Quantized redshift anomaly

Dark energy, or just dust? Findings raise questions

March 1, 2008
Courtesy Carnegie Institution
and World Science staff

Outer space may be strewn with tiny whiskers of carbon that dim faraway objects, researchers say. They add that this might explain previous findings that led to the view, , now widely accepted by scientists, that a mysterious dark energy pervades the cosmos.



Ultraviolet image of a Type 1a supernova, designated 2005ke, in the spiral galaxy NGC 1371. The supernova is circled. The image was taken with NASA's Swift satellite.

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Scientists proposed the dark energy hypothesis a decade ago in part to explain the unexpected dimness of certain stellar explosions called Type1a supernovae. Astronomers use these bright bursts as standard candles to gauge cosmic distances.

Since the explosions are believed to all have about the same intrinsic brightness, brighter-looking ones are judged closer, and dimmer ones further.

In the late 1990s researchers noticed that some of them seemed too dimtoo distantto fit standard theories. This led to the hypothesis that an ongoing expansion of the universe was accelerating, pushed by an unknown form of energy dubbed dark energy.

In the new study, Andrew Steele and Marc Fries of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. report discovering an unusual new form of carbon in minerals within meteorites dating from the formation of the Solar System. The findings appear in the Feb. 29 issue of the research journal Science.

The graphite whiskers were likely produced from hot, carbon-rich gas and were found in parts of the meteorites called calcium-aluminum inclusions, the investigators said. At around 4.5 billion years old, these are the oldest known solids in our solar system. During this time when the sun was young, the solar wind was very strong, a current of particles that blow outward from the sun, said Fries. So graphite whiskers formed near the sun could have been blown into interstellar space. The same thing may have happened around other young stars.

Graphite whiskers might also be created and dispersed by supernovae, he added. A thin haze of the whiskers in space would affect how light of different wavelengths, or energies, passes through space. It has been postulated, the researchers said, that light of so-called near-infrared wavelengths would be particularly affectedthe same wavelengths whose dimming first led to the dark energy model.

Graphite whiskers or similar materials have been proposed to possibly explain those observations before, but their presence in space has never been confirmed previously, said Steele and Fries. With their discovery in the meteorite, the pair added, researchers can test the whiskers properties against theories and observations.

We cannot comment further on the implications for dark energy, Steele said, but it is important to study the characteristics of this form of carbon carefully so we can understand its impact on dark energy models. Well then feed this data forward to the upcoming NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) missions that will look for the effects of dark energy.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Tommy</i>
Van Dokkum et al look at very massive galaxies at a redshift of about 2.3 and find that on average they are 5- 6 times smaller in radius and hundreds of times denser than massive galaxies in todays universe. The densest of these high-z galaxies have densities five times that of any galaxies that now exist.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Naturally, the larger your sample, the higher is the likelihood of meeting extreme objects (the most massive person within 100 miles of you will almost certainly be much more massive than the most massive person within 100 yards of you).
So one can not draw any conclusion regarding systematic local differences from this.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Tommy</i>
Sirocco et al confirm these results, reporting that at z=1.5 the surface brightness of galaxies, as determined with the conventional cosmology assumptions, is 2.5 magnitudes brighter than for nearby galaxies, which implies that, for a given luminosity, the galaxies have radii that are 3.2 times smaller.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Or it implies simply that the cosmological assumption of the surface brightness decreasing like 1/(1+z)^4 is incorrect.

Thomas

I heard that recent re-evaluations of the Malquist effect remove the evidence of expansion originally provided by supernove data. In other words, the surface brightness was an indicator of expansion but it has been shown that this is not true.

The Alternative Cosmology Group Newsletter - June 2009

The newsletter is distributed gratis to subscribers. Get onto our mailing list without obligation at www.cosmology.info/newsletter . The current newsletter is a review of 930 papers published under astro-ph on arXiv for the month of May, 2009. If you would like to suggest papers you may have come across for inclusion, please send them to Hilton Ratcliffe or Eric Lerner.
WMAP catastrophe
This month, weve chosen to highlight a paper that is causing a stir in cosmology. Serious doubt is cast upon the validity of the entire body of WMAP analysis. Thanks to Eric Lerner for the following analysis:
An important new paper shows that there are serious errors in the WMAP teams analysis of the satellites data. The new paper, Observation number correlation in WMAP data By Ti-Pei Li et al, which has been accepted by MNRAS, shows that a spurious apparent temperature is introduced into the map of the CMB by the WMAP teams analyses. As a result, the conclusions based on this analysis, including the widely-publicized supposed agreement with some predictions of the dominant LCDM cosmology, are thrown into doubt. Li et als recent paper on WMAP observation number effects arXiv 0905.0075 is a follow-up to Liu and Lis earlier paper on the same subject, 0806.4493, which was reported in this newsletter, but whose significance was not fully recognized at the time.
WMAP mapped the tiny variations of anisotropies in the CMB by comparing the inputs of two receivers or horns placed 141 degrees apart, as the satellite spun and scanned the entire sky. Complex mathematical procures were used to transform these differences in inputs into a map of absolute temperature or intensity at every point in the sky. In outline the authors argue that:
1. The way temperature is calculated by the WMAP team based on the differential between the two WMAP horns is in error, as is best explained in the Li et al paper. When the number of observations of a given pixel by the plus horn (the number of times that point in the sky is scanned) is different than the number of observation by the minus horn, there is a spurious temperature added, dependent on transmission imbalances, which are different for different bands. (Esq. 5 and 6 of Li et al). These spurious temperatures, up to 10-20 micros K are clearly shown in figure 3, which shows the pixel-by-pixel correlation of the
2
difference in observation number and temperature. This spurious temperature, dependent on observation number, in turn produces a spurious fluctuation in temperature which is dependent on the number of observations. The number of observations in turn is a strong function of declination. See figure 2 of Liu and Li, which tells the story very well. Li explains procedures by which the raw data can be re-analysed to eliminate these artefacts.
2. The method by which WMAP temperatures are calculated also does not accurately correct for the fact that pixels 141 degrees way from hot spots are measured too cold. In Liu and Li, p.18, they show that pixels 141 degrees away from the 2000 hottest pixels in the map are on average 12-14 micro Kelvin cooler than average pixels, depending on the band. This is several hundred times above the expected random variation. Since each circle contains 15,000 pixels spread across a good section of the sky, the average temperature should be very close to the average of the whole sky. This is even truer for 2,000 such circles. But that is not what Liu and Li found.
So, from these papers, it seems that there are spurious temperature anisotropies that are comparable with the entire anisotropy found in the WMAP teams maps. Therefore the entire analysis of cosmological parameters based on these maps is wrong. Indeed it seems very puzzling that an analysis that is so contaminated with errors should come up with parameters anywhere near those expected by LCDM models. The fact that the Li et al paper was accepted by MNRAS is perhaps an indication that some of the leading journals are becoming more open to work that challenges conventional assumptions in cosmology.
13. Title: Observation number correlation in WMAP data
Authors: Ti-Pei Li, Hao Liu, Li-Ming Song, Shao-Lin Xiong, Jian-Yin Nie
arXiv:0905.0075
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Tommy,

Thank you for this note. We are lucky to have skeptical investigators like Hilton and Eric out there, combing through the explosion of papers for things like this. Do you know of any challenges to the conclusions of these papers?

Possible typo (involving the number "2") - midway between numbered paragraphs 1. and 2.
Can you check it out and fix it as needed?

LB

I would suggest that anyone and everyone find the newsletter and sign on. Keep in mind that Eric was kicked out of Wikipedia by the Big Bang group which has slanted everything their way. However, the recent experiments seems to indicate that the big bang theory founded on one assumption after another is wrong. There are explanations for the shift in the frequency of light. I thihk Hubble himself never did believe that the shift was a result of speed. I wonder if anyone thought about how the total energy of the universe came from a dot when there was not a dot to begin with. Or how this dot grew to a size beyond the size of the Universe in a split second or how this expansion suddenly stopped. The April 2009 issue of the Alternative Cosmology Group Newsletter has been posted at:

www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2009.04.pdf



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