Slashdot Mirror
NASA Sees Glow of Universe's First Objects
Damek writes with news from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which has captured light from what may have been the first glowing objects in the universe, light generated 14 billion years ago. From the article: "'We are pushing our telescopes to the limit and are tantalizingly close to getting a clear picture of the very first collections of objects,' said Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky... 'Whatever these objects are, they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today.' Astronomers believe the objects are either the first stars — humongous stars more than 1,000 times the mass of our sun — or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If the objects are stars, then the observed clusters might be the first mini-galaxies..."
Space-time itself can expand faster than the speed of light, and did so in the early universe. That is, even though point A and point B used to be very close, and light was going from point A to point B, point A and B keep getting father apart, so the light has further and further to go.
You may say, "But I thought nothing can go faster than the speed of light." However, you'd be wrong. General relativity allows for this effect.
Unfortunately, using this to create a faster than light drive is still not conceivable, because the only way we know to control space-time is with large amounts of mass or energy (and I mean LARGE).
Think of it as the difference between how fast an ant can crawl across the surface of an expanding balloon, vs. how fast the balloon itself is being inflated. The two speeds are not related to each other, and there can be a limit on the former when there is not on the latter.
This story is very typical of space stories these days. You get some speculation from some scientists about what they expect that they should be seeing, tenuously based upon some weak observational data. A public release is put together and the news story gains steam because it invokes some concept that tickles the imagination of the public (gigantic black holes and stars, for instance). Then, when better observations come in and suggest that maybe we shouldn't be so sure of our prior speculation, there is little effort to correct the record.
0 304starbirth.htm).
1 24solar3.htm), which defied traditional theories about supernovae in nearly every single respect. Even though plasma physics tells us that we can understand the structure we see in those images down to the number of beads in the smaller ring, we continue to ignore those explanations because they involve electricity in space.
c 4td), which extends 100,000 light years -- even though the lifetime of the X-ray producing particles is only about 100 years.
It was interesting to observe that this (probable) garbage made it onto Slashdot, whereas the Stardust mission results (with actual data) did not. It seems that the space news cycle is caught in a competition to make the most outlandish claim possible in order to get the attention of the public these days. Investigating anomalies within the current paradigms has taken a backseat to wild speculation. There's little interest anymore in questioning the early assumptions that got us to this point in the first place:
Our conviction in stellar birth by way of gravitational collapse survives observations of R Corona Australis, which is generating enigmatic x-rays and 100 million degree F temperatures at a very early stage of the supposed collapse (http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/05
Our conviction in our theories about supernovae survived observations of Supernova 1987A (see pictures at http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060
Our conviction in the theory of black holes was not dampened at all by the associated problems with generating the observed quasar jet 3C273 (http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=9kpg
And then there's the Stardust mission -- which when combined with the results of the Deep Impact mission indicate quite clearly that our early assumptions about comets were quite wrong. Scientists are now apparently trying to invent scenarios for how it could be that comets would contain exotic meteorite particles as well as particles that have clearly been formed under intense heat. Perhaps they should consider that these initial speculations were wrong in the first place. I doubt we'll see any such sanity though. More likely, we'll see additional new speculations to support the earlier unsupported speculations.
There increasingly seems to be far less glory these days in doing the homework that we'll be graded on and far more interest in fantasizing about multi-dimensional space and gigantic black holes.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Consider tracing a path over the surface of a balloon with a pen as you're inflating it. You will move the pen a certain distance depending on whatever speed you draw with, but the path you've drawn will be longer than that distance. If you start out with two pens, and move them slow enough relative to the expansion of the balloon, it will take a long time before they meet (or they may never meet), even though they'll each traverse the original distance between eachother in a short amount of time.
It doesn't matter that the object that emitted the photon was moving away at high speed. The light travels at the same speed towards us regardless of the speed of the object it was emitted from. The speed of light, which is a constant. The only thing the object moving fast away from us would affect is the wavelength.
If the universe is expanding at all, then there will have to be galaxies far enough away to be receding at greater than the speed of light. But there is still no local motion greater than c. Superluminal motion that is nonlocal can't be used to send superluminal messages, and space that didn't exist at the time you passed its current location shouldn't count towards your "speed" anyway.
Where does the extra space come from when you draw two dots on a balloon then inflate it?