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Surprise Galaxies at the Edge of Observable Space
brindafella writes "A scientist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo & Siding Springs Observatories, Dr Paul Francis, has dicovered a string of galaxies 300 light years long, and further out than they 'should' be. The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible. The findings have been presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta. 'We have detected 37 galaxies and one quasar in the string, but it probably contains many thousands of galaxies.' He said the galaxy string lay 10,800 million light-years away. See the animation here."
"The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible."
So thats the state of American science, only look at things that agree with current theory!
I guess Galileo's ideas were impossible too, no need for the pope to take a look through the telescope cos he already KNOWS Galileo is making it all up.
Bad science, but very quick science.
Shame!
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Does the concept of a "universe" leave room for anything "outside" of it?
Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe. The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense, regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.
There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed", which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness, because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.
Intiution tells me that the universe didn't start with a big bang
Sigh. Your intuition is wrong. If you had eyes in the microwave you wouldn't doubt the Big Bang at all. Giant, uniform fireball. Hmm.
than having been around all along but not doing anything overt since second 0 (or the end of day 6 if you want to get silly).
A deity doing something overt, externally, to a creation that it created would be impossible to discern from an act naturally occuring inside the creation itself.
Said simpler, the difference between a miracle and a coincidence is whether or not you believe it was a miracle.
Our perceptions operate at a very fundamental level of physics, allowing us to perceive time, though it is not really any different from so called spatial dimensions.
Ooh yes, it is quite different! It's got a negative signature in the metric tensor. Therefore, motion backwards in time requires unbounded energy, whereas motion in all directions in space requires none.
This is why many people say that "space and time switch roles" inside an event horizon: because motion backwards in time (while remaining inside the event horizon) becomes virtually free, whereas motion radially outward becomes unbounded in energy.
There's no way we could move freely in time without violating nasty bad things, or doing weird things with wormholes or negative matter density.
The NASA page on this quotes a redshift of 2.38. Do they say how they got it? Did they take full spectra from all these objects? Are some of them Lyman break galaxies? Are any of the redshifts photometric rather than spectroscopic?
The expansion of the Universe is an expansion of space itself.
That concept I understand. Your simple restatement of it though makes me wonder... has there been any thinking/investigation of whether the Plank constant could have (gradually) changed during some stage of the Big Bang and/or what the consequences of such a change would entail?
--LP