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200,000 Elliptical Galaxies Point the Same Way
KentuckyFC sends us to arXiv, as is his wont, for a paper (abstract; PDF preprint) making the claim that 200,000 elliptical galaxies are aligned in the same direction; the signal for this alignment stands out at 13 standard deviations. This axis is the same as the controversial alignment found in the cosmic microwave background by the WMAP spacecraft.
Do they give any reason that this might be so? Are the galaxies in the same area? Did they all form from some insanely massive rotating structure or something?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da2byMoEG30
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
nope - the turtle.
"See the TURTLE of enormous girth,
On his shell he holds the earth.
If you want to run and play,
Come along the BEAM today."
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
god doesn't play dice
he plays with magnets
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Einstein did not say that there cannot be a center of the universe.
What he did say is that for the purposes of measurement, there exists no privleged metric. All this says (All?!) is that there is no overall coordinate system that will be superior to all other coordinate systems.
If things started out as a big bang, on some scale, we will find a "center" of the universe. Is this an astronomy-shaking discovery? No. Maybe a tremor or two, for diehard relativeists. We already know that for specific purposes, there is often a preferred metric for computational or navigational purposes. Remember back in the Apollo program when the physics guys tried to explain that at a specific point, the coordinate system for the spacecraft shifted over from Terra-centric to Luna-centric, and the reporters looked at the "jog" in the plot and asked if the spacecraft would feel a "lurch" as it passed this point?
It's not nearly as big a deal as, say, whether Pluto is a "planet" or not. Pick a label, pin the sticker on the rock, except in this case, the rocks are superclusters of galaxies.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
His "random computer generated results" test is what we statisticians call a 'Monte-Carlo' test. Its perfectly valid, given the assumptions he is working under.
Suppose you throw 10 possibly biased dice and score 50 in total (where the average score would be 30).
You then get 10 definitely fair dice and throw them 100 times, counting the total each time. If these trials only score 50 or more once, then the chances of your possibly biased dice being fair are 1 in 99. That's pretty much what he's done.
With dice its possible to compute the probability exactly without doing the trials, since the behaviour of uniform probabilities (ie even chance of scoring 1 to 6) are well known and easy to compute. But if you have a situation of elliptical galaxies and their apparent projection on a sphere viewed from the earth then I suspect the computations may be harder...
Let's note that:
1) This guy is a high-energy physicist, not an astronomer.
2) He has two published articles on extragalactic astronomy, both from the early 90s, which have picked up a grand total of 4 citations.
3) He has put up 3 papers on the arXiv in the last few months, all on this subject. None of them are stated to have been submitted for review, and indeed they are not in the style of any of the major relevant journals.
Yeah, yeah, ad hominem and all that. I'll read it more carefully later if I have time (but I'm a bit busy writing a paper of my own, like, for submission and peer review and all that). He does appear to enjoy abusing statistics, both here and in his earlier papers.
I just kinda think that Slashdot could report on all the many scientific discoveries that are actually likely to be true, rather than grand claims based on a couple of preprints by someone with little experience in the field.
...well, I have a MS in Physics, anyway. Well, Applied Physics. In semiconductors. Anyway...
I think another poster said it a bit more intuitively, that the point is now smeared out everywhere. That sounds roughly right to me.
Another thing to realize is that the Big Bang doesn't mean that an explosion happened in a single point in empty space, and then everything expanded outward. It's that space itself was compressed down into a single point, and then expanded. There was nothing outside the Big Bang for it to expand out into. Every point in the universe was infinitely closer together. All the energy was really close together--really dense--so it was really hot. Then as things got less dense, the temperature decreased. In one sense, everywhere is the center of the Big Bang.
This is also why distant galaxies can be receding away from us faster than the speed of light. Because expansion doesn't mean that galaxies are moving through space. (In relativity, nothing can move through space faster than c.) Instead, the distance between us is increasing as space itself expands. (You can visualize that as making two marks with a pen on a deflated balloon, and then blowing up the balloon. The two marks don't move on the balloon, but they do get further apart.)
IANAAP either, but I see it like this: imagine you have 4 spinning tops in the corners of a square. (The spinning tops are the galaxies.) The square itself doesn't spin, but the round things in the corners do. If all 4 rotate in the same direction, the system has a decidedly non-zero angular momentum, namely the sum of the 4. You can also easily find a frame of reference (e.g., centered the centre of the square and with the X and Y axes aligned with the side of the square) that doesn't rotate, and measure everything relative to it.
Or if it makes it easier to imagine, think of the science gag of having a very fast spinning flywheel in a suitcase. Ask someone to carry it for you, or leave it around and see if anyone tries to steal it. (Though these days it'll more likely be the blown up by the SWAT or whatever equivalent your country has.) If the suitcase is horizontal (lying on the side), someone's going to have a beast of a time trying to pick it up. Or if it's standing, they'll have a beast of a time taking a corner with it. Though the suitcase (universe) doesn't rotate, the flywheel (galaxy) in it does, and the angular momentum of it all is very much non-zero.
Now think of a suitcase with 4 flywheels in it, or 200,000 little flywheels. The suitcase itself doesn't rotate, the centres of the wheels don't rotate around anything, but the total system has a total angular momentum. Anyone trying to mess with that piece of luggage is in for a bit of surprise.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.