Hubble Space Telescope Spots the Farthest Known Star (engadget.com)

Researchers using Hubble space telescope data have spotted Icarus (aka MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1), a blue supergiant whose light was emitted when it was 9 billion light years away from Earth -- over 100 times farther than the previous record-setter. According to Engadget, "They captured the star thanks to a rare, ideal gravitational lensing effect where the star's light was magnified not only by the gravity of an in-between galaxy cluster 5 billion light years from Earth, but by a star inside that cluster." From the report: Observers had been keeping close watch on the cluster since 2014, when they'd detected a supernova that turned out to be present in a galaxy 9 billion light years away. They realized Icarus was present in April 2016, when a point of light near the supernova seemed to change brightness. Don't get too attached to this new discovery. With this kind of distance, Icarus has long-since turned into a neutron star or black hole. The findings are still advancing science in ways you might not expect, however. As the Guardian noted, the Icarus study ruled out a theory that dark matter consists of black holes. If that had been the case, they would have brightened Icarus even more. And if nothing else, this proves that humanity can detect more than just the largest and brightest celestial objects at these kinds of distances.

Comments

The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Pezbian]

If that old thing can see something so unique and far away, I can only imagine what the James Webb Space Telescope is ultimately capable of.

If it ever launches.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Gavagai80]

The Hubble isn't the telescope doing 99% of the magnification work here. The galaxy cluster and the star within are the two powerful telescopes being used.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[TFlan91]

Modding needs a confirmation box, selected redundant instead of insightful. Sorry man. Posting to undo..

Re: The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you implying that by the time Webb telescope launches the galaxy cluster will dissipate?

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd forget about that James Webb Telescope if I were you. This current administration is trying to kill it, but don't trust me, go look it up.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

If it ever launches.

It's better to thoroughly test it while it's still on the ground . . . instead of having to send up a Geek Squad repair crew on the Space Shuttle, like we had to do with the Hubble.

Oh, yeah . . . we don't have the Space Shuttle anymore.

If there's trouble with the Webb, we'll have to politely ask our good friends the Russians for help.

Or maybe the Chinese.

Has India done any manned flight yet . . . ?

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[110010001000]

We have SpaceX. They are going to take us all to Mars soon.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't you fucking liar. It wants to cancel the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), citing other priorities for NASA. The James Webb is due to launch in 2019.

Re: The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gravitational lensing

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Opportunist]

Yeah, and I'm one of them.

Blasted diet.

Re: The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to toss you out of an airlock.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who did you feed last night that wasn't part of your family, or a co-worker, or a neighbor?

My monthly deduction goes to help feed a child in Cambodia. It takes no effort on my part, I don't even notice the amount, it took a moment to decide which child to direct the funds to after the previous one moved away from the program. It's less than the least I can do, and it doesn't make me a better person. But I do something, more than zero, and if you aren't, you perhaps should direct your ire properly.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way that the Shuttle, even if it was flying, could reach the Webb. Maybe, just maybe the SLS & Orion but even then, the designers of the Webb, in all their wisdom, did not design it to be repairable in space. The Hubble was, but not the Webb. Yet another oopsy with the Webb. And of cource, the SLS will never be ready...

The chance of the Webb actually deploying correctly are rather slim....and will it ever launch?

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

If that old thing can see something so unique and far away

I still don't understand how they can determine distances of such far-out objects. Yes I am aware of standard candles, and that we "know" how far away they are based on observed brightness. But observed brightness isn't just impacted by distance, it is also impacted by the size of the object. So how can we be so sure that these standard candles are not bigger or smaller than we assume they are?

Are the distances simply so large, that a standard candle would need to be exponentially larger/smaller than our assumed size in order to significantly impact the calculated distance?

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

A trip in the Orion on the SLS to the Webb would be arduous; the astronauts will probably be close to insanity locked up in that tin can by the time they reached the Webb. I don't know how long it would take, but I would think it would be 3-10 times as long as the Apollo missions.

And besides Orion and the SLS were never really serious about flying, rather they are all about funneling billions, oops creating jobs, for the NASA contractors.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[jfdavis668]

They use the light of type Ia supernovas, which explode with a know brightness, to determine the distance to a galaxy. Then they compare that to its redshift so determine the redshift to distance ratio. Then, all you need to do is measure the object's redshift to determine its distance.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[stevelinton]

If that old thing can see something so unique and far away

I still don't understand how they can determine distances of such far-out objects. Yes I am aware of standard candles, and that we "know" how far away they are based on observed brightness. But observed brightness isn't just impacted by distance, it is also impacted by the size of the object. So how can we be so sure that these standard candles are not bigger or smaller than we assume they are?

Are the distances simply so large, that a standard candle would need to be exponentially larger/smaller than our assumed size in order to significantly impact the calculated distance?

Standard candles are things that have a fixed total brightness (or at least a brightness that we can work out independent of their size).

For instance a certain type of supernova is believed to happen when a white dwarf star, slowly accreting matter from a companion, finally gets too massive to support itself and collapses into a neutron star. Regardless of the mass of the original white dwarf, this mass at which this collapse happens is pretty much the same, and so the total brightness of this type of supernova is more or less constant.

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just THINK of how many OTHER stars will be schlupped by the time they launch that thing and discover all its manufacturing errors...

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[PPH]

WFIRST

We are going to rename it USAFIRST. So Trump will support it.

Re: The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[PPH]

I wonder how long the alignment between Icarus, the intermediate galaxy cluster and our observation point will remain. Things move in space. How does the 'field of view' of the gravity lens compare with the motion of our solar system around the Milky Way?

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[CrimsonAvenger]

If there's trouble with the Webb, we'll have to politely ask our good friends the Russians for help.

Why? They can't get to the Earth/Sun L2 point with any manned vehicle they've ever built.

Or maybe the Chinese.

Neither have they.

Has India done any manned flight yet . . . ?

No. And if they had, they wouldn't be capable of going beyond LEO either.

Note that since the retirement of Apollo, NOONE has had the ability to send people beyond LEO. And even Apollo wasn't capable of going to the Earth/Sun L2.

Note further that NOONE is even planning such capability anytime soon (by "soon" I mean before 2050 or so).

Except SpaceX. Whether they will have that capability before my leftovers are in the ground, not a clue. But they're at least aiming to have the capability....

And on an almost unrelated note, how long is the Webb supposed to stay at Earth/Sun L2, what with Luna perturbing its orbit?

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

My monthly deduction goes to help feed a child in Cambodia.

...or so you were told. (possibly...)

Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Note further that NOONE is even planning such capability anytime soon (by "soon" I mean before 2050 or so).

That's not really true; I'm pretty sure that all three of NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are planning such capability before 2050. Only the latter two plan it to have a reasonable price tag, though.

Easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

We are finding new systems to White Flight to.

Slashdot should avoid linking to such silly sites.

[ArsenneLupin]

html {
display: none;
}

WTF?

No grav lensing

[greylion3]

There's no such thing as gravitational lensing. Light is not bent by gravity.
Light is an electromagnetic impulse, can't 'bend' that with no matter involved.

The galaxy in between is merely a lens-shaped blob of matter acting as a lens:

https://www.thunderbolts.info/...

Re:No grav lensing

[jfdavis668]

Space is bent by gravity, not light. Light then takes the shortest path through the curved space time.

Re: No grav lensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome, an electric universe guy.....

Re:No grav lensing

[Opportunist]

I have to thank you for that link, the Flat Earthers have really become stale (I mean, let's be honest here, they just circle-jerk around the same arguments just like the religious nuts) and debunking them is starting to bore people. This should provide material for at least a few months.

Re: No grav lensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck, you're stupid.

The gravity bends space. Light follows the bend in space. From the perspective of the light, it is still going straight.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

It's curious to watch people pretending today like there is only one way to bend starlight. The current craze over gravitational lensing actually began with a panic by mainstream astronomers ...

Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp

"Prior to the 1950's Fritz Zwicky, the Swiss astronomer who had an illustrious and turbulent career in California, was aware that strong gravitational fields had been shown to bend light rays -- as in the famous eclipse observations of the displacement of positions of stars observed at a grazing angle to the sun's limb. At that time he started looking for an extragalactic object which might be directly behind another, and thus have its outer light rays bent inward by the gravitational field of the foreground object so that it formed a ring or halo. Some 'ring galaxies' were found, but they all seemed to be physical rings around the galaxy and not magnified background objects.

The more common situation to be expected was when the background object was not exactly centered and the gravitational ring collapsed into a one sided arc. But no striking examples of that were found either, so the subject had gone dormant. The sudden revival of gravitational lensing to the huge industry it is today is simply due to the quasars. In the 1960's and 70's I started finding high densities of quasars concentrated around nearby, low-redshift galaxies. Because of their high redshifts, it was felt that they could not be associated with low-redshift galaxies ...

The Einstein Cross ...

... When it was first discovered it caused a panic because it was essentially a high redshift quasar in the nucleus of a low redshift galaxy ... Gravitational galaxy lensing had to be invoked for this one ...

'We put the slit of the spectrograph between quasars A and B in the Einstein Cross and we registered a broad Lyman alpha emission in each quasar. But between them we found a narrow Lyman alpha line -- it looks like there is some low density gas at the same redshift as the quasars between them.' A jolt ran through me and I looked at him to try to read the expression on his face. As usual in such situations, his eyes avoided mine. The point was, of course, that a line between quasar A and B passed directly between the nucleus of the galaxy and quasar D. On the face of it high redshift gas was indicated near the nucleus of the low redshift galaxy. But what I knew, and what anyone can know looking at the Lyman alpha centered photograph in Color Plate 7-7, is that there is a putative Lyman alpha filament connecting quasar D to the galaxy nucleus. What the spectrum had confirmed was that this indeed was a low density, excited hydrogen filament connecting the two objects of vastly different redshift."

If you actually review discussions of the original observation, it's very clear that the astronomers were not considering any alternative hypotheses ...

The Impact of Gravitating Lensing on Astrophysics, Martin J. Rees Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 OHA

"All that can be said in rebuttal is that it would be even more remarkable if the 4 images, all with the same redshift, existed for some other reason, in a configuration which can be so well modelled by the lensing hypothesis"

The problem, of course, is that Halton Arp -- Edwin Hubble's protege -- very much was able to produce an alternative hypothesis (based upon ejection from active galactic nuclei), and once he suggested it in a published work, he was removed from his telescope time.

The following quote seems to reveal the secret sauce of micro-lensing:

Gravitational Lensing: An Astrophysical Tool

"1.3 Models

The small number of observables in lensing means that the observat

Re: No grav lensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Space is bent by gravity, not light. Light then takes the shortest path through the curved space time.

Please take Astrophysics 101 before ever posting again.

Re:No grav lensing

[Opportunist]

There's a big difference between "there might be another reason" and "let's listen to a crackpot tell us his fairy tales that will fundamentally change what we know about the universe".

The whole shit is based on the ideas of a psychiatrist, I wouldn't be surprised if he pulled it off knowing more about how to trick humans into believing you than astronomy.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Halton Arp was hardly a "crackpot". He was Edwin Hubble's protege, and both Arp and Hubble were together skeptical of the now-accepted interpretation for redshift. The mainstream moved ahead with that interpretation regardless.

Up to the point where Arp published his paper demonstrating that the assumption that redshift must have only one interpretation was wrong (of course removing the most important argument for the Big Bang), he was considered the world's leading authority on disrupted galaxies. In fact, those galaxies are still labeled by their "Arp number" to this day.

Once he started pitching the argument that galaxies also have an intrinsic redshift value which from observations appears to derive from their age, he was removed from his telescope time. This was actually part of a much larger historical context where Caltech seized the Palomar telescope which was up to that point jointly operated with the Carnegie Foundation. Once they took control of that machine, they made sure that only research which supported the Big Bang hypothesis could be done on it ...

Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp

"In the 1940's the largest telescope of its time, the 200-inch at Palomar, was conceived and built. Since Rockefeller and Carnegie were rival capitalists the Rockefeller Foundation could only give the money to California Institute of Technology rather than the Carnegie Institution of Washington where the world's leading astronomers were. Cal Tech, however had no Astronomy Department so an agreement was signed between the two Institutions that they would jointly operate the Observatory. The noted Carnegie astronomers such as Hubble, Baade, R. Minkowski then initially used most of the telescope time. Younger staff members were gradually included ...

Quasars were discovered in 1963 and astronomers rushed to observe them because they assumed their high redshifts meant they were at great distances and that the nature of the universe would thereby be revealed. The Cal Tech radio astronomer who isolated the positions of the first quasars asked for telescope time to observe their spectra and obtain their redshifts. He was told only certain of the faculty could observe with the 200-inch telescope. Those select few went on to measure the spectra and reap the headlines and the original discoverer left the field in disgust ...

There followed an interregnum of about 17 years in which the Cal Tech astronomy Department pressed for a larger and larger share of the telescope time. One must know that in the operating agreement for the Observatory that the Carnegie astronomers were appointed full faculty members at Cal Tech. Then in 1980 Cal Tech broke the agreement, taking over the 200-inch and severing the faculty appointments of the Carnegie astronomers. There were bitter protests by the suddenly discharged faculty (Appeals to the American Association of University Professors were not heeded) ..."

You might consider looking more carefully at the actual history for how we've arrived at this conclusion of a Big Bang.

Re:No grav lensing

[skoskav]

I was not aware of this fascinating field of pseudoscience. Those refractive lensing/electric universe topics seem to be confined to the echo-chambers of a few websites, linking to papers by authors with degrees in irrelevant fields, posted in pay-to-publish journals.

These topics have creationism's alternate simplified explanations for everything, global warming deniers' hubris, with the ludicrousness and conspiratorial thinking of Flat Earth proponents. It's a sort of trifecta of pseudoscience.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

"Most people when they paint themselves into a corner will admit their mistake and splash their way out. Mainstream cosmologists turn round and dismantle the corner brick by brick until the building comes down on top of them.

Faced with observations of the motion of galaxies that can't be explained by gravity alone, it would seem reasonable to consider the possibility that electromagnetism might be responsible. After all, since science began physicists have been able to find only four different types of force: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, the last two of which act only at very small sub-atomic distances. Unfortunately however, there is less kudos in working with the classical physics of electromagnetism than in an exposition of some unexpected consequence of general relativity, and general relativity only deals with gravity."

- Harry Nielsen, Crisis in Cosmology (not in any manner affiliated with the Thunderbolts Group)

Re: No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

It really seems, from conversations with people who have been on Slashdot since the early years, that the low quality of discussions which have dominated for the past 10 years or so has caused the best contributors to leave this platform. Here's an example of the kind of conversations we see in other places on the topic of the Electric Universe. This comment was attached to a Thunderbolts Project video on youtube ...

I've been looking into General Relativity (GR) these past months because of the severe criticism on this channel (my background is in math so differential geometry is not scary to me) and I've found some interesting points:

1) As I suspected for a long time Einstein is not the mythical genius who thought of relativity all by his own, indeed now I even appreciate more Maxwell & Riemann, two men I already knew to be great scientists and who deserve as much (if not more) accolades for Special Relativity (Maxwell) and General Relativity (Riemann).

2) The field equation of GR is an equity between the curvature of space and the total forces and is usually stated as: G = cT , G is the curvature (representing Gravity), c is a constant and T is the stress tensor. This statement leaves a very important term, namely the electromagnetic forces. The field equation should be written as: G = cT + M , where M is a tensor containing all the electromagnetic forces. In a half-dozen textbooks I checked only one has this tensor and the author immediately discard it because EM forces are "negligible" and proceed with using the field equation without it.

3) All the empirical "proofs" of GR are actually confirmation of the special case of the Schwarzschild Solution--valid only for the scale of the solar system--and not the general case. This is very important as this solution is derived with some guess work (even the general case have some guess work) with an eye to the Newtonian limit. There is no empirical confirmation of GR on the galactic or cosmological scales.

4) GR (minus the EM tensor) has field to explain the anomalies observed on the Galactic and Cosmological scale, resulting in the idiotic concepts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. There seem to be no attempt to reconsider GR or utilize the electromagnetic term (long forgotten) to explain the anomalies resulting in acceptance of Dark Matter/Energy instead.

I conclude that the EM forces can be neglected on the Solar System scale but they have to be taken into account on larger and larger scale. For example Dr. Scott's article showing the velocity profile of a galaxy following the Berkland current profile certainly a strong indicator that EM forces play a major role on the Galactic scale.

Come on, Slashdot. Stop being a cesspool of rants every time the topic of cosmology comes up.

Re:No grav lensing

[skoskav]

Umm, I can see that you've pasted that quote in various forums before, as are most of your posts -- mainly a mashup of tangentially related quotes. But regardless, I'll bite...

From what I can tell, that quote -- which originates from https://www.marxist.com/crisis... -- goes on to mention dark matter, then completely misrepresenting its evidence. For sake of convenience, Wikipedia lists some of the major ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... If the Electric Universe model wants to be taken as real science then it needs to have the explanatory and predictive power necessary to account for all of these evidences at least as well as dark matter. You can't just say that a single line of evidence (gravitational lensing in this case) is wrong, therefore [my competing hypothesis] wins. That's intellectually lazy.

Also, see the references of that marxist.com article you quoted. This goes back to my echo-chamber accusation. They're all anti-Big Bang and pro-Electrical Universe websites. The one link to an arxiv.org paper is for a quote, which does not appear in the paper on the page given.

Re:No grav lensing

[BrianMarshall]

You can't just say that a single line of evidence (gravitational lensing in this case) is wrong, therefore [my competing hypothesis] wins. That's intellectually lazy.

It isn't lazy - it is a really common pattern in "conspiracy theory" arguments. It's nuts.

A lot of his argument is about people-problems rather than physics.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: " If the Electric Universe model wants to be taken as real science then it needs to have the explanatory and predictive power necessary to account for all of these evidences at least as well as dark matter."

The answer to the riddle of dark matter is as follows:

(1) At the interstellar scale, gravity is a localized force. This should be common sense, for if the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would generally be around 4 miles away (this analogy goes by the name of the "Burnham Model"). Simple algebra argues against stars gravitationally interacting with one another at the interstellar scale.

(2) And if you were to actually ask a theorist for proof that Relativity applies at the largest scales, the more honest ones would admit that they lack such proof:

Bankrupting Physics: How Today's Top Scientists Are Gambling Away Their Credibility, by Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones (2013), p10:

"Combing through the library, I found a well-known textbook on galactic dynamics where the authors state:

'It is worth remembering that all of the discussion so far has been based on the premise that Newtonian gravity and general relativity are correct on large scales. In fact, there is little or no direct evidence that conventional theories of gravity are correct on scales much larger than a light year or so. Newtonian gravity works extremely well on scales of 10^12 meters, the solar system (...) It is principally the elegance of general relativity and its success in solar system tests that lead us to the bold extrapolation to scales 10^19 - 10^24 meters ... [3]'

Wow! Fancy that. Two leading experts claim that the law of gravity has been well tested in our solar system only -- a tiny fraction of the universe that corresponds to a single snowflake in all of Greenland. Scientists seem drawn to the 'elegance' of the theory, which is not really a scientific criterion. I often confront physicists and astronomers with this quote. Usually they shrug and reply airily, 'That is indeed true, but why shouldn't the law of gravity be valid? So far, there is nothing better to replace it.'"

- J. Binney and S. Tremaine, S. Galactic Dynamics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 635.

(3) Wal Thornhill has provided a conceptually simple explanation for gravity which may or may not be correct (I suspect he is close). What is important about his conjecture is that it shows us an example for why gravity might be a localized force. His explanation goes like this:

- Every particle within each atom is made of orbiting ~0 mass charges.

- Every subatomic particle is distorted by the presence of others to form a tiny electric dipole.

Like magnets that are free to rotate, all the electric dipoles in protons, neutrons and electrons line up to produce gravity.

Neutral atoms distorted by gravity induce an electric field inside of a body.

The idea is useful, even if incorrect, because it gives us a simple framework to think and pivot from. For example, it's easy enough to see that gravity should be a localized force with such a mechanism. And we've seen this sort of thing elsewhere -- namely, the Van der Waals.

(4) So, what is happening at the largest scales? We know enough at this point to have a good clue about it. Consider, for example, this clue whose importance has been completely missed by the mainstream:

Many disc galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have a central bulge that resembles either a box or an unshelled peanut. This bulge may form when the circular orbits of

Re:No grav lensing

[Opportunist]

The crackpot I'm talking about is the person the site cites as its authority, David Talbott. A man so important that he didn't even get his own Wikipedia page, so I can only link to other sources. Let's not take the ones that "slander" him as the crackpot he is, let's use his entry in the Velikovsky Encyclopedia.

Velikovsky was by the way the psychiatrist who invented the woo we're talking about here.

Re:No grav lensing

[skoskav]

1) This is why individual stars far apart don't orbit each other, just like planets far apart don't orbit each other. Stars orbit around that which is gravitationally dominant to them, which is either the gravitational center if a compact star cluster, or the gravitational center of the galaxy it resides in.

2) You're confusing proofs with an inability to falsify. Proofs are for mathematics and philosophy. Science deals with evidence, and progresses by making theories successively better approximate observed phenomena. For this the scientific method is used to test hypothesis and theories, which accrue predictive and explanatory power by repeated failures to falsify them. That general relativity isn't tested well enough to your liking in an area isn't evidence against the theory, as you would instead need to successfully falsify the theory for this area if you want to replace it, and not be seen as yet another crank.

3) Tell him to work it into a falsifiable hypothesis then, so that people can test it, and maybe even fail to falsify it. Otherwise it's just lofty ideas that aren't providing anything of value, and the scientific community will continue to label him as a crank.

4) You're making massively unfounded assumptions when claiming that the spiral arms trace out large-scale electric currents. The Electric Universe model must provide falsifiable explanations for the dark matter evidence i linked to previously, otherwise it will continue to be inferior.

Re: No grav lensing

[jfdavis668]

1. There is no Astrophysics 101, Astrophysics is a 400 level course. 2. I have taken that course. 3. Space curvature is something you learn in Physics, when you learn special and general relativity.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

(1) Notice what neither you nor anybody else in the mainstream ever talks about: There must be some typical distance between stars at which they stop interacting with one another. What is this distance? I, and some others, have argued that the typical force of 1.5 x 10-14 Earth gee's meets this requirement. This is a completely inconsequential force, and nobody should be attempting to construct a cosmology based upon forces like this. All of you are wasting your time. We can already see that nothing will come of any of these efforts, yet you persist. I mean no offense by suggesting it, but it seems to me that you do so simply because this is what we were all taught, and you're struggling to reset your mental framework.

(2) You're thinking too deeply about the words I am using, and not enough about the nature of the situation. Look, for example, at the human body: If you traverse through the scales of the human body, you will progress through a variety of situations which have differing dominant forces: at the bacterial scale, gravity is inconsequential and the electric force dominates; at other scales, the effects of water or chemistry may dominate; at our perception, gravity dominates. In the electrical view, the universe is very much like a large organism. In fact, the term plasma was coined as a reference to blood plasma -- because it appears alive. In the laboratory, plasmas naturally form vessels which transport charge (we call them Birkeland currents); the plasma observably forms cell walls which protect their charge (we call them plasma double layers); the plasma forms into macro-structures like stars (similar to cells) and galaxies (similar to organs). Halton Arp has observed the galaxies essentially procreating. His ejection hypothesis even observes damage to the host during the process of birthing (he became famous for cataloging these "peculiar galaxies").

The point of what I am doing above is to demonstrate that there is more than one mental framework which we can approach the problem with, and the very fact that dark matter has not been found even as the instrumentation has become a million times more sensitive suggests that your own favored approach is rapidly approaching its endpoint. So, what are you going to do about it? Will you decide to seek out alternative frameworks? Or, will you go online and argue against those who already are, so that in the event that you reach this dead-end, everybody is now in the same unfortunate position as yourself?

(3) Wal has dedicated his life to doing just that. Gravity has become his main focus in these later years.

(4) We are talking about cosmology here. What aspects of the Big Bang creation event are "falsifiable"? I mean, context matters tremendously. An important part of science is to clearly understand its limits. Cosmology is an intersection between physics and metaphysics; there are some aspects which are scientific, and others like the origin of the universe which are truthfully beyond the limits of what science can do. This has nothing to do with Peratt. It's the nature of the game.

And either way, it is already admitted by the ESA that ...

our Galaxy is threaded with filamentary structures on every length scale. From nearby clouds hosting tangles of filaments a few light-years long to gigantic structures stretching hundreds of light-years across the Milky Way's spiral arms, they appear to be truly ubiquitous. The Herschel data have rekindled the interest of astronomers in studying filaments, emphasising the crucial role of these structures in the process of star formation.

This is a clearcut vindication for plasma scaling -- the claim that plasma structure replicates over enormous scales in the manner of a fractal. Theorists are attempting today to use this observation of s

Re: No grav lensing

[painandgreed]

1. There is no Astrophysics 101, Astrophysics is a 400 level course. 2. I have taken that course. 3. Space curvature is something you learn in Physics, when you learn special and general relativity.

Mod parent up! Reinmannian space FTW!

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

David Talbott is the only person -- academics included -- to ever tell the complete history for how astrophysicists came to adopt magnetohydrodynamics as the model of choice for explaining cosmic plasmas. This single act, alone, is profoundly historical, because the story is sufficiently awkward that academics refuse to tell it.

Velikovsky was the first person to predict that Venus' temperature should be hot, and he did so at a time when the entire scientific community assumed Venus should be much like the Earth beneath the cloud cover. Velikovsky was of course a close friend of Einstein, who in his later years, took great interest in Velikovsky's work (Einstein's followers have traditionally and famously failed to live up to his own nuanced skepticism of his own work). You might try harder to ask how it could be that Velikovsky knew that Venus must be hot. He did so by studying ancient documents, which curiously recorded Venus' arrival in human-historical times into our solar system as a comet:

Venus and the Cosmic Connection

"Repeatedly, these calamities were attributed to a malicious deity almost invariably a goddess coming to wreak havoc upon the Earth. Although the actual names naturally varied, the deity involved turned out time and time again to be the one that cultures worldwide associated with the object we know today as the planet Venus. But they didn't talk about it as if it were a planet -- they described it as a comet. A Chinese text describes Venus as spanning the heavens, rivaling the Sun in brightness. Mexican astronomers referred to it as 'the star that smokes,' while on the opposite side of the world the same theme is found in the Hindu Vedas, the Hebrew Talmud, and the Egyptian description of Sekhmet. The Aztecs called Venus the 'heart' of Quetzlcoatl, which in turn means 'plumed serpent,' with feathers that signify fire. The serpent or dragon is one of the most common figures used in the ancient world to signify 'comet,' examples being the Greek Typhon, Egyptian Set, Babylonian Tiamat, Hindu Vrta, all of whom raged across the sky and brought destruction upon the world.

The word 'comet' comes from the Greek coma, meaning hair, and among ancient astronomers referred to a star with hair, or a beard. The same appellation was given to Venus. One of the Mexican names for Venus was 'the mane' -- the Peruvian name, chaska, means 'wavy-haired'; the Arabs call Venus 'the one with hair.' One of the most vivid comet images is the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, recognized universally as representing Venus. Ishtar is described as being 'the bright torch of heaven,' 'clothed in fire,' and the 'fearful dragon,' while her heavenly manifestation is known as the 'bearded star.'"

Velikovsky's successful prediction was one of the reasons for the Venus Pioneer mission: the scientists decided to generate their own evidence for a runaway greenhouse effect, in order to undermine Velikovsky's analysis from ancient texts. They miserably failed:

"The mystery of Venus' internal heat", Nov. 13 1980 issue of New Scientist

"Two years' surveillance by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter seems to show that Venus is radiating away more energy than it receives from the Sun. If this surprising result is confirmed, it means that the planet itself is producing far more heat than the Earth does.

F.W. Taylor, of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford, presented these measurements at the Royal Society meeting last week. Venus's surface temperature is higher than any other in the solar system, at 480 C. The generally accepted theory is that sunlight is absorbed at Venus's surface, and re-radiated as infrared. The latter is absorbed in the atmosphere, which thus acts as a blanket keeping the planet hot. It is similar to the way a greenhou

Re:No grav lensing

[Opportunist]

Ya know, orbital mechanics isn't dealing with working on the car that SpaceX launched...

How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?

And sorry, backing up this woo with some Chinese woo doesn't make it any better. If you dig deep enough, you find all sorts of stories in the various mythologies the world over. What exactly would that prove? That someone else had the idea before. Sorry, but old stories prove nothing. Unless you have something to back up a story with, you have a story. Else I'd say that magic is real because you can read about it in Harry Potter, so if what's written is true, magic is real. Is it real?

About Venus radiating more heat than it receives: Personally I think it's mixing a few things together and hoping it sticks. Outside of pages peddling woo (some of it even crazier than Venus traveling across the solar system) I can't really find much about it, mostly because it would mean that Venus would by now be about 50C cooler than it was in 1980 and I kinda think we would have noticed something like that when Venus Express examined the atmosphere barely a decade ago. At the very least we could have seen a significant difference in temperature if the planet radiated 15% more energy than it receives.

What's true is that Venus is the hottest planet of the solar system, that it does radiate back a very large part of the solar radiation that hits it and that there are actually planets that radiate more energy than they receive. What's necessary for this, though, is the size of that of Jupiter and Saturn. The combination thereof, well, isn't.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: "How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?"

Who says that the planets were not disturbed at all? Plato clearly states the fact that they were indeed disturbed, and further, that all of mythology is an attempt to convey this event:

"Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burned up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time"

... then further on ...

"All of these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonderful, have a common origin; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, or exist only as fragments; but the origin of them is what no one has told"

What do you think he means by "a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time?" Plato of course had no idea what gravity was, but he appears to be describing a debris field that returns to the planet over many years. In fact, that's one very logical way to explain why cultures like the Mayans would construct calendars which far exceed the seasonal variations necessary to farm.

What I notice is that when data does not conform to peoples' pre-existing notions, they tend to just completely ignore it. Taken at face value, the following data would seem to suggest that something extremely fundamental has changed in our solar system:

"Earth and the other rocky planets aren't made out of the solar system's original starting material, two new studies reveal.

Scientists examined solar particles snagged in space by NASA's Genesis probe, whose return capsule crash-landed on Earth in 2004. These salvaged samples show that the sun's basic building blocks differ significantly from those of Earth, the moon and other denizens of the inner solar system, researchers said ...

McKeegan and his team measured the abundance of solar wind oxygen isotopes. Isotopes are versions of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. Oxygen has three stable isotopes: oxygen-16 (eight neutrons), oxygen-17 (nine neutrons) and oxygen-18 (ten neutrons).

The researchers found that the sun has significantly more oxygen-16, relative to the other two isotopes, than Earth."

Re: "At the very least we could have seen a significant difference in temperature if the planet radiated 15% more energy than it receives."

Your expectations would seem to be wrong, but there have been additional vindications regardless:

Venus Express discovered that surface features were not quite where they should be, evidence that Earth's cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured ... Scientists have looked at the possibility of this change arising from short-term, random variations in the length of a Venus day, but have concluded that these should average themselves out over time.

R.A. Kerr, "Venus is looking too Pristine," Science, Vol. 250 (Nov. 16, 1990), p.912.

Re:No grav lensing

[david_thornley]

1) Everybody in the field understands the strength of gravity. Cosmology is based on it. It's hard to grasp the quantities involved, because they can be extremely large or extremely small. The attraction of one star for another is extremely small, but there's a lot of stars, and a lot of time for a small acceleration to act on a star.

What you are saying is that cosmology is improperly derived. Not just that it's wrong in fact, but that the math is wrong. To do this, you need to look at the math and find where it is wrong. There are lots of things in science that yield surprising and counter-intuitive results.

2) No, you're missing the point. You claimed that GR is not proven in some situations. Guess what: it's not proven in any situation. Nothing in science is proven. What we have is theories that have made lots of verified predictions, and which have survived lots of falsification attempts. Your earlier sentence was " And if you were to actually ask a theorist for proof that Relativity applies at the largest scales, the more honest ones would admit that they lack such proof:" - and, while it's correct, it's meaningless. There's no proof that Relativity is applies at any scale. That doesn't mean it's not an extremely successful scientific theory.

And, yes, there are other ways to look at things. There's also a saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out. To have a credible theory, you need to show that it explains previous observations pretty much as well as the current theory. If it can't, it's not really worth considering, since there's any number of ideas that demonstrably don't conform to reality.

The fact that you're criticizing cosmology without understanding what you're doing very strongly suggests that you aren't doing this, because you don't understand what's already there. There have been major shifts in science, but they've always come from people who understood the existing science and why it was the way it was.

3) In other words, there are no falsifiable predictions, so the Electric Universe is not currently a scientific theory.

4) You don't get to assume things like electric currents. Nor are they being vindicated, unless the theory makes testable predictions, which, by (3) above, it doesn't. It's conceivable that such currents could exist, but the more crap you pile onto a theory to make it work, the less credible it is. If there are such currents, and they're strong enough to have effects, why haven't we noticed some effects? That needs to be answered.

Also, your attack on the Big Bang theories is irrelevant as well as ignorant (if you actually understood them, you'd have some idea why they're considered science, and you'd attack that idea) . You aren't offering another explanation for what happened in the first periods of the Universe; you're claiming that stuff is happening right this eon in this galaxy, stuff that we should be able to observe with what reaches the Earth right now.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: "What we have is theories that have made lots of verified predictions, and which have survived lots of falsification attempts."

You are pointing to the accuracy and precision of the mathematics of Relativity, while glossing over the fact that Einstein lifted all of this math from the aether theorists. The debate over Relativity has always been over the physical inference, not the accuracy and precision of the mathematics. There are countless examples, but here is just one:

William Day, A New Physics, 2000, p.118

"Relativity is a strange and novel theory that has provided equations with extreme accuracy with a theory that logically cannot be true. The theory is at most a way to rationalize a mathematical description by an imagined condition that gives a workable formula, much the way Newton devised an equation by calling gravity a force acting at a distance."

What we know is that Einstein had the luxury of fitting his physical inference to the mathematics. People who subsequently point to the accuracy and precision of the math to establish the physical inference's validity are pitching circular logic.

Re: "3) In other words, there are no falsifiable predictions, so the Electric Universe is not currently a scientific theory."

Each framework begins in a different theoretical place. The fact that plasma cosmology begins with plasmas, and works its way towards a better explanation for gravity, is not an argument against it; it's merely an observation that the two frameworks exhibit differing coverage. There is nothing extraordinary about this. You want a neat and tidy situation where you can compare apples to apples, but reality is not neat-and-tidy as you wish. That's hardly an argument for which idea will win out.

Re: "If there are such currents, and they're strong enough to have effects, why haven't we noticed some effects? That needs to be answered."

The currents are observed to be creating both stars and galaxies. You just don't see it because you've failed to learn the by-now extensive history of the Birkeland current concept.

Re: "Also, your attack on the Big Bang theories is irrelevant as well as ignorant (if you actually understood them, you'd have some idea why they're considered science, and you'd attack that idea)."

I very much understand the "evidence" of the CMB, and here are some details which your science journalism has failed to inform you about:

Anthony L. Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe, Second Edition, 2015, p.33-34.

"High-power microwave generation on earth belongs exclusively to devices using relativistic electron beams ... A relativistic electron beam that does not produce microwave radiation is unknown. These same basic mechanisms are likely to have their natural analogs in cosmic plasmas."

The idea that the microwaves coming at us from all directions must necessarily indicate an expansion is total nonsense. It is one of the greatest collective delusions in the history of modern science.

The idea of expansion was proposed by a Catholic priest:

Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, The World & I, May 1988, p.190-197

"To Alfvén, the Big Bang was a fable -- a fable devised to explain creation. 'I was there when Abbé Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory,' he recalled. Lemaitre was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing."

You might take that into consideration when you contemplate why the Big Bang is so popul

Re:No grav lensing

[skoskav]

1) Hmm, I used the algorithm you mentioned earlier for reaching that number, and the gravitational force between Alpha Centauri A+B and Proxima Centauri came out as 4.40 x 10E-13 "Earth gee's" at their current distance of about 13,000 AU. It's a magnitude above what you call "a completely inconsequential force," yet Proxima seems to be in orbit around them as per this paper: https://www.aanda.org/articles.... I don't see how gravitational interactions would cease shortly after this point, especially as star clusters, gas, dust and a lot of dark matter comes into play gravitationally at great distances.

2) We may have different viewpoints on how scientific progress should operate. I consider both the continual refinement of existing theories and investigation of paradigm-shifting hypotheses to be necessary for progressing. But for the paradigm-shifting hypotheses to deserve serious attention they need to be robust enough to explain and predict what the current leading theory does, and preferably some of its shortcomings, in a falsifiable manner. So I find the Electrical Universe model trying to explain way too much with sporadic and tangentially related data.

4) The Big Bang theory makes a bunch of necessary predictions. If, say, the cosmic microwave background radiation was found to have another source, or the universe was shown to not be expanding, or a distant galaxy is blue-shifted, or stars certainly older than 13.8 billion years were discovered... then the theory would be in trouble.

I'm aware of the galactic filaments in the universe, but I don't see how all this leads to an internally consistent alternative to the leading theories of dark matter and general relativity, which I know how they can accurately predict time dilation of GPS satellites and calculate trajectories across space. I remain unconvinced and unimpressed by the Electric Universe.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: "But for the paradigm-shifting hypotheses to deserve serious attention they need to be robust enough to explain and predict what the current leading theory does, and preferably some of its shortcomings, in a falsifiable manner. So I find the Electrical Universe model trying to explain way too much with sporadic and tangentially related data."

All ideas obviously begin in an archaic state. I try to focus on scientific controversies more broadly, so I don't really want to leave the impression that the Electric Universe is the only one I follow. But, I feel confident based upon what I have seen that the trends are favoring electrical cosmology. By the ends of our lifetimes, enough ground will be covered that we will begin to approach parity in the support -- and at that point, the people who have gone online to argue against it will probably regret these behaviors. As I've stated in the many posts on this subject, these trends are not reported by science journalists, and so are invisible to anybody who does not first learn and then actively track the claims in the light of new observations. After having tracked the EU for a full 12 years, I feel that tracking is the missing secret sauce to judging competing scientific theories because it introduces an element of surprise which theorists cannot spin. When some observation is made which surprises the mainstream, the consistent pattern is that they will admit their surprise for the first few days. Then, as they confer, the pattern is that they become emboldened to adopt the mindset that the anomaly has always been known and predicted. It's a very consistent pattern. However, what they are not doing is tracking, and this is the fatal flaw in a culture which no longer values generalists. Specialization has become so intense that they can no longer understand completely valid arguments which originate from adjacent domains.

Re: "I'm aware of the galactic filaments in the universe, but I don't see how all this leads to an internally consistent alternative to the leading theories of dark matter and general relativity"

You should learn about the subject-object transition. I think you have adopted an ideal for how to think about science which you might benefit from questioning. People have studied how leaders (like CEO's) think, and a key quality is an ability to rapidly switch between competing -- even conflicting -- frameworks. Here is an excellent quote which greatly impacted my own thinking, and which I think sums up the situation quite well:

Village Venus Syndrome
Dr. Edward de Bono

"'Dr. Edward de Bono's book on practical thinking ... makes interesting reading for ... those concerned with the problems of interpretation in the historical sciences, with the aid of an ingenious experiment, he analyzes the way the human mind works and identified 'five ways to be wrong,' 'four ways to be right,' and 'five ways to understand.' Among the ways to be right -- which means ways in which one can convince oneself one is right -- is what he calls the 'village Venus,' or 'unique rightness' method, a mental process which he believes to be particularly common among scientists and academics. If one has lived one's whole life in a remote village, cut off from contact with other people, the village Venus must be the most beautiful girl in the world because one cannot imagine anyone more beautiful. In the same way a scientist or scholar who cannot imagine, or who has not heard of any explanation which will fit a given body of evidence, as well as the one he has thought of (or, one might add, has been taught), is capable of being fully convinced of its unique rightness. Consciously he tells himself, and believes, that it is right because it fits all the facts; but actually its rightness derives solely from the lack of rival explanations.'"

Here's the graphic I think you s

Re:No grav lensing

[skoskav]

It seems that we can neither convince each other through arguments, nor come to much of an agreement. I tried to explain why I think the scientific community regards Electric Universe as yet another pseudoscience, and will continue to do so until its proponents changes their approach to research.

See you around.

Re:No grav lensing

[david_thornley]

To take one obvious issue, relativity is self-consistent. It can logically be true. It does require ditching or modifying concepts like time, space, and simultaneity, but that's perfectly logical. Einstein fit his physical inference to the mathematics, and then had a theory of physics based on that math. Physics has been based on assumptions and mathematics before and since.

The basic thing is that relativity has made a good many predictions about the physical world, and has been confirmed time and again. The mathematics is used to determine the predictions of the theory. Nobody's claiming that relativity's true because the math works, because that could be true of any number of things. People claim relativity's true because it explains and has predicted a lot of things, and nobody's come up with anything that contradicts it.

Until you realize this, there's no point in continuing the discussion.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: "People claim relativity's true because it explains and has predicted a lot of things, and nobody's come up with anything that contradicts it."

The truth of the situation is that there is no real need for absolute consensus upon an inference which exists at the very edge of our ability to sense and judge what is going on.

To provide a very real-world example, I have a close (surprisingly young) electrical engineer friend who has been working tirelessly towards the full unification of aether with the Electric Universe and quantum mechanics, and presumably gravity. Every time that I pass on some new insight or information on these topics, he rebuts me with 10 details that I was not even aware of. He has voraciously digested everything that has ever been published on the topics of aether and Relativity; he recalls these details as though they happened yesterday. This culture of intolerance towards people who are pursuing these matters is extremely short-sighted, anti-innovative and presumptive that such people will never succeed in their efforts. There's more than enough room in physics for competing ideas about the fundamental nature of space, and you and I both know that if any sort of innovation was to emerge from such works, even the most vocal defenders of Relativity would not think twice about using such innovations.

Re: "Until you realize this, there's no point in continuing the discussion."

As the situation currently stands, you are free to throw shade on efforts to find better theories without any future penalty if you prove wrong. There are no consequences for being wrong, and of course no need to endure the social stigma that the innovators must endure every day for your eventual benefit. The inventors of the rocket and the laser, and the discoverers of epigenetics, plate tectonics and radio waves from space all persisted in spite of incredible intellectual hostility. It seems that throughout American history, we have repeatedly prioritized our own personal desire to feel right over the unknown possibilities which might result from being wrong. These cultural patterns, without a doubt, throttle the rate of innovation within our country.

Re:No grav lensing

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Ultimately, there is no need to agree. And if you look at how the history of science has played out, what you will clearly observe is that science benefits enormously from the existence of rational disagreement and debate. My general approach is to delay judgment on controversies for as long as possible, because what I observe as an anti-pattern in domains like cosmology where uncertainty abounds is that people trend towards judging prematurely. The better approach in such cases is to systematically track. If academia was functioning in an ideologically responsible manner these days, where they were more concerned about producing innovations than defending hundred-year-old theories against innovation, that is what they would be teaching. The thing is, I've been tracking this debate now for a full 12 years, and it is becoming harder to avoid judgment in the light of the observable trends.

Re:No grav lensing

[Opportunist]

You honestly base the hypothesis of a movement of planets on mythological stories written by a people that could not even have identified such a movement as what it would have been even if they had seen it?

Sorry, but I'll leave you here.

Re:No grav lensing

[david_thornley]

Science is built by people with differing views, and physics in particular has been interested in new ideas. If you can't get any acceptance, you need to ask yourself what you're doing wrong.

Re:YOU FAIL IT

[jfdavis668]

Best use of the English language I have seen all day.

Re:Slashdot should avoid linking to such silly sit

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new I.T. closet cleaner overlord.

Re:Slashdot should avoid linking to such silly sit

[skoskav]

It seems to be due to the use of a click-jacking defense best-practice: https://www.owasp.org/index.ph...

Unfortunately this is inconvenient for NoScript users.

Re:Slashdot should avoid linking to such silly sit

[ArsenneLupin]

Wouldn't it be easier if they just did service apache2 stop? Or even easier: pull the web server's power cord?

me too

[supernova87a]

Hey, I just found an even farther star!

*shows picture of a small dot*

Re:Slashdot should avoid linking to such silly sit

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please help me find the power cord for The Cloud?

Thanks.

I Am a Star

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am a star. I'm a star, I'm a star, I'm a star. I am a big, bright, shining star. That's right."

"Don't get too attached"

[hcs_$reboot]

Well, it's not like watching Game of thrones characters...

Re:Slashdot should avoid linking to such silly sit

[hcs_$reboot]

Unfortunately this is inconvenient for NoScript users.

Noscript users? In 2018?Who wouldn't want to trust javascript?