Today's Elites

Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Ironic Universe: updated

"Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion -- dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported."

This dark flow motion together with cosmological electromagnetic anisotropy (or birefringent polarization) together seem to point to some sort of directed universal evolution of even supposed inorganic matter that no sanitized purely mathematical model can account for. It is evidence that no matter how long one attempts to achieve a so-called unified field theory the universe will always present us with some unexpected singularities due to its continuing evolution. We will forever be baffled by the fact that the universe always seems to surprise us.

Here's yet another irony in the news:

"Sunspots are supposedly rooted to the bottom of the belt," says Hathaway. "So the motion of sunspots tells us how fast the belt is moving down there."

He's done that—plotted sunspot speeds vs. time since 1996—and the results don't make sense. "While the top of the conveyor belt has been moving at record-high speed, the bottom seems to be moving at record-low speed. Another contradiction."

Could it be that sunspots are not rooted to the bottom of the Conveyor Belt, after all? "That's one possibility" he notes. "Sunspots could be moving because of dynamo waves or some other phenomenon not directly linked to the belt."


March, 2017:

Running away from Einstein

"This 10 million light year-wide ring made up of small galaxies is expanding rapidly like a mini Big Bang. The team believe our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, once flew past our own galaxy at close range, creating a sling-shot of several small galaxies.

Dr Hongsheng Zhao, Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy and co-author of the paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by Oxford University Press, said: "If Einstein's gravity were correct, our galaxy would never come close enough to Andromeda to scatter anything that fast.""


November, 2019

"Scientists are finding that galaxies can move with each other across huge distances, and against the predictions of basic cosmological models. The reason why could change everything we think we know about the universe."


April, 2020

The fine structure constant has a directional anisotropy.

"And it seems to be supporting this idea that there could be a directionality in the universe, which is very weird indeed," Professor Webb says.

"So the universe may not be isotropic in its laws of physics - one that is the same, statistically, in all directions. But in fact, there could be some direction or preferred direction in the universe where the laws of physics change, but not in the perpendicular direction. In other words, the universe in some sense, has a dipole structure to it.

"In one particular direction, we can look back 12 billion light years and measure electromagnetism when the universe was very young. Putting all the data together, electromagnetism seems to gradually increase the further we look, while towards the opposite direction, it gradually decreases. In other directions in the cosmos, the fine structure constant remains just that - constant. These new very distant measurements have pushed our observations further than has ever been reached before."


June, 2020

K-State study reveals asymmetry in spin directions of galaxies
The patterns span over more than 4 billion light-years, but the asymmetry in that range is not uniform. The study found that the asymmetry gets higher when the galaxies are more distant from Earth, which shows that the early universe was more consistent and less chaotic than the current universe.

But the patterns do not just show that the universe is not symmetric, but also that the asymmetry changes in different parts of the universe, and the differences exhibit a unique pattern of multipoles.

"If the universe has an axis, it is not a simple single axis like a merry-go-round," Shamir said. "It is a complex alignment of multiple axes that also have a certain drift."

September, 2020

Why is there a normal galaxy sitting at the edge of the universe?

"Massive stars blow powerful winds, supernovae detonate like flashbulbs, and all that energy released should stir the gas up in the galaxy, making it irregularly shaped (plus, that early in the age of the Universe there just hadn't been a lot of time to get organized). Most distant galaxies we see are indeed blobby. The fact that this galaxy has a disk that appears to be pretty calm and stable is bizarre."

"Interestingly, it’s not alone. Earlier in 2020 astronomers announced they found a disk galaxy at about the same distance, called the Wolfe Galaxy. Like this one, it’s not understood how it can exist. Clearly, the theoretical models are wrong, or at least (and more likely) incomplete. Obviously, there’s more to learn about galaxies that exist at the edge of the observable Universe."

November, 2020

Scientists Detect Hints of Strange New Physics in The Universe's Background Radiation


"As far as we have been able to measure so far, there's only one fundamental interaction that breaks parity symmetry; that's the weak interaction between subatomic particles that is responsible for radioactive decay. But finding another place where parity symmetry breaks down could potentially lead us to new physics beyond the Standard Model."

"And two physicists - Yuto Minami of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Japan; and Eiichiro Komatsu of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany and Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan - believe they have found hints of it in the polarisation angle of the CMB."

December 2020

Are primordial magnetic field theories getting in a twist?

"In cosmic voids where the density of galaxies is far lower than standard, astronomers have observed weak magnetic fields that may provide a window into the early universe. The fields 10-17-10-10 G in magnitude with large coherence lengths of up to megaparsecs are thought to have their origins in the early universe, but so far it is unclear when or how they were generated."

December 2020

Portrait of young galaxy throws theory of galaxy formation on its head

"Scientists have challenged our current understanding of how galaxies form by unveiling pictures of a young galaxy in the early life of the Universe which appears surprisingly mature.

The galaxy, dubbed ALESS 073.1, appears to have all of the features expected of a much more mature galaxy and has led the team of scientists to question how it grew so fast."

February 2021

Discovery of a Giant Arc in distant space adds to challenges to basic assumptions about the Universe

"The Giant Arc, which is approximately 1/15th the radius of the observable universe, shows as an enormous, nearly symmetrical, crescent of galaxies in the remote Universe. It is twice the size of the striking Sloan Great Wall of galaxies and clusters that is seen in the nearby Universe. This new discovery of the Giant Arc adds to an accumulating set of (cautious) challenges to the Cosmological Principle."

June 2021


"We report the discovery of a highly-polarized, highly-variable, steep-spectrum radio source, ASKAP J173608.2−321635, located ∼4 ◦ from the Galactic center in the Galactic plane. (...)  We discuss possible identifications for ASKAP J173608.2−321635 including a low-mass star/substellar object with Corresponding author: Ziteng Wang zwan4817@uni.sydney.edu.au, tara.murphy@sydney.edu.au arXiv:2109.00652v1 [astro-ph.HE] 2 Sep 2021 2 Wang et al. extremely low infrared luminosity, a pulsar with scatter-broadened pulses, a transient magnetar, or a Galactic Center Radio Transient: none of these fully explains the observations, which suggests that ASKAP J173608.2−321635 may represent part of a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging surveys. "

September 2021

Early Massive Galaxies ran out of gas, Shutting Down Their Star Formation

"But what is removing the cold gas from the galaxies? Astronomers are stumped, and will have to continue their observations to find clues to this great galactic mystery. “We still have so much to learn about why the most massive galaxies formed so early in the Universe and why they shut down their star formation when so much cold gas was readily available to them,” said Whitaker. “The mere fact that these massive beasts of the cosmos formed 100 billion stars within about a billion years and then suddenly shut down their star formation is a mystery we would all love to solve, and REQUIEM has provided the first clue.”"

October 2021

Strange radio waves emerge from direction of the galactic centre

"Astronomers have discovered unusual signals coming from the direction of the Milky Way’s centre. The radio waves fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source and could suggest a new class of stellar object.

“The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarisation. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

“The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We’ve never seen anything like it.”"

March 2022

Mysterious, Swirling Waves Discovered in the Sun – Incredible Speed Defies Explanation

"Researchers from NYU Abu Dhabi’s (NYUAD) Center for Space Science have discovered a new set of waves in the Sun that, unexpectedly, appear to travel much faster than predicted by theory.

"In the study, Discovery of high-frequency-retrograde vorticity waves in the Sun, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers — led by Research Associate Chris S. Hanson — detailed how they analyzed 25 years of space and ground-based data to detect these waves. The high-frequency retrograde (HFR) waves — which move in the opposite direction of the Sun’s rotation — appear as a pattern of vortices (swirling motions) on the surface of the Sun and move at three times the speed established by current theory.

"Complex interactions between other well known waves and magnetism, gravity, or convection could drive the HFR waves at this speed. “If the HFR waves could be attributed to any of these three processes, then the finding would have answered some open questions we still have about the Sun,” said Hanson. “However, these new waves don’t appear to be a result of these processes, and that’s exciting because it leads to a whole new set of questions.”"

December 2022

Tetrahedral Asymmetry Handedness in Galactic Distributions


February 2023

"This is our first glimpse back this far, so it's important that we keep an open mind about what we are seeing," Leja said. "While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change."


January 2024

The Big Ring galaxy cluster discovery challenges the principle that the universe is smooth at cosmological scales.



No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive