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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.
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.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Space is bent by gravity, not light. Light then takes the shortest path through the curved space time.
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.
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
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
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
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
You might consider looking more carefully at the actual history for how we've arrived at this conclusion of a Big Bang.
- Harry Nielsen, Crisis in Cosmology (not in any manner affiliated with the Thunderbolts Group)
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 ...
Come on, Slashdot. Stop being a cesspool of rants every time the topic of cosmology comes up.
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:
(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:
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:
(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 ...
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
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:
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:
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:
... then further on ...
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:
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:
R.A. Kerr, "Venus is looking too Pristine," Science, Vol. 250 (Nov. 16, 1990), p.912.
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:
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:
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:
You might take that into consideration when you contemplate why the Big Bang is so popul
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:
Here's the graphic I think you s
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.
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.