 400,000-Volt, 3,000,000-amp electrical current.
Heck, this article is about the Wind probe. It specifically has electrical and plasma detectors, which were the entire reason for its flight.
Now, there are a lot of people who consider the electric universe theory to be pseudo-science garbage, and Hannes Alfvén's 1960s-era plasma cosmology has been steadily disproven through the 1990s. However, those notions were attempting to explain life, the universe, and everything through electricity or plasmas, stretching and warping good science onto issues they are not able to address.
That in no way means electrical fields, magnetic fields, and plasmas are absent from space or most scientists think such things are absent from space, just that some pseudo-scientific notions incorrectly use them.
which easily accelerate electrons to relativistic velocities.
In the absence of outside forces, sure. It's a no brainer for electrical fields to accelerate particles. However, the specific situation under discussion is within Earth's magnetic fields and exosphere, which include other influences: protons; electrons of different velocities; heavier ions and neutral atoms; and Earth's convoluted magnetosphere. It's not a simple environment to launch an electron to the observed energies. It's more like trying to get Ferrari to 80mph in an LA rush hour, which is why scientists are making surprised noises.
This is something that Hannes Alvén was trying to promote in the 1980s,
Hannes Alfvén - who did some incredible work understanding plasmas and Earth's magnetosphere, and earned his Nobel physics award - began promoting his plasma cosmology in the 1960s. By the 1990s, it was no longer favored by astrophysicists and cosmologists because it failed to explain a number of key observations: it didn't explain the isotropy of the cosmic microwave and x-ray backgrounds; it did not predict Hubble's Law, and failed to explain the abundance of light elements in the universe.
But, again, that doesn't mean people think electric and magnetic fields and plasma are absent from space - there's a reason why the Voyagers, Wind, Van Allen Probes, Cassini, Galileo, and New Horizons have plasma and magnetic sensors.