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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."
That can't be right.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Perhaps our view of the Universe is not as complete as we thought. I hate to think of what things have been cast down as impossible to only later be shown as true. It's not as if these are amateur cosmologists, give them a break and a chance to be proven right or wrong.
Much better luck loading with the story at NASA's site, including an MPEG version of the animation.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible
This is just sad. I sometimes think we'd be centuries ahead in science if theorists could lay aside their egos and realize that hardly any theory lasts forever in its entirety. Refusing time to a group of astronomers who think they may have found something new is not so different from burning heretics who claimed the world was a sphere.
Maybe overdramatic, but my point stands.
"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
Irony? Despite being refused, where do they present the results ...
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Well maybe the model is wrong.
As any good evolutionist knows , after the "Big Bang" all the matter in the universe, which had been compressed (through forces and mechanisms unknowable) into a very tiny ball, exploded outward (spherically, with planar tendencies) with tremendous force.
This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang"
(snip)
Your criticisms would carry more weight if they demonstrated that you understood the relativistic hot Big Bang model at all. The Big Bang model does not presume any very tiny ball, it does not presume that the universal state of high density and temperature that existed long ago occurred because of compression from outside forces, it does not presume a "spherical with planar tendencies" explosion, or indeed any explosion at all.
Take some time and learn about the model. Seriously. Even if at the end, you think it's complete crap, you still should learn what it is. You cannot criticize it effectively if you don't know what the model actually says. And, as your post indiciates, you don't know what the model actually says.
You don't quite have the point. This surprise has nothing to do with distance from the "center" of the big bang, since there is no center.
What's important about these galaxies is their age. Since they are ten billion light years away, the light that is reaching us now is an image of their state ten billion years ago. When the universe was that young, galaxies wouldn't yet have had time to organize themselves into strings.
The most straightforward explanation is that the universe is older than we thought. That has already been postulated as a component of other theories-- various ideas about dark matter, the cosmological constant, etc.-- meaning it's not entirely contrary to current thinking.
So you're partially right, in saying this discovery will force changes in Big Bang theory. But that does not mean what you think it means.
should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation).
Actually, you're messing up what chaotic means in this case. A string formation may or may not be chaotic, depending on the creation mechanism. In the early days of the Universe, matter would be uniform, not "chaotic". If it was formed as a string, then this would be consistent with an early age, because it hadn't had time for their peculiar velocities to distort the formation. If they didn't form as a string, then it wouldn't be consistent with an early age, because gravity wouldn't've had time to pull them into that shape (assuming it could).
The light that's coming from the farthest away from us is uniform - we call it the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. And, amazingly enough, it's incredibly uniform and isotropic. Anisotropies in the CMBR are incredibly small.
If you doubt the Big Bang, get a microwave telescope and look around you. If a Big Bang didn't happen, SOME gigantic, uniform explosion happened, because there's this gigantic, uniform explosion everywhere around you. And it's redshifted by something like z = 10,000 : around 100,000 years after the Big Bang, if my memory serves. That is the universe, as it was very, very close to the Big Bang.
This observation just shows that galaxies formed quicker and faster than theorists predicted. This is not a big deal.
After all, theorists for a while had a hard time explaining how galaxies formed at all. The string formation may suggest that cosmic strings (1-dimensional topological defects) may actually have existed in the early universe. Cosmic strings have been "down on their luck" theoretically recently, as the preponderance of dark matter and energy have convinced many people you don't actually need cosmic strings. This may start them thinking otherwise.
"faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).
Chance has a perspective issue. Saying something happened by "chance" and saying that it was "planned" is a matter of belief, not of fact. Nowhere do scientists say why something happened. Just how. Trying to use scientific arguments to justify a "why" is flat wrong - you're trying to justify a statement that requires evidence outside of a proper frame of reference. It's similar to the problems with the strong anthropic principle - fundamentally, from our point of view, it's indistiguishable from its opposite (oddly enough, because of the weak anthropic principle). You can't tell the difference between a "chance" creation or a "designed" creation by an intelligent force because they produce exactly the same results, because fundamentally, you have to produce a universe capable of having humans (the weak anthropic principle). We have no knowledge of the number of "dead" universes, nor whether or not "dead" universes could even exist. Therefore, from our point of view, there's no way to prove which is correct, and which is incorrect, and therefore, it's a matter of belief, not of science.
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?
> This surprise has nothing to do with distance from the "center" of the big bang,
> since there is no center
I've heard this before, and although I don't disagree with it, I've never been able to wrap my brain around it. It seems to me that any explosion has a center, or a point of origin. Even one that expands out into "nothing" like the Big Bang did/is.
This is, unfortunately, a flaw in the name of the model. It conjures up the idea of an explosion of material into surrounding empty space, which is not what the Big Bang model describes. The expansion of the Universe is an expansion of space itself. The galaxies grow farther apart not because they are moving away from each other through space, but because space itself is expanding between them.
Not that that necessarily makes things easier for you. Fundamentally, this points out a failure of one of our most useful way of understanding thimgs: to relate them to things we already understand, or with which we are already familiar. For instance, when authors of cosmology books for laypersons construct analogies to the expansion of space and the resulting increasing separation of the galaxies, they use things like a loaf of raisin bread expanding in the oven. But that analogy is flawed: the raisin bread has space surrounding it into which it can expand (not to mention a "center"), while no such thing exists for the universe.
A better analogy in that it gets rid of the embedded center is to give up our 3D universe, and instead consider the 2D surface of an inflating balloon. Dots (galaxies) painted on the balloon's surface are all getting farther and farther apart from each other on the surface of the balloon (in space), but no place on the surface of the balloon (no location in the Universe) can be called the center of the expansion (the one place from which things started expanding apart). But this analogy is a bad one, as well. It makes an assumption about the topology of the universe (that it loops around on itself, or is "closed"); the Universe may be that way, but it need not be. More importantly, this analogy requires the existence of a 3rd dimension (the radial direction) separate from the 2D surface of the balloon; a change in the position of the surface of the balloon with time in that radial direction describes the expansion. But the Big Bang model doesn't require such a hidden dimension which is driving the expansion.
There just isn't something from our day-to-day lives which provides a decent analogy to the expansion of the Universe. It has to be understood on its own terms, without recourse to simple visualization. Not that this is uncommon in physics since the beginning of the 20th Century; for instance, quantum mechanics describes phenomena which are difficult to impossible to describe in terms of how things work in our common sense, everyday world. In the end, it comes down to a quote from (I think) Feynman (although he was talking about quantum mechanics at the time): "I don't know how to describe it in terms of something you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of something you're more familiar with."
The problem with ID is that a universe that does not comply with the ID theory would not be able to be observed. ID basically states that the universe is so well put together and that things fit so perfectly to allow certain things, most notably life, that there must be some force behind it.
What ID completely ignores is the fact that any universe that would have rules that would be shitty for life and intelligence would never realize it. In other words, there could have been a billion big bangs all that developed different laws. In all of these big bangs there might have been only one where all the laws arrived to allow for intelligence (humans) to observe it.
ID theory also suffers from the simple fact that a good theory can devise be disproved. You can never prove a good theory, but you can always find a way to disprove it. If you develop a theory that can not be disproved, then you have not added much. You have just engaged a logic exercise, not any sort of true science.
ID has no place in science. ID is a just a catch all for things we don't understand. It might very well come that one day we discover through science some intelligent power that created everything, however, until that time ID is very much a premature. ID is based upon the observation that the universe is elegant in its construction. To automatically assume that this means that some higher power is at work is utterly foolish.
As to the topic at hand, the only thing that this proves is that current theories could be potentially incomplete. It very well could be that the universe is older then it appears, and this would of course require modifying or scrapping the current theories. It isn't a death blow by any stretch of the imagination. It also is still need a great deal more scientific validation before it can be shown that what we are looking at is as old as these scientist claim.
It's just yet-another-inconsistency in the n-th hack to the BB theory introduced to clean up previous gripes.
Can you be more specific? What's the inconsistency here, with what is it inconsistent, and how does that inconsistency speak to the Big Bang model as a whole, specifically? I'm not saying you're wrong (yet); I just can't address your statement directly because it's too vague.
There are without question unsolved problems in cosmology (thank heavens; otherwise, cosmologists would have little to do). I'm interested in your careful argument as to why those problems cannot be solved in the context of the Big Bang model, and therefore falsify it. To me, it seems like you're saying "Since we don't understand how tornadoes form, it's time to realize that the `spherical Earth' model is a failure." That analogy probably seems silly to you, since we have lots of evidence to support the idea of a (nearly) spherical Earth. But we have lots of evidence that supports the Big Bang model as well, including non-trivial advance predictions borne out by subsequent observation.
The Big Bang model will be falsified if and when a prediction it makes is shown to be false. But that hasn't happened here: the Big Bang model does not make predictions about the specifics of the mass distribution or galaxy formation. Those are topics of importance in cosmology, but they do not directly speak to the veracity of the Big Bang model. Only if the general constraints the Big Bang model places upon galaxy formation are such that these observations should be impossible is there a problem for the Big Bang. Nobody's shown this to be true.
It is true that these observations, if correct, pose a challenge to the standard cosmological model. But there's more to the standard cosmological model than just the Big Bang model.
> 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.
Is it meaningful to talk about the portions of the universe that are outside our light cones as being mathematically connected to us? You can say that they were, but not that they are. There's no such thing as an instantaneous "now" snapshot of the universe, just a snapshot of the current surface of the backwards light cone. In practice, "everything that I can observe" and "everything that is connected to me" refer to the same thing.
I shouldn't speak for the poster to whom you were replying, but I'm pretty sure that he was using the phrase "mathematically connected" in a topological sense, rather than referring to causal connection. If one meant connected in a causal sense, then you're absolutely correct that that means the backwards light cone by definition, and therefore means what I can observe. But you can also talk about the topology of space, and whether the Universe is simply connected, connected, etc. I think that's how it was meant; and that definition is different from what's observable.
Well, the BB story has gone along for so much time... some new data whacks it, ok... small nudge and it's consistent.
Can you give an example?
Some new research threatens boatloads of papers, ok... mop it under the rug.
Can you give an example?
Average, uninitiated scientists can't make heads or tails of the nasty slew of hypotherical particles and their family relations (that HAS to be true because it fits the model!)... oh, they're just ignorant.
The Big Bang model makes no predictions whatsoever about the existence of any hypothetical particles, let alone a "nasty slew." The only particles required to be present for the Big Bang model to make accurate predictions are those expected to still be relativistic at the time of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: namely, the three families of baryons and leptons that we've already detected in experiments here on Earth. In fact, when the BBN calculations were first done, it was discovered that the predictions only made sense if there were three or fewer families of fundamental particles. At that time, we only knew of two for sure. We've since discovered the third in particle accelerators, and measurements of the decay width of the Z0 particle 13 years ago confirmed that no more than three such families could exist. So, contrary to your statement, the Big Bang model not only doesn't predict a "nasty slew of hypothetical particles," but at this point it doesn't predict any hypothetical particles at all, and indeed sets a limit on how many light ones can exist.
It looks to me like you don't know what the Big Bang model actually says. And it looks to me like you don't know what's not the Big Bang model -- that is, what are other ideas that are taken seriously as part of the standard cosmology but are not part of the Big Bang model itself because they deal with cosmological topics that the Big Bang model does not directly address.
Hmm, I've grocked EM and some quantum physics (the basics: Schroedinger, Fermi and the avg undergraduate stuff in a Solid State Phy course) and never got the Alice in Wonderland feeling.
Really? Wow. One of the reasons I loved quantum so much, through undergrad and grad school, was how something that seemed so "Alice in Wonderland"-y to me could be so solidly borne out by experiment. I mean, tunnelling through potential barriers? Come on. But amazingly enough, the answers come out right.
You might argue that modern cosmology can account for all the data (or just give it enough time and it will) but anyone can shoehorn a dataset in a model... just add some epicycles, a nudge here, a constant there... it'll all fit.
But can you give me some examples of how this has gone on, with respect to the Big Bang model?
Our cosmological understanding has undergone a tremendous amount of change in the last 20-25 years, as cosmology has gone from a data-starved science to a data-rich one. Lots of ideas have been put forward, "tweaked" (as you say), shot down, resuscitated, etc. None of that has to do with the Big Bang model. People have definitely tried to massage pet theories when data has come in that didn't quite fit (the topological defect folks -- cosmic strings, etc. -- come to mind); but those theories were not the Big Bang model.
It really seems to me like you don't know, of the set of ideas that make up the standard cosmology and those additional ideas that are taken seriously but not yet fully accepted, what's part of the Big Bang model and what isn't. The popular press carries some of the blame for this -- the phrase "the Big Bang model" is all the cosmology most newspaper science writers know, so when results have challenged cosmological orthodoxy, they've sometimes been described as challenges to the Big Bang model, even though in actuality they've typically said nothing whatsoever one way or the other about the Big Bang model.
So, I just wished these guys p
Thanx for your post, once again proving that "Intelligent Design" advocates have no understanding of science. If you get the science wrong then it is very easy to use it as part of some bogus and supposedly "scientific" argument.
As any good evolutionist knows
First of all evolution and the big bang have absolutely nothing in common aside from the fact that they are both science. You may as well have said "As any good gravitationist knows..."
after the "Big Bang" all the matter in the universe, which had been compressed (through forces and mechanisms unknowable) into a very tiny ball, exploded outward
All of the matter and energy was evenly spread through out the entire universe, all the way back to the big bang. Matter did not "explode". Space expanded. Bits of matter got farther from other bits of matter because the space between them expanded. Everything was densely packed in a miniscule space because there was only miniscule amout of space in the universe. And that miniscule amount of space had no "outer edge".
(spherically, with planar tendencies)
Sphereically? No. You are imagining some exploding ball, and that is an absolutely totally wrong image. The best way to explain it would be as the skin of an expanding 4 dimentional hyper-sphere, but I really don't relish the prospect of trying to stretch your mind around that concept.
No "planar tendancies" either. Aside from random fluctuations everything was smooth and equal throughout the universe. Everywhere was just like everywhere else. No edge, no center, no fast, no slow. The good old balloon analogy - when you blow up a ballon the surface expands, but every point on the surface is exactly like every other point. The surface of a balloon has no edge, no center, no explosion, no part moving any faster or any differently than any other part.
with tremendous force.
You are reffering to some imaginary explosive force of matter pushing out. There was no explosion and there was no "out" to push to. Expanding space dragged the matter apart. No explosive force at all. It expanded like the surface of a balloon, not like a stick of dynamite.
All of this random matter eventually coagulated into more and more complicated forms until stars, planets, and the like were formed.
Hey! You got that part right!
This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang" doesn't make sense
Chuckle. You're quite right that what you said makes absolutely no sense.
There is no "assumed center" of the big bang, at least not within our 3-dimentional universe. At any given time every point in the universe is the same "distance" from the big bang.
Those galaxies are far from us, but you are completely wrong to imagine they are "FAR OUT" at the edge of the big bang. To the extent that it makes sense to reffer to the "distance to the center of the big bang", those galaxies are extremely CLOSE to the center because you are looking back in time. You are imagining them out at some low-density surface of an explosion, these galaxies are actually in a HIGH DENSITY region, they are much closer to the big bang itself.
You are making the classic mistake of picturing the Earth as the center of the universe. From our point of view the Earth is at the outermost edge of the big bang from every direction. No matter which direction you look from the Earth you are looking back towards the "center" of the big bang because you are looking back in time. As you look billions of light years away in every direction you see increasing mass density and you are looking closer and closer to the "center" of the big bang.
From our point of view we see ourselves at the oldest lowest density outermost edge of the big bang - the outermost edge from every direction.
since the matter comprising those galaxies (being the furthest out from center and thus having the greate
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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
> and whose to say that the Universe doesn't oscillate?
That possibility is still definitely on the table, but it's losing support.
It has almost no support in the mainstream cosmological community, and hasn't for quite a while.
A universe that slows, stops, and falls back in a "Big Crunch" is a negative curvature universe. A universe that expands infinitely is a positive curvature universe. Between them you have a precise zero-point, a "flat" zero curvature universe where the expansion rate slows infinitely close to zero.
Actually, this is backwards. Traditionally, it's been positively curved universes that recollapse, while negatively curved universes converge towards a free expansion where the expansion scales linearly with time (that is, as the age of the Universe doubles, everything expands by a factor of two). So that's backwards. But also, in that traditional view, flat universes expand infinitely as well; they simply asymptotically approach (but never quite reach) an end to the expansion (I think you were trying to say that, but I wanted to make it clear).
But importantly, this view has neglected the possibility of a nonzero vacuum energy, or cosmological constant. That's why I used the adverb "traditionally" above -- traditionally, we've assumed there to be no vacuum energy, and set the cosmological constant to zero. We now have significant observational evidence that this was wrong. In the presence of a cosmological constant, it's no longer possible to simply say "negative curvature = expands forever, zero curvature = expands forever but asymptotically approaches stopping, positive curvature = recollapse." Those simple relations between curvature and fate no longer hold if there's a cosmological constant. It's true that the energy content of the Universe drives the time-evolution of its expansion; it's also true that the energy content of the Universe determines its curvature. But the presence of a cosmological constant changes the Friedmann equations in such a way that that simplistic correlation between curvature and how the expansion will proceed no longer holds true. This is illustrated by the apparent situation with our own Universe (see below).
There are very strong theoretical reasons to think that the universe has exactly zero curvature - precisely on the balancing point. On the other hand recent observations seem to suggest accelerating expansion, possibly runaway positive curvature taht would eventually rip apart everything - the Earth, atoms, even protons.
Actually, we have strong observational evidence that the Universe is flat (that is, has zero curvature), from observations of the primary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. At the same time, you're correct that recent observations indicate an acceleration to the expansion. But this is not contradictory when a vacuum energy exists. In fact, a vacuum energy is the only way to get an accelerating expansion; a negative curvature universe with no cosmological constant does expand infinitely, but that expansion does not accelerate.