In Star Trek, a plasma drift is a large nebula-like interstellar phenomenon. In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Haunting of Deck Twelve"), Neelix mentions that a large plasma drift moved through his home system, blocking out the stars and moons for months. In the episode "Deadlock", the USS Voyager entered a plasma drift almost half a sector long, to hide from a Vidiian-controlled star system.

Such vast clouds of plasma do in fact exist in the real universe. Combining the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico with a precision imaging, seven-antenna synthesis radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO), a team of researchers led by Los Alamos scientist Philipp Kronberg in April 2007 discovered a new giant in the form of a previously undetected cloud of intergalactic plasma that stretches more than 8 million light years across - or about 80 times the width of our galaxy, the Milky Way. A 2-3 megaparsec zone of diffuse, intergalactic plasma, the object is called Region A. It is in the general neighbourhood of a dense collection of galaxies called the Coma Cluster, which lies 300 million light years from Earth. But the cloud appears to be too distant from the cluster to be powered by it.

The synchrotron-radiating plasma cloud is spread across a vast region of space that may contain several black hole harboring radio galaxies. The cloud may be evidence that black holes in galaxies convert and transfer their enormous gravitational energy, by a yet unknown process, into magnetic fields and cosmic rays in the vast intergalactic regions of the Universe. The diffuse, magnetized intergalactic zone of high energy electrons may be evidence for galaxy-sized black holes as sources for the mysterious cosmic rays that continuously zip though the Universe. It is still not known what kind of mechanism could create a cloud of such enormous dimensions that does not coincide with any single galaxy, or galaxy cluster.

In 2006, a less isolated cloud of plasma was reported around galaxy cluster Abell 3376, with similar dimensions to Region A Astronomers suspect that cloud is the result of gas from outside the cluster colliding with the cluster's own gas.