Is the Big Bang in the Bible?

[Lorizael]

No sale.  Those are too short and skip too many steps to be convincing.  Still no explanation of what dark energy is, only what it's alleged to have done.  Not good enough.

My vote is something no one's thought of yet.

...I'm thinking about those braided rings of Saturn found by Voyager 1 in 1980 - Newton's laws are long-standing and rigorous, yet here was something they didn't even know was possible, and I don't believe the mechanisms are completely understood yet.  -Because the universe tends to be more complex than we imagine, and our observations will never be complete...

Hey, you guys wanted reasons why it's not something else. Those are the arguments about why it's nothing relatively normal. I can give you links describing what dark energy potentially is, too.

But think about what you're suggesting for a moment. When the observations were made in 1998, initially astronomers proposed a number of relatively mundane solutions. Further observations ruled out those solutions. So instead, astronomers proposed something more radical: a quantity of energy causing universal expansion.

What you're saying is that, no, it's not that radical suggestion, but an unknown other radical suggestion. Sure, that's possible, but why should cosmologists accept that it's an entirely unknown radical phenomenon when all the evidence to date suggests that it's one particular unknown phenomenon?

[Rusty Edge]

Thanks for the links.
I think I processed the first 2 and a half pretty well.

The arguments in the comment section might as well say- "I'm smarter than you are!"

They got into a discussion of dark energy being a lame term and proposed "Dark Chocolate" to describe both "Dark Matter"  and "Dark Energy"  I like dark chocolate. It's more satisfying than a Milky Way. Or maybe they should name it after the chocolate beverage "Yahoo".


Any way He said they ruled out dust and other explanations without explaining. I'm still wondering if there aren't gravity waves and magnetic fields, or some other such residue of the big bang out there affecting the red shift in la supernovas .

Okay. I need to catch up with this thread....

[Lorizael]

As far as what the best evidence suggests dark energy is...

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/23/what-is-dark-energy-2/

[Buster's Uncle]

Lori, can you explain the braided rings to me, then?  Has anyone worked the math out and survived peer review?

Yes, I'll stand behind it's an entirely unknown radical phenomenon.  Why energy?  What properties beyond the obvious.  Sounds like more of what I said about dark matter - there's aspects of how gravity works at a universal scale that we've yet to puzzle out.

-Rather like they found out with newtonian orbital mechanics; trivial effects over long time scales add up in non-intuitive ways, until the observations are complete enough.  Our earthbound perspective is not easily overcome.

[Rusty Edge]

Okay.
Thanks for the info Lorizael.


I'll try to re-read it tomorrow. My mind has expanded enough for one night. I had no idea the theory of dark energy had been around as long as it has. It's nice to know it was met with skepticism.

Another comment I read in the blog comes to mind- "I wish Einstein were still alive to comment on this."

[Lorizael]

Any way He said they ruled out dust and other explanations without explaining.

The third post goes into some detail about why dust cannot be the culprit. It can't be normal dust because normal dust wouldn't affect all wavelengths of light equally the way observed dimming appears. And it can't be an unknown type of grey dust because that would cause a steadily increasing level of dimming the farther out you get, which is not what astronomers actually observe.

I'm still wondering if there aren't gravity waves and magnetic fields, or some other such residue of the big bang out there affecting the red shift in la supernovas .

There are certainly gravity waves acting on large scales, but cosmologists have pretty good models of what sort of gravity waves would have been produced by the Big Bang, and there's no evidence at present to suggest that could account for extremely uniform dimming of distant supernovae. Moreover, there's significantly more evidence than supernovae alone pointing to dark energy.

Magnetic fields are extremely unlikely, however, because there's no good reason why magnetic fields would produce a uniform effect across the universe. Magnetic fields are only going to exist in the vicinity of charged particles, and which means they're only going to occur in areas of high density. So any effect from a magnetic field would depend on where you look, and to date the expansion of the universe looks identical in all directions.

[Buster's Uncle]

Interesting discussion of the cosmological constant linked in that last article, and related.  http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/17/einsteins-greatest-blunder-was-really-a-blunder/

[Lorizael]

Lori, can you explain the braided rings to me, then?  Has anyone worked the math out and survived peer review?

Closer observation has revealed that the rings only appear braided and really just have a number of clumps in them. The clumps are thought to be due to the presence of a large number of hard to detect mini-moons that inhabit and influence the rings.

Why energy?

Because so far scientists have seen nothing in the universe not composed of matter/energy. As far as we can tell, that's what reality is--matter and energy. If scientists find something new happening, there are two basic ideas: new matter/energy, or new laws. There's no reason to think any other option is meaningful at this point.

So yes, dark energy could be some heretofore unknown consequence of general relativity, but so far the evidence doesn't suggest that. And when you have an incredibly successful theory that has passed every test thrown at it with stunning accuracy, there's not currently a good reason to believe new laws are necessary.

Think about the discovery of Neptune. Newton's laws predicted that Uranus would behave in a particular way--and it wasn't. This surprised a lot of scientists at the time, because people pretty much thought Newton's laws were perfect. Rather than abandon the theory, however, scientists proposed that there was simply data they were missing: a new planet perturbing Uranus' orbit. Lo and behold, math was done, predictions were made, and Neptune was discovered.

Basically the same thing has happened with dark energy. An anomaly was discovered. Math was done, predictions were made, and everything discovered so far in the CMB and in cosmic structure has pointed to dark energy as the culprit. The only difference is that scientists haven't figured out exactly what dark energy is yet. But seriously, it's only been 16 years.

New laws are possible. And new laws do make their way into physics. After all, it turned out Newton's laws weren't perfect. They couldn't account for Mercury's precession, famously. At the time, just like with Uranus, astronomers predicted the presence of another planet. But it turned out they were wrong. What was needed was a modification to gravity. There's an important difference here, though. Einstein didn't invent general relativity to account for a simple astronomical anomaly. General relativity accounts for a gigantic amount of large-scale (and some small-scale) behavior.

The same will have to be true for any law that can explain the effect of dark energy. If you're going to modify gravity, it's going to have far-reaching consequences that make testable predictions. But the problem is that a century's worth of data has confirmed general relativity in essentially every regime but the quantum one. There's very little room for a new law of gravity that isn't quantum gravity. And if that's the case--well, you certainly can't claim scientists aren't working on that. Quantum gravity is an extremely active and vibrant field in theoretical physics.

[Impaler]

Lorizael, would you care to comment on my doubts regarding the original SNIa time-dilation conclusions back on page one, here is a link

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=7876.msg44865#msg44865

[Buster's Uncle]

So dark energy is more or less the cosmological constant?  Nobody really understands the exactly what the latter is either, but it's at least a familiar concept - and the name doesn't trigger my bullcrap detector.  Bad move w/ the new name, cosmology community.  Some of us can think for ourselves and are buzzword-averse... 

[Buster's Uncle]

Black Hole 'Doughnut' Theory Has Holes In It, New Study Suggests (INFOGRAPHIC)
The Huffington Post
By Jacqueline Howard | Posted:  06/02/2014 9:51 am EDT    Updated:  06/02/2014 9:59 am EDT   



Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, have shown that galaxies with hidden supermassive black holes tend to clump together in space more than the galaxies with exposed, or unobscured, black holes. This enhanced image shows galaxies clumped together in the Fornax cluster, located 60 million light-years from Earth. | NASA/JPL-Caltech



Why are some black holes hidden behind space dust? That's a complicated question -- but one astronomers thought they had figured out.

Now they're not so sure.

Black holes can't be spotted by the naked eye, of course, but their shape can be detected from the glow and heat released when gas falls into them -- this also indicates that a black hole is "active," because it basically gorges on surrounding gas material that fuels their growth. And astronomers believe that every galaxy has a black hole at its center.

At one time astronomers believed all black holes were surrounded by doughnut-shaped structures of thick dust. They thought that, depending upon their orientation and the angle at which they were viewed, these "toruses" could completely obscure some black holes.

According to this so-called "unified model" of black holes, all black holes are similar in nature -- and a black hole viewed edge-on might be obscured, while a black hole viewed face-on might be visible.

Now a study based on new observations made by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope suggests that something other than dusty "doughnuts" may determine whether a black hole is hidden.

"The unified theory was proposed to explain the complexity of what astronomers were seeing," study co-author Daniel Stern, a project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a written statement. "It seems that simple model may have been too simple. As Einstein said, models should be made 'as simple as possible, but not simpler.'"

For the study, Stern and his colleagues analyzed 170,000 galaxies from the WISE data and then measured the extent to which those galaxies formed clusters. If the unified theory were true, the visible and "hidden" black holes at the galaxies' centers should be randomly distributed among the galaxies, whether or not the galaxies were clumped together. But the researchers found something unexpected: galaxies with hidden black holes are more clumped together than those with visible black holes.


(Story continues below)

This infographic explains a popular theory of active supermassive black holes, referred to as the unified model -- and how new data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, conflict with the model. Astronomers say the model could still be correct but needs adjusting to account for the unexpected observations by WISE.


"Our finding revealed a new feature about active black holes we never knew before, yet the details remain a mystery," study co-author Lin Yan, a researcher at NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., said in the written statement. "We hope our work will inspire future studies to better understand these fascinating objects."

The study has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/02/doughnut-theory-black-holes-infographic_n_5380823.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Gravitational Wave Discovery Challenged By Two New Studies
Nature
By Ron Cowen | Posted: 06/04/2014 8:29 am EDT  |  Updated: 06/04/2014 8:59 am EDT



The sun sets behind BICEP2 (in the foreground) and the South Pole Telescope (in the background). | Steffen Richter/Harvard University



The astronomers who earlier this year announced that they had evidence of primordial gravitational waves jumped the gun, two independent analyses suggest.

The papers, published on the arXiv preprint repository, propose that the original analysis did not properly account for the confounding effects of galactic dust. Although further observations may yet confirm the findings, independent researchers now say they no longer think that the original data constituted significant evidence.

"Based on what we know right now, we have no evidence for or against gravitational waves," says Uros Seljak, a cosmologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of one of the latest studies.

Astronomers using the BICEP2 radio tele­scope at the South Pole announced in March that they had found a faint twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the radiation left over from the Big Bang. This pattern, they said, was evidence for primordial gravitational waves ripples in the fabric of space-time generated in the Universe's first moments. The findings were widely hailed as confirmation of the theory of cosmic inflation, which holds that the cosmos ballooned in size during the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

But the new analyses suggest that the twisting patterns in the CMB polarization could just as easily be accounted for by dust in the Milky Way.

The papers follow a presentation three weeks ago by Raphael Flauger, a theoretical physicist at New York University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who re-examined a map of galactic dust used by BICEP2. Flauger concluded that the BICEP2 researchers had probably underestimated the fraction of polarization caused by dust in the map, which was compiled from data from the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft. Flauger says that when the dust is fully accounted for, the signal that can be attributed to gravitational waves either vanishes or is greatly diminished.

"I had thought that the [BICEP2] result was very secure," said Alan Guth, the cosmologist who first proposed the inflation concept in 1980, after learning about Flauger's talk. "Now the situation has changed," added Guth, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The BICEP2 researchers have argued that the Planck map figured in only one of the six models that they used to examine the role of dust. But in a paper posted to the arXiv server on 28 May, Flauger and his co-authors David Spergel and Colin Hill, both of Princeton University in New Jersey, say that the five other models are based on a low estimate between 3.5% and 5% of the fraction of total polarization caused by galactic dust. Extrapolation from a more detailed map, released last month by the Planck team, suggests that the fraction is closer to 815%, Spergel explains.

With those updated numbers, he says,there's no evidence for the detection of gravitational waves. But a final determination cannot be made until a more precise dust map, expected to be released by the Planck team in October, is available, he adds.

In the other analysis, Seljak and Michael Mortonson, a cosmologist also at the University of California, Berkeley, re-examined BICEP2 data on how the polarization signal varies with the frequency of the microwaves it detects. The BICEP2 team had checked its results against data recorded at lower frequency by an older telescope, BICEP1. They found that the intensity of polarization did not change from one frequency to the other in the way expected if it were caused by dust, and concluded that the data favoured gravitational waves over dust by an 11-to-1 margin.

But Seljak and Mortonson say that the BICEP2 analysis did not exclude data on small spatial scales, or fractions of degrees of the sky. That is a problem, Seljak says, because on these small scales, gravitational lensing in which the path of light bends around massive objects exactly mimics the twisting polarization pattern that gravitational waves imprint on larger spatial scales.

Accounting for lensing,the primordial gravity-wave signal is preferred to dust with odds of less than two to one in other words, not significant odds at all, says Seljak.

BICEP2 co-leader James Bock, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says that although his group's main paper has been revised based on many referee comments and resubmitted for publication, the evidence for gravitational waves is certainly not being retracted. The BICEP2 results are basically unchanged, he says.

Further observations may yet see the cosmic ripples emerge from the dust. It is possible that forthcoming data from several observatories including the Keck Array, a telescope at the South Pole built by the BICEP2 teamand the Planck team's full-sky map of CMB polarization will confirm that a signal is there, although perhaps not as strong as first suggested.

This story originally appeared in Nature News.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com////gravitational-wave-discovery-challenged_n_5440197.html?utm_hp_ref=science

[Lorizael]

Lorizael, would you care to comment on my doubts regarding the original SNIa time-dilation conclusions back on page one, here is a link

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=7876.msg44865#msg44865

It's a little misleading to say that 2 out of 3 tests are coming back negative. Astronomers have looked for time dilation in a lot of supernovae but not a lot of GRBs or quasars. The reason for this is the accepted reliability of 1a supernovae as standard candles. They're not perfectly reliable, no, which is why the studies done on them have a wide variety of criteria researchers can use to rule out a supernova as a good candidate. For example, there are anomalous super-Chandrasekhar mass supernovae with much greater than expected luminosities, but far lower kinetic energies. This difference is kinetic energy is a red flag that lets researchers toss out particular candidates.

Quasars and GRBs, however, have far more problems in the reliability of their light curves, so they haven't been looked at as often for use as standard candles or confirmation of time dilation. That they don't exhibit the expected level of time dilation suggests either that time dilation isn't occurring or that we simply don't have good data on GRBs and quasars. Cosmologists accept the latter interpretation because it is not time dilation alone that lends support to the theory expansion and the Big Bang. In fact, there is a wealth of evidence that supports the reality of the Big Bang and the metric expansion of space.

To begin with, general relativity itself suggests the Big Bang. The problem that originally led Einstein to introduce a cosmological constant is easily solved by assuming an expanding universe. That the universe is cold now and was once hot (as exhibited by the CMB) is evidence of the Big Bang. That distant galaxies are progressively redshifted is evidence of the Big Bang. That space is virtually flat on cosmic scales is evidence of the Big Bang. That the energy density of the universe was much greater in the past is evidence of the Big Bang. That hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements is evidence of the Big Bang. That galaxies are clustered the way they are is evidence of the Big Bang.

Essentially every piece of cosmological data suggests the Big Bang. Some pieces also suggest other theories, but when taken as a whole, it is the Big Bang that has the most solid observational foundation. So an anomaly in unreliable sets of data is not really trouble for the theory. It's a question that needs to be further examined, studied, and answered, but by itself it cannot tear down all the support that the Big Bang theory has.

[Lorizael]

So dark energy is more or less the cosmological constant?  Nobody really understands the exactly what the latter is either, but it's at least a familiar concept - and the name doesn't trigger my bullcrap detector.  Bad move w/ the new name, cosmology community.  Some of us can think for ourselves and are buzzword-averse... 

There are a couple models of dark energy, but the leading candidate is essentially a cosmological constant--energy associated with space itself.

[Rusty Edge]

So dark energy is more or less the cosmological constant?  Nobody really understands the exactly what the latter is either, but it's at least a familiar concept - and the name doesn't trigger my bullcrap detector.  Bad move w/ the new name, cosmology community.  Some of us can think for ourselves and are buzzword-averse... 

There are a couple models of dark energy, but the leading candidate is essentially a cosmological constant--energy associated with space itself.

So the proof of a cosmological constant is an anomaly?