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Chandra Provides Support For Dark Energy
starannihilator writes "The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has provided new evidence supporting the existence of dark energy, the force causing the acceleration of universal expansion. The new findings support the theory that the universe will expand forever, provided there is enough dark matter. CNN and Newsday are running the story, originally reported by NASA. Chandra's site has some good images and information on the three galaxies clusters studied (Abell 2029, MS2137.3-2353, and MS1137.5+6625)."
I am eagerly awaiting the next annoncement where someone again finds evidence to refute the dark matter claims. It seems like the science; "Dark Matter is like this" - "No, it can't be, actually it's like that". Is not going to end soon.
Join me. Come to the dark side, and together, we will expand the universe.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I dated a girl named Chanda once. Dark energy is a good way to describe her.
Maybe someone can explain... But when the CNN article states that the universe is "accelerating", does that mean it's really accelerating? I thought it was decided that the universe's expansion was expanding at the speed of light. So, I would assume that by accelerating they mean growing bigger and not actually accelerating faster than the speed of light. Unless, this Dark Matter is something that can bend the known laws of physics and travel faster than the speed of light?
Hmmm.
how do we know if something outside the universe isnt affecting it.
I'd like to think we live on an electron in orbit around the proton of a molecule as part of a giant coffee mug -- our universe is expanding due to some even bigger geek having just poured hot coffee in our universal mug.
It's "dark" cuz that's how this geek likes his coffee.
If the universe was expanding at the speed of light. It would look pretty dark out there at night.
Or at the very least it would be awfully hard to see some of those distant galaxies.
Gravitation is a shadowing effect. (Yes, all the formulae still work, except when you get out towards the edges of space)
--Mike--
No. The expansion of the universe refers to the fact that distant galaxies are moving away from us, and that the farther they are, the faster they are moving. This is expressed by the Hubble constant, which has a value of about 50 km/s/Mpc.
The acceleration of the expansion is reflected as this "constant" increasing with increasing distance.
The acceleration is caused by Dark Energy, not Dark Matter.
Dark Matter is either normal matter or subnuclear matter that makes its presence felt as increased gravity, but is not directly observable.
Dark Energy is not well understood at all.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Does anyone else think that the cutting edge of physics is starting to resemble Ptolemy's system of astronomy? With all this 'dark' energy, and 'dark' matter, it's beginning to look like a lot of hand-waving.
Increasingly complex adjustments (e.g. epicycles) were made to Ptolemy's system to explain the observed motions of the heavenly bodies. Then along comes Copernicus and tells us that we've been looking at it inside out all along, things are simple after all, we just have to adjust our viewpoint.
I think physics is overdue another Copernicus.
The headline to this story is an exaggeration. Of course, you can't blame it on the author seeing as the headlines of the major news sources were exaggerations as well.
So what, we have more evidence the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. WE ALREADY KNEW THAT! This is just another indication that it's happening. This doesn't "prove" the existence of dark energy. It's still entirely possible (and I would suggest probable) that we just don't know the entire story about gravity. Physicists have gotten gravity wrong before after all.
The original poster has it wrong, more dark matter decreases the expansion of the universe as one would expect, dark energy does the opposite changing the state function of the universe and thus allowing it to expand. IAA astro-physicist
What, no pictures of "dark matter"?! That I'd call an announcement!!
Whenever life get's you down, Mrs. Brown
and things seem hard and tough,
and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
and it feels that you've had quite enough---
Just remember that your standing on a planet that's evolving,
revolving at 900 miles per hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles per second, so it's reckoned,
a sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun, and you and me and all the stars that we can see
are moving at a million miles a day,
in an outer spiral arm at 40,000 miles an hour,
in this galaxy we call the milky way.
The galaxy itself contains 100 million stars,
it's 40 thousand light years side-to-side.
It bulges in the middle 30 thousand light years thick,
but out by us it's just 3000 light years wide.
We're 30 thousand light years from galactic central point,
we go round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions
in this amazing and expanding universe.
Musical interlude
The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
in all of the directions it can whizz.
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know
A million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when your feeling very small and in-secure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth.
And prey that there's intelligent life, somewhere out in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
Attribution for the above lyrics to Eric Idle.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I have a particle around here somewhere that I measured to find its precise speed was very slightly faster than c.... I would show it to you as proof but I cant seem to find it anywhere! ;o)
That was proved to me years ago when I met my housemates girlfriend. She was positively festering with it. She radiated me with it so much of it that I now have a latent ability to detect dark energy within a 5m radius.
I've seen a few references to a theory of a final "big rip," in which everything (even atoms) are torn apart by the expansionistic force.
Would this apply to black holes, as well? If black holes aren't ripped apart, would they continue to provide areas of gravity strong enough that particles in the vicinity don't undergo the rip?
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
Uh, dark matter and dark energy aren't the same thing.
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From the Micro$oft school of cosmology. Take something ( a cosmological model ) that barely works, find out there's a yet another problem with it, and patch it ( with blather about dark matter ) in the hope that it works. Then find out that by introducing the patch to fix one problem, you find another ( er... what exactly is dark matter? Anyone? Please? )
Hey, I rubbished Micro$oft and the whole of modern cosmology in one post. Cool.
There was some PBS special a little while back that talked about "string theory" of reality and the possibility that the "Big Bang" was actually a big "collision" between this and another dimmension. The "collision" or interaction between the two different dimmensions not only created tremendous energy but also left some material from the other dimmesion in this one, dark matter. That is why the stuff is invisible with no known origin but somehow detectable. Kind of like the Old Ones.
This is great news!
>The new findings support the theory that the >universe will expand forever
I was afraid that the universe would stop expanding and start collapsing and that would kill us all!
Why are they ignoring the obvious (at least to me) possiblity that the universe oscillates around some optimal size. Imagine the universe as a rubber ball. Squeeze the ball and let it go. Every particle inside will immediately start moving away from the others at an accelerated pace, continuing to accelerate until passing the rest boundary, when it will start slowing down. What's causing the expansion? How about the reduction of space curvature? Imagine space as a tablecloth (ok, so I'm knee deep in analogies :) on a table with a hole in the middle. Place a heavy pitcher in the middle and the tablecloth will be pulled through the hole, pulling its edges closer together. This is what happens around a star according to general relativity theory. Now, the star is constantly radiating energy and losing mass, so the space is constantly uncurving. Because it is uncurving, it is expanding. When all the stars burn out, space will start collapsing again as energy falls into black holes. Then the black holes coalesce and make the big bang singularity, which explodes for some reason and everything starts all over again.
It may be possible to have a universe that is expanding and contracting at different times based on variables we have no ability to measure, hence never be able to know which way we are going to go, only where we seem to have gone.
For some great educational sources for the non-astro-physicist, see The Elegant Universe excellent program (my six and ten year olds understood most of it). A few other articales are at Sky and Telescope and Scientific American
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
I've always been bothered by the "the universe will expand forever, and it's accelerating" theories.
Not that I have an a fraction the knowledge or mathematical skills of these scientists; but correct me if I'm wrong.
Doesn't gravity effecct objects regardless of the distance between them? Meaning to say, that gravity, however weak, will always have this attractive force.
so, won't this energy causing this accelerating expansion eventually burn up/out?
couldn't the universe be Like the release of a stretched-out, very long rubber band (played back in slow motion). At first release starting from a velocity of 0 and then accelerating. but after expending it's energy, slowing? heck, then even retracting?
in other words, what evidence supports that this thing is going to expand at an accelerating rate forever? seems like gravity is going to get a little upset about that eventually.
The Chandra instrument is named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist from early in the previous century. Not the moon.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Here's a quick summary of the technique:
[TMB]
Heh, and you still wonder why people hate fundamentalist nutters like you. It's weird that fundamentalist muslims and orthodox jews are at each others' throats... You have more in common then you are different
Now blow the balloon up a little more such that P0 and P1 are 1mm further apart, and thus P1 and P2 are also 1mm further apart (P0 and P2 are 2mm further apart). Then (D=distance, dD=change in distance):
dD01/D01 = 1mm/10mm=0.1
dD12/D12 = 1mm/10mm=0.1
dD02/D02 = 2mm/20mm=0.1
i.e., dD/D = constant. Since the dD occured over the same time for the two distances, you can also write this as
(dD/dt)/D = V/D = constant = K
(This is the Hubble equation, where K=H.)
So, in theory, you could blow up a balloon such that two points are moving faster than c relative to each other (V=c=D*K). Let's see how to do this. The distance between any two points on the surface is D = r*Q (r=balloon radius, Q = angle between the points in radians which stays constant as the balloon expands). The change in distance over time is
dD/dt = V = dr/dt*Q.
The furthest two points can get apart is Q=pi (opposite points on the balloon), hence the fastest relative velocity will be between these points. Let V = c and solve:
dr/dt = V/Q = c/pi
In other words, if the radius of the balloon was expanding at a rate of just under 1/3 the speed of light, two points on the balloon would be moving relative to each other at the speed of light. (This would not only take a lot of air, but the rate of air required would go up with the cube of the radius, so you'd want to do this when the radius is very small.)
Applying this 2D analogy to the 3D universe, it doesn't have to be expanding at the speed of light for two distant points to be moving greater than c relative to each other. But it does have to be expanding above a certain rate to achieve this. If it's expanding slower than this critical rate, no two points can be moving faster than light relative to each other. If it's expanding faster, they can. Since the expansion seems to be accelerating, it seems inevitable that it will happen at some point if it hasn't already.
We should also be able to figure out if it has already happened or when it will. We know the constant H (from the Hubble equation H = V/D). (It's easy to calculate anyway, given the distance to any star and it's measured relative velocity.) If we know the history of the expansion rate we know how big the universe is, i.e., this furthest distance Dmax between any two points. We can then solve the Hubble equation V = H*Dmax and see if it is less than or greater than c.
By the way, I don't think this violates relativity, it doesn't say anything about the rate of expansion of the universe. I think this falls into the "warp" concept of traveling faster than the speed of light, i.e., if you can locally expand the universe fast enough, it appears you are moving away faster than the speed of light, and vice-versa if you can contract it fast enough locally it appears that you are approaching faster than the speed of light. I could be wrong about that though.