Astronomers Find Most Distant Protocluster of Galaxies 129
The Bad Astronomer writes "Using the monster 8.2-meter Subaru telescope, astronomers have identified the most distant cluster of galaxies ever found: a collection of galaxies at a staggering distance of 12.7 billion light years. This is the most distant cluster ever seen that has been confirmed spectroscopically (PDF). Technically, it's a protocluster, since it's so young — seen only a billion years after the Big Bang itself — the cluster must still be in the process of formation."
upgraded to include... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:upgraded to include... (Score:4, Insightful)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades [wikipedia.org]
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Damn. Randall Munroe drives a Scooby?
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Kidding. Just that his favorite astronomical entity is the Pleiades. And the Scooby is, well, associated to a different kind of person.
incredible (Score:4, Insightful)
It is incredible what we can accomplish as humans, imagine if we did not waste trillions on useless battles for the hear and minds of primitive retarded people with stone age believes.
Re:incredible (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, we could spend some of that to educate folks like yourself on how to write properly!
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It is incredible what we can accomplish as humans, imagine if we did not waste trillions on useless battles for the hear and minds of primitive retarded people with stone age believes.
Stone age believes like self determination and freedom from foregin invaders looking to implement cultural and economic imperialism? That sort of believe?
Soo.... (Score:1)
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Your momma's so fat she has her own event horizon.
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Technically anything has an event horizon [wikipedia.org], although you'd have to compress yo mamma pretty significantly before she'd be smaller than her own event horizon.
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Oh yeah? Well yo' momma's so fat, anything near her begins to spaghettify [wikipedia.org].
Well, that's where it was... (Score:2)
12.7 billion years ago it might have been 12.7 billion light years away, but where is it now?
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Come back in 12.7 billion years and I'll let you know.
Re:Well, that's where it was... (Score:5, Interesting)
12.7 billion years ago it might have been 12.7 billion light years away, but where is it now?
Exactly where we see it. The 12.7 billion years haven't passed, because there is no common point of reference between us and them for that time to have passed in.
"Now" and "then" makes no sense except for local distances, without introducing FTL, time travel and violating causality. We can only measure round trip times, not one way time.
The photons haven't experienced 12.7 billion years of travel - they just left.
If this makes your head hurt, good.
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Wait, what? If the photons travelled at the speed of light, they've been doing that for 12.7 billion years.
Assuming photons can count and measure time, would they really "see" this as instantaneous? Or would they have had time to catch up on their reading?
Relativity and light speed are so damned confusing some times.
Re:Well, that's where it was... (Score:5, Informative)
Short answer: yes. For anything traveling at luminal speeds, time is not perceived. If you were a photon, it might take you 12.7 billion years to get here, but for you it is an instant.
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I think he's wrong.
From the photon's point of reference, it traveled instantaneously. From our point of reference, it took 12.7 billion years for the photons to reach us.
Therefore, what we're seeing is how it looked 12.7 billion years ago.
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From the photon's point of reference, it traveled instantaneously. From our point of reference, it took 12.7 billion years for the photons to reach us.
Therefore, what we're seeing is how it looked 12.7 billion years ago.
Your error is to apply the word "ago". That implies that time passes here and there in the same frame of reference - a universal clock, if you like. That doesn't exist - time is only a local phenomenon.
From our point of view, it did not take 12.7 billion years for the photons to get here, because from our point of view, 12.7 billion years ago, that part of the universe didn't exist. There is no "then" common to us and them; only a blossom slowly opening and revealing parts of the universe to us that's ne
Re:Well, that's where it was... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come on, do you guys just make this stuff up as you go? ;-)
No, seriously, I actually understood that we were seeing what was there 12.7 billion years ago -- WTF does it mean then? I thought this was what existed 12.7 billion years ago from our point of view.
That sounds dirty, and I'm not sure if it actually sheds any, er, light on this.
I think this actually confirms what I knew in university -- astrophysicists must spend much of their time drunk in order to be able to reconcile this stuff with everything else.
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No, seriously, I actually understood that we were seeing what was there 12.7 billion years ago
There you use that word again. "Ago" doesn't make sense at relativistic speeds and vast distances.
It's 12.7 billion light-years distant. Light-year is a distance, not an age.
If you travelled that distance and back at the speed of light, we would have to wait 25.4 billion years for your return. But your travel would not take that time. A person at your turning point, 12.7 billion light years distant, would not have seen you 12.7 billion years ago when you come back to us. He would just have seen you le
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Light-year is a distance, not an age
But when light goes the speed of light, the distance also becomes an age.
As much as I appreciate your first few corrections, your on-going determination to be a grammar-nazi is not appreciated.
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But when light goes the speed of light, the distance also becomes an age.
No, that does not follow. I am sorry, but it really doesn't, because time is not a constant.
As much as I appreciate your first few corrections, your on-going determination to be a grammar-nazi is not appreciated.
This isn't about grammar, but about the error of applying Newtonian physics to relativistic speeds. In Newtonian physics, it is obvious that going 100 km at 100 km/h would take one hour. But in relativistic physics, it doesn't - going 1 lyr at 1 lyr/y doesn't take 1 year.
If you in year X send out a probe at 1 lyr/y (c) for a distance of 1 lyr, and have it return immediately, it would take 2 years (not factoring in
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Re:Well, that's where it was... (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding, and im sure its flawed, is that something like a Photon doesn't experience time. To it, it pops into and out of existance, one end at the surface of a star in a galaxy cluster 12.7 billion light years away, the other end at the Subaru telescope in this case. Just as suddenly as this happends, its gone again.
This is because its traveling at the speed of light. Time and space are linked. Beyond this my understanding breaks down, but I suspect it has something to do with moving through space at that speed, and our misunderstanding of what time really is. We experience time where there is a 'universal' time in our refrence, because really anything we need to reference is already here, moving with us at the same speed around the sun. There is no 12.7 billion years ago to this galaxy, per our reference, because nothing that is happening 'now' as you and I understand it can possibly affect us here, without violating the speed of light. We're not looking at a galaxy we're literally looking back in time at a galaxy. If this galaxy exploded ripping a hole in the fabric of space-time and ended the entire universe right now, we'd not be aware of it for another 12.7 billion years. Per our reference, nothing has happened, or will happen, for that span of time. So in effect, for us, what we're seeing is what IS happening.
Now please correct my misunderstanding, those of you lurking out there who do know better, because i'd love to understand all this!
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Wait, what? If the photons travelled at the speed of light, they've been doing that for 12.7 billion years.
Only from an outside point of view, of which there are none. We only see the end of their travel.
From their point of view (if you could piggy-back on them in a space ship going the same speed), only an instant has passed, while the rest of the tiny universe aged.
Relativity and light speed are so damned confusing some times.
It sure is. One of the most difficult thing to grasp is that time is a purely local phenomenon, and that you can't apply "now" to anywhere else. Even such a thing as "the age of the universe" is our age of the universe. What the age of the unive
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May I be excused? My brain is full [flickr.com].
I honestly don't know how physicists keep it straight -- verb tenses must be a bitch. When the photon will have arrived yesterday after it's long journey of instantaneous, we will have known tomorrow what something looked like billions of years ago but never not almost today. Next year, we might know what happened before that.
So
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Actual physicists would probably tell you that if we could get a decent handle on the cluster's state and location 12.7 billion years ago from these visual observations, we could make a reasonable projection, taking the two reference frames into account, as to the cluster's current state and location. It is still out there, somewhere, right now, in some state.
All the pseudo-mysticism in this discussion is a load of nonsense by geeks trying to sound intelligent.
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ftfy
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Terry Pratchett took this to the logical conclusion in his vision of the Discworld. Listen in to some conversations going on at the Unseen University, and generally with wizards in Discworld, and you'll hear stuff that makes just about as much "sense". Nature is a bitch :)
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The photons haven't experienced 12.7 billion years of travel - they just left
Implying the photons were teleported straight to the lens of the Subaru Telescope. Unless you can show that those photons somehow violated or evaded the constant "c", you can damn well bet your ass those photons have experienced a duration of travel at the speed of light from their point of radiation to our planet's present position.
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The speed of light is infinite, because due to relativistic effects, time has stopped. Only an outside observer sees something moving at the "speed of light"; to the photon itself, no time passes.
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Let's say I am 1,000 light years away and I flip you off.
By the time you
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Only an outside observer sees something moving at the "speed of light"; to the photon itself, no time passes.
Not really. This was a research project, which means the very last part of the photon's trip was through part of academia. Which means it felt like exactly like 12.7 billion years.
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Implying the photons were teleported straight to the lens of the Subaru Telescope.
No, implying that distance and time aren't constants, but vary depending on your frame of reference.
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So you are denying that the astronomers who captured these photons with their telescope have a frame of reference?
Saying the duration of travel a photon experiences is imaterial because the photon has no awareness is saying that there is no sound if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it. We all know that it *must* have interacted with the atmosphere and made a sound -- regardless of anyone being there to hear it. As such, the light traveled at the speed it always travels, we happen to obs
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So you are denying that the astronomers who captured these photons with their telescope have a frame of reference?
No common frame of reference? Yes, most certainly there isn't one, and the astronomers would agree. They only capture the photons as they arrive here, and can tell by the red-shift how far away the proto-galaxy is. But they can't tell anything about time, because the speed of time itself can't exceed the speed of light - there's no big Pratchettian clock that ticks time for everywhere in the universe.
When something happens elsewhere, it hasn't happened at all until the light cone hits us. Or, to put it
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If you left our current location 12.7 billion years ago, and were travelling at the speed of light in the exact direction that these photos came from, and then stopped so you could be easily observed, would you currently be where the protocluster is, or will it have moved?
"12.7 billion years ago" would be in our time frame.
But your "currently" would not be.
It is meaningless to say you travel for 12.7 billion years at the speed of light, because to the world you departed, you have left reality, and to yourself, no time has passed at all.
Instead, you can imagine that you travel a distance of 12.7 billion light years. Which isn't the same. And no, it won't bring you back to that proto-galaxy. In the zero seconds your travel took, the universe has expanded. You'll arrive at
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According to you, my car doesn't move, the Earth moves around me. Got it
And no, it won't bring you back to that proto-galaxy. In the zero seconds your travel took, the universe has expanded.
While technically correct, your logic is wrong. If you want to understand time relative to the proto-galaxy, then you must do all of your calculations from the proto-galaxy's frame of reference, not your own. So yes, it took 12.7bil years.
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If you want to understand time relative to the proto-galaxy, then you must do all of your calculations from the proto-galaxy's frame of reference, not your own. So yes, it took 12.7bil years.
You make a leap of logic by applying the 12.7 billion years to their time frame. Where do the 12.7 billion years come from? The travel time from the photons' point of view is 0 seconds. The 12.7 billion light years is from our perspective. So what ages them 12.7 billion years, from their perspective?
That would only make sense if you could assume that our now is their now You can't. "Our now" hasn't reached them yet, and won't, until they're 30+ billion years older than they are in the "their now" that
Eppur si muove (Score:2)
How the fuck did this get "Informative"? It's total bullshit. Informative is the worst tag on slashdot, it implies the moderators somehow, by being moderators, know what's true more than other users, (or, at all...) which in this case they clearly don't.
Time passes for all things. Photons just as anything else. Just because they're going really fast doesn't mean somehow time isn't passing for them, so you're mistaken. They've experienced the same amount of time, for all intents and purposes.
You just don't understand relativity, AC. What you're saying is very much like claiming that ships would fall off the edge of the earth if it were round, or that the earth can't circle the sun because we would fall off and burn to a crisp. You cling to Newtonian time, just as your forefathers clung to the Ptolemaic world view.
That time passes differently depending on your speed is now indisputable - even satellite clocks used for GPS have to compensate for that! The faster you go, the more profound the
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That time passes differently depending on your speed is now indisputable - even satellite clocks used for GPS have to compensate for that! The faster you go, the more profound the effect. As you approach the speed of light in vacuum, the passage of time approaches zero. At c, it is zero.
Which is why c has to be an absolute unbreakable limit, as otherwise the passage of time at a speed greater than c would be negative i.e. you would be travelling back in time.
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Or is this an extreme for which string theory or quantum gravity have a different answer?
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You don't understand that distance = rate * time
If time is 0, then you haven't moved. You're thinking about the wrong frame of reference's time. A photon may have a time of 0, but for most everything else, time cannot ever be 0.
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You don't understand that distance = rate * time
No, I don't understand that, because it's not true.
s = v * t only holds true as an approximation when the speed is low.
The full formula is s = v * t * [gamma], where [gamma] is the Lorenz factor, 1 / sqrt(1 - (v^2/c^2)). For low speeds, the Lorenz factor is so close to 1 as to make no difference, which is why you can use s = v * t in everyday life.
If you travel at 10 m/s for 60s, you would get 600m as a result.
But if you travel at 99% of the speed of light for 10 s, you would not travel 0.99 * 299 792 458
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That's what I've never understood. For it to be happening right now, to me, it stands to reason that if we look far enough away we could see the light from the big bang. Which means that everything that has ever happened is always happening everywhere. Which means that we always have existed in the state that we exist in today and will always exist in the state that we existed in billions of years ago.
Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed.
Re:Well, that's where it was... (Score:4, Interesting)
You couldn't see light from the Big Bang itself because it took until nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang for the Universe to cool sufficiently for photons to find a clear path through the charged ions. It's this first wave of freed photons that form the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
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I'm not sure what's confusing you. Look, how time is perceived (excluding any particular psychological phenomena) is a function of speed of the object in question; it's all relative to the frame of reference of the observer. The faster you go, the slower external time passes (not your own time, mind you, just the time of anything not moving as fast as you are). The closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time passes, until finally you have a photon which always moves at the speed of light, time does
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Other than some string theorists, I think most physicists are of the opinion that time-space did not exist prior to the Big Bang.
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Other than some string theorists, I think most physicists are of the opinion that time-space did not exist prior to the Big Bang.
According to string theorists, prior to the Big Bang, the Silly String was in the Big Can. Then it was squirted out forming the universe. One variant of this holds that it was Pasta not Silly String.
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it stands to reason that if we look far enough away we could see the light from the big bang
This [wikipedia.org] is pretty much what you are looking for.
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Probably long dead. Since these were the "first" stars/galaxies from the beginning of the universe, they've long since exploded and are now part of the "near by" most recent stars and galaxies we're most familiar with. They are part of us.
Re:Well, that's where it was... (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong on several counts. What the 12.7 refers to is when the light left the cluster in question (in billions of years). At the time the light left the cluster it was actually much closer to us than 12.7 light years. The observable universe is actually larger in light years than the time since the Big Bang, due to the expansion of space. This expansion also stretched the travel time for the cluster's light to reach us. Now the cluster (to the extent 'Now' has any meaning) may be 25+ light years away (I apologize for the imprecision, as I don't have the exact figures at hand).
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how can you mods possibly score this reply a 2!
He's 9 orders of magnitude off, for starters.
And they didn't mod him a 2 - that was his karma bonus.
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Ah, my bad on the billions. I noted it near the beginning but dropped it as I continued. Please accept my apology for the mis-translation, as my planet has a very, very large orbit.
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So while we can talk about "now" and "then", it's meaningless on an absolute scale. For this reason, when light from someplac
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Not quite a young cluster (Score:2)
the cluster must still be in the process of formation.
Well, it's still in the process of formation where we can visibly see it. Given that it's 12.7 billion light years away, I'd like to believe that the galaxies are properly formed at this point. Though, given that not one person knows exactly how long it takes to form a proper galaxy, who's to say that it isn't finished. It's all best guess I suppose. Really cool science though, knowing that light from 12.7 billion years ago is illuminating our planet, however faint it may be.
Re:Not quite a young cluster (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps the universe is in fact curved and 12.7 billion years "across" and we are looking at the formation of the milky way and other local galaxies...
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No, we have enough evidence to know that isn't true. There are plenty of galaxies visible with the wrong masses to tell us that if the universe is curved the curvature doesn't loop within the size of the visible universe.
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"still in the process of formation" (Score:1)
Scientists may only be detecting its protocluster stage because the light from its current stage hasn't made it here yet, but I'm willing to bet good money that it's neither young, nor a protocluster, nor still in the process of formation.
If they look really hard (Score:1)
Now or then? (Score:5, Funny)
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But, we weren't so far away 12 Billion years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever one of these astronomy articles comes up about seeing a galaxy or cluster "near the big bang", there's one fundamental question which has always bothered me. . .
We are told that the universe is expanding, and has been expanding for about 14 Billion years. This means that everything was much closer together back 13 Billion years ago (when the summary says we are seeing the light from). Also, light travels much faster than the universe expands. So. . . why didn't the light pass us billions of years ago?
I realize that light takes time to travel, and that's the idea behind the idea that we can "look back in time" when we look at very distant astronomical objects. . . but. . . again, why didn't the light PASS US billions of years ago, since light expands outward faster than the universe expands outward? Wouldn't the universe need to have been expanding at almost the speed of light, for us to just now receive light from 13 Bn years ago? Well, that is, that the expansion would have had to happen at about 13/14 C?
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This may help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space [wikipedia.org]
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A quick answer is to say that the universe assuredly is expanding faster than the speed of light. Or rather, it's expanding at some rate, and two sufficiently distant points will be receding from one another at the speed of light, or even greater than the speed of light. (You've no doubt heard that "nothing can travel faster than c" but in fact it's really that "energy (hence information) cannot propagate faster than c"... according to relativity spacetime itself can expand at any speed.)
A more detailed exp
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The premise of your argument is that the expansion of space can't cause the distance between two objects to increase at a rate greater than the speed of light. I don't know where you got that from, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe [wikipedia.org].
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Initially, the expansion of the universe was a lot faster than the speed of light: the universe got really large very shortly after the bang.
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timeline is totally wrong! (Score:2)
"..... distance of 12.7 billion light years. "
If an object is 12.7 billion light years from us, the time that light takes to travel to us takes.... 12.7 billion years.
" ...the cluster must still be in the process of formation."
Nope. It _was_ in the process of formation about 12.7 billion years ago. Now that said cluster is 12.7 billion years older, and it is either very old or blown away to bits and pieces some time ago.
The distance works like a time machine, and for example we see and experience our Sun ab
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Although I'm sure that many introductory physics students might love it if somehow time was somehow independent of distance so you could just easily convert light-years to distance, but it is not. As explained by numerous posters on this thread, there are a couple of big issues with this simplification.
First, the distance to the clusters in question is infered from its red-shift (which it gets from the actual fabric of space itself expanding). The actual paper implies the cluster is approximatly z=6 (wher
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"If I completely ignore these variables over here, this makes no sense! It's a paradox!" - Surprise? It is a fun thought exercise.
"from the photon's point of view"
From birth to death, the photon has always been traveling at the speed of light. If no time has ever elapsed for it, how could it have a "point of view"?
Let me phrase that a bit differently. If something "existed" for a time of exactly 0, then it never existed at all. From its
Nice title... (Score:2)
"Astronomers Find Most Distant Protocluster of Galaxies" - seems to imply a finite universe. That probably makes half the physicists in the world happy...
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Yes, well, whether or not the universe is finite, the headline certainly was, and some things didn't fit.
The summary clarified: "This is the most distant cluster ever seen that has been confirmed spectroscopically."
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The article baldly assumes as much. It would be nice if we could get back to the days in which the data was primary and cosmological theories were secondary.
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It's always fun to watch pseudo-critical morons dance their little dance. How, pray tell, does any of this cause problems for Big Bang cosmology?
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Ask me politely and perhaps I will explain it to you. Either that or you could read the post you are replying to.
Re:Just More Evidence (Score:4)
The post I replied to was written by a moron who uses words he does not understand to make points he cannot support. If you have the words of someone who isn't a moron, then by all means provide them. This is my official "Not Polite To Worthless Fucktards Day", and you sir, qualify, with pathetic idiotic claims that you have somehow debunked Big Bang cosmology.
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As I remain polite, I have either refuted your assertion that my post was trollish or the assertion that trolls don't get polite. If you need a longer explanation try reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Bang-Never-Happened/dp/067974049X [amazon.com]
It is heavily referenced, and much more evidence disproving the Big Bang has appeared since it was written. I don't feel strongly enough to fight about it, but I'm always up for some reasoned discourse. It doesn't have to be polite, so long as it does not confuse
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I made a good argument and it has not been addressed.
Well, you said some stuff. It wasn't a good argument. I could say that the universe was turtles all the way down, and also say that was a good argument. But neither of those things would be true, either.
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Instead cosmologists are claiming it is 90% super-special undetectable matter and energy. At least the turtle hypothesis is testable.
The Big Bang hypothesis is testable too; it predicts that there were no galaxy clusters 1 billion years (12.7b years ago) after the big bang, it was a bunch of plasma and quasars. And anything observed from that timeframe should look much different than what is next door. So they invent a host of exotic theoretical energies to bring empirical knowledge in line with their theor
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It's an empty confirmation if it depends on the universe being 90% fairies. Show me one fairy and maybe I'll believe in the rest.
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So the main piece of evidence for the Big Bang remains redshift of distant galaxies coupled with the assumption that the further away things are the faster they are moving, as opposed to the assumption that light frequency could decline at a very slow and predictable rate. What's your theory on that?
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According to one theory that I've heard, the lensing effect that gravitational fields have on light also alters its local speed, sort of increasing the density of the space/time fabric. Just as a dense material such as water, glass, or diamond will have a dramatically lower local speed of light, so too is the speed of light in proximity to a gravitational field lower than the speed of light in deep space. According to this theory, the true speed of light in the absence of any gravitational field would be in
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Redshift is poor evidence for a theory which is inconsistent with observed redshift. The two elephants in the room are quantization and misordered objects.
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Incidentally, I have a better theory, one that accommodates all the "evidence" for the alleged "Big Bang" without resorting to suspending the laws of physics or causality... but last time I discussed it on /., you guys proved you don't like hearing ideas that challenge your cherished fucking illusions, so I'm not going to bother telling you again what happened; apparently, you can't handle the truth.
Does the name of your theory include the words "cube" and "time" but not necessarily in that order?