Big Bang Theory faces uncertainty

[mchammer75040]

Galaxy find stirs Big Bang debate

Thursday, January 8, 2004 Posted: 12:08 PM EST (1708 GMT)

Bigger surveys of the string are being carried out.
Story Tools

SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- An Australian-led team of scientists has discovered a new string of galaxies which they say challenges existing theories about the evolution of the universe.

The team, using telescopes in Chile and in Australia, detected the galaxies about 10.8 billion light years away in a remote region of the universe, the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics said in a statement Thursday.

With light traveling at 9.5 trillion kilometers in one light year, this means the galaxies are being observed as they appeared 10.8 billion years ago, the statement said.

The universe was formed during the Big Bang about 3 billion years earlier -- 13.7 billion years ago -- so the find could give more clues about what went on in the universe when it was one-fifth of its present age.

Thirty-seven of the brightest galaxies were detected, including a quasar, but thousands of galaxies were probably in the string, according to astronomer Dr Paul Francis who heads the team.

But none of the existing computer simulation models were able to reproduce galaxy strings as large as the one the team found.

"We are looking back four-fifths of the way to the beginning of the universe and the existence of this galaxy string will send astrophysicists around the world back to the drawing board to re-examine theories of the formation of the universe," Francis said.

"The simulations tell us that you cannot take the matter in the early universe and line it up in strings this large. There simply hasn't been enough time since the Big Bang for it to form structures this colossal."

The researchers -- who were funded by NASA and the Australian National University -- were refused the use of a telescope in the United States because the observations to be carried out were considered technically impossible by many American astronomers, the statement said.

The team has presented its findings to the American Astronomical Society.

Further surveys to map an area of the sky ten times greater than the team's observation are underway.

This would provide a clearer picture of the large-scale structure, the statement said.

I personally never took the big bang theory too seriously, (although I am athiest) I forsee more re-examinations of theories as we push forward in science. Any thoughts?

 

[Dax]

I knew it. No theory is for certain.

 

[LoneDeranger]

Who knows, eventually it might end up just as ridiculous as the theory that the earth is flat.

 

[RandomPING]

You believe this made up stuff about the world being round? haven't you ever seen pictures from space? It's just a big round flat blue coin. we only see the left or the right side of it, never inbetween.

 

[Mr.Magnetichead]

You believe this made up stuff about the world being round? haven't you ever seen pictures from space? It's just a big round flat blue coin. we only see the left or the right side of it, never inbetween.

Thats because you cant represent a sphere in 2d.

 

[Letters]

Thats because you cant represent a sphere in 2d.

Don't be preposterous, Mr.Spherehaed.

 

[PvtRyan]

Haven't read this, though I visit sites like sciencedaily.com on a regular basis.
Sounds interesting, but I doubt one inconsistency could weigh up against all the arguments pro Big Bang (an expanding universe from a singularity)
The universe IS expanding, the cosmic background radiation fits perfectly to the big bang theory, the helium-hydrogen ratios are exactly what Big Bang predicts etc etc.

A lot of weird inconsistent stuff is going on in the universe, recently the brightest star in the milkyway has been found, 40 million times brighter than the sun, but according to starformation rules this star cannot even exist. But this doesn't mean the theory of star formation from hydrogen clouds is wrong.

 

[LoneDeranger]

Haven't read this, though I visit sites like sciencedaily.com on a regular basis.
Sounds interesting, but I doubt one inconsistency could weigh up against all the arguments pro Big Bang (an expanding universe from a singularity)
The universe IS expanding, the cosmic background radiation fits perfectly to the big bang theory, the helium-hydrogen ratios are exactly what Big Bang predicts etc etc.

A lot of weird inconsistent stuff is going on in the universe, recently the brightest star in the milkyway has been found, 40 million times brighter than the sun, but according to starformation rules this star cannot even exist. But this doesn't mean the theory of star formation from hydrogen clouds is wrong.

The problem is that nobody knows where this energy exists or why our universe keeps expanding because of it.

And of course nobody even has a clue what caused the singularity in the first place.

 

[PvtRyan]

The problem is that nobody knows where this energy exists or why our universe keeps expanding because of it.

And of course nobody even has a clue what caused the singularity in the first place.

The expansion is said to be caused by black matter, not proven yet but it's not the first time they predict particles before they are proven (actually it was like that with every now known particle)

I think it was physically possible to explain a singularity from nowhere. The only problem was that they needed to unify quantum theory and general relativity, now if String-theory is correct, it's possible to explain it. It's just we wouldn't understand it anyway.

The alternative to Big Bang is creation, which is, not a very good one. One of the first arguments from creationists vs big bang is 'where did the matter come from?', but creation doesn't solve this problem. Worse, it creates a new one: instead of matter appearing out of nothing, it's an intelligent being that was always there that created everythin out of nothing.
The big bang is a much simpeler and more logical explanation.
But then again, maybe big bang is just a small piece of the puzzle, but this new find doesn't mean the whole theory should be dismissed. It's still considered a scientific fact by physicists and astronomers.

 

[LoneDeranger]

The expansion is said to be caused by black matter, not proven yet but it's not the first time they predict particles before they are proven (actually it was like that with every now known particle)

I think it was physically possible to explain a singularity from nowhere. The only problem was that they needed to unify quantum theory and general relativity, now if String-theory is correct, it's possible to explain it. It's just we wouldn't understand it anyway.

The alternative to Big Bang is creation, which is, not a very good one. One of the first arguments from creationists vs big bang is 'where did the matter come from?', but creation doesn't solve this problem. Worse, it creates a new one: instead of matter appearing out of nothing, it's an intelligent being that was always there that created everythin out of nothing.
The big bang is a much simpeler and more logical explanation.
But then again, maybe big bang is just a small piece of the puzzle, but this new find doesn't mean the whole theory should be dismissed. It's still considered a scientific fact by physicists and astronomers.

Actually it's caused by dark enegy not dark matter (dark matter creates gravity to make the universe contract, but theres much more dark energy out there).

Yeah I agree that it's definatelly not the time to throw the big bang theory out the window, but 100 years from now we may realize that it was totally wrong.

 

[mchammer75040]

Yea I dont think it should be thrown out, but Im sure it will be revised in some ways from time to time. Talkin about all this makes me realize how amazingly complex the universe is.

 

[LoneDeranger]

There are many more examples. Take atomic theory for instance. At first people thought that you had your elementary particles (neutrons and protons) in the center and the electrons just sort of orbited around it.

Well now it turns out neutrons and protons can be broken down into further particles and the elctrons don't really orbit but pop up at random places.

Just shows how even the most reasonable theories end up being wrong or incomplete.

 

[Prince of China]

Wow, LoneD, you sure know alot about time & space:frog:

 

[LoneDeranger]

Not really

But I try to do something useful at work so I read articles on quantum physics and stuff ...

 

[RandomPING]

the thing is, so many people know so little about space, that if you talk like you know what you're talking about then you sound smart at it

 

[Fender357]

I knew it. No theory is for certain.

Thats why its called a Theory

 

[Ti133700N]

We should ask Gordon what he thinks of all that stuff

 

[EvNTHriZen]

There is no universe. What seems like the universe to us is actually smallness on a greater scale.

If you believ in God, do you want to know what he was doing before he created the universe? It was accelerating Particles.

 

[PvtRyan]

There is no universe. What seems like the universe to us is actually smallness on a greater scale.

String theory (actually M-Theory) suggests something like this, that our universe is a membrane of a string of energy that grew so large because it was fed by the energy of parallel universes. Weird stuff.
I don't know much about this either, but this program really helps: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html

It's a 3 hour documentary about string theory, big bang and quantum mechanics, no more difficult to understand than a Discovery show.

 

[el Chi]

<Raises hand> They never actually explain how they came at the conclusion that the universe was formed 13.7 billion years ago... Maybe the theory's not too bad, but that's just unfounded crap speculation.

EDIT: Ti133700N, I was going you to challenge you to a duel over the Spongebob avatar, but I realise that that's just stupid (especially seeing as The Arena got closed ;( ) . I think it's only fair to warn you that they're making a Spongebob film. It'll be crap. Join my cause for the destruction of Hollywood.

 

[EvNTHriZen]

try this site...

Super String Theory

 

[mchammer75040]

For all those intrested in Dark Energy/Matter:

Science breakthrough of the year: proof of our exploding universe

Tim Radford, science editor
Friday December 19, 2003
The Guardian

Welcome to the dark side. Around 73% of the universe is made not of matter or radiation but of a mysterious force called dark energy, a kind of gravity in reverse. Dark energy is listed as the breakthrough of the year in the US journal Science today.
The discovery - in fact a systematic confirmation of a puzzling observation first made five years ago - paints an even more puzzling picture of an already mysterious universe. Around 200bn galaxies, each containing 200bn stars, are detectable by telescopes. But these add up to only 4% of the whole cosmos.

Now, on the evidence of a recent space-based probe and a meticulous survey of a million galaxies, astronomers have filled in at least some of the picture.

Around 23% of the universe is made up of another substance, called "dark matter". Nobody knows what this undetected stuff could be, but it massively outweighs all the atoms in all the stars in all the galaxies across the whole detectable range of space. The remaining 73% is the new discovery: dark energy. This bizarre force seems to be pushing the universe apart at an accelerating rate, when gravitational pull should be making it slow down or contract.

"The implications for these discoveries about the universe are truly stunning," said Don Kennedy, the editor of Science. "Cosmologists have been trying for years to confirm the hypothesis of a dark universe."

Sir Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, called it a "discovery of the first magnitude".

The findings were made by an orbiting observatory called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). This measured tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, in effect the dying echoes of the Big Bang that launched time, space and matter in a tiny universal fireball.

These painstaking measurements were then backed up by the telescopes of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which mapped a million galaxies to see how they clumped together or spread out. Both confirmed that dark energy must exist.

The findings settle a number of arguments about the universe, its age, its expansion rate, and its composition, all at once. Thanks to the two studies, astronomers now believe the age of the universe is 13.7bn years, plus or minus a few hundred thousand. And its rate of expansion is a bewildering 71km per second per megaparsec. One megaparsec is an astronomical measure, totting up to 3.26m light years. Something latent in space itself is acting as a form of antigravity, exerting a push on the universe, rather than a pull.

Dark matter was proposed more than 20 years ago when it became clear that all the galaxies behaved as if they were far more massive than they seemed to be. All sorts of explanations - black holes, brown dwarfs and undetectable particles that are very different from atoms - have been suggested. None has been confirmed.

But dark matter exists, all the same. The dark energy story began in 1998 when astronomers reported that the most distant galaxies seemed to be receding far faster than calculations predicted. A study of a certain kind of supernova confirmed that they had not been misled: the universe was indeed expanding ever faster, rather than decelerating.

The discovery that some unexpected and undetectable force was pushing the fabric of space apart seemed to confirm a famous observation decades ago by the British scientist JBS Haldane: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose. It is queerer than we can suppose." It once again raised profound questions about the nature of the universe: about space, and time, and energy, and matter. And it set the theorists on the hunt first for an explanation, and then for an experiment that would confirm their hypothesis.

So they turned once again to the original evidence for the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the original blaze of creation, cooled to minus 270 C - just about 3 C above absolute zero. Several lines of research, including experiments in the Antarctic and from high-flying balloons, began to provide a clearer picture: the universe simply had to consist of something more than just atoms and so-called dark matter.

"But WMAP, with superbly precise data beamed back from a little spacecraft a million miles away, has made the evidence more precise," said Sir Martin, of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.

"The dark energy is spread uniformly through the universe, latent in empty space. Its nature is a mystery. Whereas there's a real chance of learning what the dark matter is within the next five to 10 years, I'd hold out less hope of understanding the dark energy unless or until there's a unified theory that takes us closer to the 'bedrock' of space and time."

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/story/0,2763,1110244,00.html