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The 1st Generation of Stars
Andy_Howell writes "Astronomers may have found members of the first generation of stars in the universe. Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck I telescope, they observed a faint red blob that had been magnified into a double image by a gravitational lens. The blob was found to be a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old. The clump appears to contain only about a million stars, and is less than a few million years old. It is thought that swarms of these clumps came together over the age of the universe to create the galaxies we see today."
The problem with "The Big Bang Never Happened" (which I have read) and other alternative cosmologies is that they don't even attempt to go deep enough to prove their points. There's a reason for this. All of modern cosmology is based on General Relativity. If you are going to say that the Big Bang Never Happened, then your alternative cosmology has to not only come up with an alternative explanation for the Universe, but also explain everything that GR does without having a Big Bang. This is a very tall order.
It isn't enough to point out the contradictions in the standard model. It is also necessary to build a new model that explains all observations. To date, no one has been able to do this without having a Big Bang at the start.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
No, we have a small number of poorly designed studies that seem to show that prayer unknown to the patient has an impact, and a number of better-designed studies that show no such thing. Every major "double-blind" study which has shown an effect from prayer on healing has later turned out to be unblinded indeed, with the personnel conducting the study having discarded evidence which didn't fit their hypotheses. Irwin Tessman, among others, has shown this quite thoroughly.
As far as the subject of this article goes: astronomers (and biologists, and geologists) are under no more obligation to consider the beliefs of creationists than historians are to consider the beliefs of Holocaust-deniers, or geographers are to consider the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In the first stage you have some phenomena that you want to try to 'explain' (in scientific parlance 'explain' actually means 'predict through use of appropriate mathematical formulae). The scientists will come up with hypotheses that yield testable formulae for predicting the phenomena in question.
In the second stage you gather lots of empirical data and see if the predictions of your hypotheses agree with the data you have gathered. You may gather data specifically chosen to prove your hypotheses false (since it should be easy to predict what measurements are most likely to disagree with your hypotheses) or you may just use whatever data comes easily to hand (there may be a large mass of existing data, as with Tyco Brahe's astronomical measurements used by Kepler to derive the shapes of the planets' orbits).
Once you have gathered enough data you can see where your hypotheses disagree with the measured data and adjust the hypotheses accordingly. Eventually your hypotheses agree to the measured data to within the current error bounds, at which time you have an official theory.
Importantly, you never actually have access to truth. Nothing is ever proven (though many things may be disproven) and everything is open to some level of doubt. It's just a matter of how much doubt you find acceptable for any give application. For common, everyday tasks, the precision required of most measurements is very low:
- speed of light = faster than anything else
- speed of sound = not as fast as light but faster than most other things
- age of the universe = age of the earth = older than we care to think about
- mass of a subatomic particle = as close to zero as makes no odds.
For specific applications you will require greater precision, but still not perfect precision:The real problem with your use of the terms 'truth' and 'proof' is that they don't mean the same thing to a scientist as they mean in common english. In common english Truth is absolute and Proof is irrefutable. To a scientist, however, truth simply means that the formulae yield answers close enough to measured values that we can't tell the difference (modulo the accuracy of our measuring devices), and proof simply means that no data has been found that clearly contradicts a specific set of formulae (aka, an hypothesis).
Just because science isn't accessing some cosmic Truth doesn't mean that sceintific theories are really just opinions. An opinion is a though in someone's head that has no concrete basis in fact. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is a set of formulae that serve to predict objective, measurable values for physical phenomena to within some specified error range. It may not be too similar to what most people think of as Truth, but it is pretty far from the common definition of option as well. It is certainly a damn sight more reliable that the assorted forms of propaganda, superstition, and outright ignorance that have passed themselves off as Truth for most of history.
It's probably the case that these are very hot stars with peak emission at blue or uv wavelengths. The reason for the red color is probably almost entirely due to the red shift of the objects, and possibly a small amount of interstellar dust (depending on how much intervening dust there is).
More often you see H-alpha emission from the gas clouds surrounding newly formed stars in star forming regions and such, it's somewhat rare (although not unheard of) to see strong hydrogen emission in a stellar atmosphere.
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