Rumors of a Strange Universe

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by wet1, Dec 2, 2001.

  1. wet1 Wanderer Registered Senior Member

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    Rumors of a Strange Universe
    Credit: High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA
    Three years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. In the language of cosmologists, a large cosmological constant is directly implied by new distant supernovae observations. Suggestions of a cosmological constant (lambda) are not new -- they have existed since the advent of modern relativistic cosmology. Such claims are not usually popular with astronomers, though, because lambda is so unlike known universe components, because lambda's value appears limited by other observations, and because less-strange cosmologies without lambda have previously done well in explaining the data. What is noteworthy here is the seemingly direct and reliable method of the observations and the good reputations of the scientists conducting the investigations. Over the past three years, two independent teams of astronomers have continued to accumulate data that appears to confirm the unsettling result. The above picture of a supernova that occurred in 1994 on the outskirts of a spiral galaxy was taken by one of these collaborations. Still, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so cosmologists the world over continue to await more data and confirmation by independent methods.
     
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  3. Greg Bernhardt www.physicsforums.com Registered Senior Member

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    it looks just like a creation of a galaxy, how is that a universe?
     
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  5. Acerbus Wanderer of the Wastes Registered Senior Member

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    nice pic

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    im going to read more on this theory, thanks for letting us know.
     
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  7. thed IT Gopher Registered Senior Member

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    If people are interested in knowing more have read of Saul Perlmutter's site on High-Z Supernova. Verification of Serlmutters work was recently acheived by the Hubble eritage team analysing the Hubble Deep Field. Have a read of Brian Schmidt's pages for more info and links.

    Phsyicsforums.com, the issue is that Supernova are used as standard candles in Cosmology as they have well defined light curves. Perlmutter was measuring supernova at high redshifts and found that the 'hubble flow' was faster than thought if the relationship is linear. For this to be true you need some form of 'push' over and above the Universes expansion. In other words a positive cosmological constant λ.

    I have also heard that some one found spectroscopic evidence of an FTL source at high Z. All this and more has led Anders Albrecht, a co-founder of Inflation, to propose that light speed was faster in the early Universe and is related to λ. Details here for the interested
     
  8. scorpio Registered Senior Member

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    following up...

    Guys,
    Quite interesting !!! I suggest for curious minds the french site of Jean-Pierre Petit (the site is bilingual french-english):
    http://www.jp-petit.com/
    JP Petit is astrophysician and created quite a non-standard theory, the twin universes (or should I say, dual universes), explained on his site.
    Some pages are quite technical, MSc level... However VERY interesting because it solves at once several issues like the mystery of the dark matter, why galaxies structures are stable, and the large scale structure of the Universe...

    Good reading !

    Ben
     

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