This week in Cosmology

I said:
Tao, if it's not distracting, what do you think of the concept of dark energy causing the universe to expand faster?

I remember reading it as it came through - and it all seemed to boil down to this:

1. We expect a class of supernovea to have a certain brightness
2. When observing a sample from this group, they were not as bright as expected
3. Therefore there must exist a new form of matter that is causing the universe to accelerate its expansion, in order to account for this observation

That was certainly my reading of it at the time, and it seemed suitably ridiculous - the whole idea of dark energy seemed like one giant goose chase.

The idea, on the other hand, that neutrinos could account for a significant amount of the missing mass, or even anti-matter galaxies, is extremely intriguing.

I think the received idea was that some form of imbalance must have caused matter to exceed anti-matter in volume somehow - and it also seemed accepted that we had merely misunderstood the mechanics of anti-matter formation so that perhaps it was not generated as equally as presupposed. The short life span of anti-matter particles at CERN and similar would normally support this idea.

However, there is great appeal in what you've suggested - huge anti-matter galaxies. If we do have an accelerated process in the early formation of the universe (I forget the guy who made a key contribution here - Richard ____?) then the clumping process could be one way in which matter and anti-matter avoided mass annihilation in the first place. It would also give rise to some form of imbalance in terms of mass we might expect.

Will very much consider this idea in mind as I do my reading - this all your own theory? If so, do you fancy writing up something on it for publishing to the front end of the site? (I'm currently pushing a lot of redevelopment on the front end). Also, would be happy for you to critique my old theory of planetary formation. :)
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Thanks and I take it as a compliment that you even ask if its my own thinking - which it is only to the degree that I'm painting with other peoples paints. And that is what it is like for me, its a very visual imagery that is quite difficult to put down in words. There is so much information flooding in from all the telescopes and instruments these days I think any 'read-a-lot' is capable as the dedicated scientist of seeing some hitherto unseen patterns. Though I love the enigma of Black Holes and this fascination may leave in me a tendency to have them as a central feature. However I think this is somewhat justified too as any theory that does not explain Black Holes is no theory at all. They are the most prominent and central feature of all star forming regions.

As for Dark Energy it is invoked only to explain this expansion that I feel, as you appear to, something that is not actually certain. Its reliance on all Type A supernova's to be identical is just farcical. As has been demonstrated by a range of intensities now on the catalogue. Not the first and not the last time a seriously flawed theory would dominate a field tho and we have to move on.

Stringy neutrinos are imaginable in the context of both String Theory (ST) and Quantum Field Physics (QFP) but drawing them into this is no easy task for me. ST and QFP I take as one explaining the other, ST being a mechanism of energy transfer in the QF. An analogy might be, however crude, of a circuit board where the QF is the green board on which everything sits, ST is the hardwired channels linking everything. black holes and matter are resistors/transistors and there is energy transfer between them. What we see as galaxies and clusters of galaxies are just the radiation (heat) emitted within a kind of multi-dimensional circuit. Even Shawns introduction of "Electric Theory" slots in nicely. The energy created at the boundery between matter and antimatter states would create massive electrical charges, especially in iron rich stars and planets.

Sorry I have done little to really clarify and expand on post 76. And the 'space' I would need to do so is about to run out....but I'll return again very soon. And by then I will have read your Planetary Theory and be able to offer comment on that too :)
 
OOps... went looking on front end of site and realised maybe I read your post wrong? Cant find anything on planetary formation.
 
I haven't set it up yet. :)

Actually going to set up a separate site for it and take some feedback, then cover it as a thesis as a feature on the front end of the interfaith site.

There are a number of changes happening at the front end - new design, new sections, etc - partly to properly integrate the static pages from the original site, but also to turn the place into a kick-ass looking ezine. But ... takes a while to implement. However, if you wanted to put something together, I'd be more than happy to consider putting it up as a feature article.

At the end of the day, if this site ever inspires thinking of any kind, that has to be a good thing, I think. :)
 
Saw that yesterday too.

Reading back through my post it is utterly incoherrant. I set out to say two things and managed neither, instead confusing them both into a single incomprhensible and mutually exclusive jibberish. That happens sometimes when you try to think and type at the same time. When I get home later I'l try again.
 
Avi said:
When I was reading Tao's background links I came across this interesting one. Remember when black holes were first found, people were afraid that if we created one, we might be dragged into it and the world would be destroyed ? :eek:

Physicists create 'black hole for sound' - space - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist

I guess the good news is that didn't happen. And most of us didn't even know about it :)
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Hmm. I remember a story a few years ago about how black holes resonate at the tone of B-flat. (Maybe they distort the "ohm" tone of C.)
 
I am trying to put the pieces of these neutrinos together in my mind, and it seems like a key connection is :

From summary of neutrino's in wiki:

From particle experiments, it is known that neutrinos are very light. This means that they move at speeds close to the speed of light. Thus, dark matter made from neutrinos is termed "hot dark matter". The problem is that being fast moving, the neutrinos would tend to have spread out evenly in the universe before cosmological expansion made them cold enough to congregate in clumps. This would cause the part of dark matter made of neutrinos to be smeared out and unable to cause the large galactic structures that we see.

Ref: Neutrino - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Now the new finding, from Tao's recent linked article:

The big bang produced huge numbers of "relic" neutrinos, which are quantum-mechanical superpositions of three different mass-energy states. In the early universe, all of these states would have moved at close to the speed of light. But according to calculations by George Fuller and Chad Kishimoto of the University of California, San Diego, as the universe expanded, the most massive of these states slowed down in the relic neutrinos, stretching them across the universe (Physical Review Letters, vol 102, p 201303).
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So as Tao discussed, this finding was essential to explain formation of the galaxies which are clusters of high density in the universe.

So this makes me wonder about the nature of neutrinos. When these "relic neutrinos" slowed down did they behave similarly to classical particles and lose a property analogous to kinetic energy ? Did this result in their cooling ? If they cooled, did this lower energy state allow them to associate in some cluster-like manner ? Could this explain why they would condense into galaxies ?
 
Interesting press release from the Hubble site:


Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way.
The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today. The results will be published in the August 6, 2009 issue of the journal Nature, with a companion paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
"This galaxy is very small, but the stars are whizzing around as if they were in a giant galaxy that we would find closer to us and not so far back in time," says Pieter van Dokkum, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., who led the study. It is still not understood how galaxies like these, with so much mass in such a small volume, can form in the early universe and then evolve into the galaxies we see in the more contemporary, nearby universe, which is about 13.7 billion years old.
The work by the international team combined data collected using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope with observations taken by the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile. According to van Dokkum, "The Hubble data, taken in 2007, confirmed that this galaxy was a fraction the size of most galaxies we see today in the more evolved, older universe. The giant, 8-meter mirror of the Gemini telescope then allowed us to collect enough light to determine the overall motions of the stars using a technique not very different from the way police use laser light to catch speeding cars." The Gemini near-infrared spectroscopic observations required an extensive 29 hours on the sky to collect the extremely faint light from the distant galaxy, which goes by the designation 1255-0.
"By looking at this galaxy we are able to look back in time and see what galaxies looked like in the distant past when the universe was very young," says team member Mariska Kriek of Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. 1255-0 is so far away that the universe was only about 3 billion years old when its light was emitted.
Astronomers confess that it is a difficult riddle to explain how such compact, massive galaxies form, and why they are not seen in the current, local universe. "One possibility is that we are looking at what will eventually be the dense central region of a very large galaxy," explains team member Marijn Franx of Leiden University in the Netherlands. "The centers of big galaxies may have formed first, presumably together with the giant black holes that we know exist in today's large galaxies that we see nearby."
To witness the formation of these extreme galaxies astronomers plan to observe galaxies even farther back in time in great detail. By using the Wide Field Camera 3, which was recently installed on the Hubble Space Telescope, such objects should be detectable. "The ancestors of these extreme galaxies should have quite spectacular properties as they probably formed a huge amount of stars, in addition to a massive black hole, in a relatively short amount of time," says van Dokkum.
This research follows recent studies revealing that the oldest, most luminous galaxies in the early universe are very compact yet surprisingly have stellar masses similar to those of present-day elliptical galaxies. The most massive galaxies we see in the local universe (where we don't look back in time significantly) that have a mass similar to 1255-0 are typically five times larger than the young compact galaxy. How galaxies grew so much in the past 10 billion years is an active area of research, and understanding the dynamics in these young compact galaxies is a key piece of evidence in eventually solving this puzzle.

If such a galaxy is the child of the small elliptical galaxies we can see in local space then they have had huge amounts of angular momentum stripped from them. Which would suggest they were within a viscous medium or subject to truly enormous gravitational drag, or both. Dark matter raises its invisible head again.
My feeling is that they have it all back to front though. They keep with this ideas that black holes are created where as I am more and more in suspicion that it is supermassive black holes that are creating. Perhaps what we see in these early fast spinning quasars are naked singularities that have blown off their event horizon, are condensing the quantum soup through which they spin into atomic scale matter and ejecting it out. We cannot see the dark matter because it is beyond measurement, save that of its gravitational effect, in what we might call the zero point field. A black hole by its very density has to reach a quantised state in its interior. I'm thinking like a fusion machine that takes quantum potential and compresses it into matter that is spat out. That highly active so called "feeding" SMBH's are actually "vomiting", (should I call it the bulimic model? ), both elementary and complex particles.

Fast-spinning black holes might reveal all - physics-math - 08 August 2009 - New Scientist

Black hole jet brightens mysteriously - space - 15 April 2009 - New Scientist

'Megamaser' is most distant sign of cosmic water - space - 17 December 2008 - New Scientist
 
Tao, nice article, I looked at the original Nature article and the author attributes the mass problem to a measurement artifact. But I think your thought about dark matter is a good one. I can give you his e-mail address if you would like to e-mail him your question, just PM if you would like the e-mail address.
 
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