Astrophysics and Cosmology - Discuss the Universe here

[Agent : Orange]

I mentioned this in the Tobias McGriff thread, but it got buried fairly quickly and I think it's important enough to mention on it's own.

This is news about the dark matter detector experiment, LUX, that has been collecting data in South Dakota for a while now:
http://sanfordlab.org/news/press_release/event-announce-first-physics-results-sanford-lab
They are holding a press conference on Oct 30 to announce their first findings. This has the potential to be as huge an announcement as the Higgs boson if a light dark matter particle has been found. If it is a non-detection then it is also a significant announcement and pretty much rules out light particle dark matter. The situation is then more complicated (and still very interesting)!

I sent the link down the wormhole, hopefully Art recognizes the potential significance of this!

[onan]

I mentioned this in the Tobias McGriff thread, but it got buried fairly quickly and I think it's important enough to mention on it's own.

This is news about the dark matter detector experiment, LUX, that has been collecting data in South Dakota for a while now:
http://sanfordlab.org/news/press_release/event-announce-first-physics-results-sanford-lab
They are holding a press conference on Oct 30 to announce their first findings. This has the potential to be as huge an announcement as the Higgs boson if a light dark matter particle has been found. If it is a non-detection then it is also a significant announcement and pretty much rules out light particle dark matter. The situation is then more complicated (and still very interesting)!

I sent the link down the wormhole, hopefully Art recognizes the potential significance of this!

I will be paying attention.

[ksm32]

I really like this, physics is like an onion with all it's layers, but it doesn't hurt your eyes.

[eddie dean]

Very interesting.
Thanks for the post Agent O

[Mind Flayer Monk]

It is a research facility deep in the earth, news from it is perfect for DM!

[Agent : Orange]

http://phys.org/news/2013-10-gold-scientists-dark.html

[ItsOver]

It is a research facility deep in the earth, news from it is perfect for DM!

The complete opposite of Dave's St. Louis spider hole, somewhere, deep below below the Earth. 

[area51drone]

I already replied in the other thread where this was first mentioned, and I'll paste that below, but I certainly will be watching this too...

I put my vote in that Dark Matter is not "real."   I think the electric universe theory makes more sense.   I don't understand why it isn't getting much traction because it's better than explaining physical problems away with some unknown hogwash and unknown constants.  I wish Art would do another show on it.

[Agent : Orange]

I already replied in the other thread where this was first mentioned, and I'll paste that below, but I certainly will be watching this too...

I put my vote in that Dark Matter is not "real."   I think the electric universe theory makes more sense.   I don't understand why it isn't getting much traction because it's better than explaining physical problems away with some unknown hogwash and unknown constants.  I wish Art would do another show on it.

I would *not* put my money on the electric universe if this turns out to be a non-detection of DM!

[area51drone]

LOL, I'd probably not put my money anywhere.   There is too much even the best of the scientists don't know.    One day a Grey alien will crash land here and answer all our questions.  One day...

[Agent : Orange]

If this announcement turns out to be nothing and fizzles, that would be disppointing. If it's the announcement of non-detection of the dark matter particle below 10 GeV, going against the recent CoGeNT and DAMA results then people will start looking to modified gravity schemes. Which all have their own problems.

I'm hoping it's a particle outside of the standard model, which might point to supersymmetry. That would be really interesting especially with the constraints on it from the Higgs mass.

The universe keeps getting more interesting

[Agent : Orange]

Low mass dark matter particles have been pretty thoroughly ruled out by LUX. The previous hints of this from other experiments must have been just background noise. Now the high mass regime needs to be checked.

The experiment ran for 85 days, which was reported on today. The next run will be 300 days which will be able to nail down the statistics at higher masses.

Curiouser and curiouser

[West of the Rockies]

South Dakota, the location of -- wait for it -- Warehouse 13!  Coinshidence?  I think not!

Actually, (all kidding aside), I look forward to hearing what they've got!

[Agent : Orange]

South Dakota, the location of -- wait for it -- Warehouse 13!  Coinshidence?  I think not!

Actually, (all kidding aside), I look forward to hearing what they've got!

Well, right now they have nothing - but that could change in the next few years.

http://phys.org/news/2013-10-results-lux-dark-detector.html

[area51drone]

This prof, Rick Gaitskell, is shitting his pants right now.  To me, this is no surprise.  Dark Matter just doesn't make any sense.   I am with those that believe there are elegant explanations to the universe.

[Agent : Orange]

This prof, Rick Gaitskell, is shitting his pants right now.  To me, this is no surprise.  Dark Matter just doesn't make any sense.   I am with those that believe there are elegant explanations to the universe.

Why?
Gaitskell has nothing to be nervous about. His team has placed the most stringent constraints on dark matter to date, which is a huge contribution.

Extra, undetectable matter (or an effect which mimics the presence of such mass) is essential to explain a number of effects, such as gravitational lensing, the evolution of structure in the universe and the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations. Without a significant amount of matter that can't be directly observed, the galaxies should not rotate the way they are observed and galaxy clusters would not contain enough mass to keep them gravitationally bound. There is just not enough matter we can see that can explain why the universe on the scales of galaxies behaves the way we observe. So if it is not dark matter which provides this effective mass there must be some other explanation that mimics what we have been thinking of as dark matter up to this point. The new explanation must give back at least as good fits as the DM hypothesis does to all phenomenon it's been applied to, including all of the stringent cosmological tests which DM stands up to.

I am in favor of an elegant alternative to DM but I have not yet seen any which perform as well as dark matter in explaining the sum of all the observations.

I will also point out that the LUX result does not rule out a dark matter particle, but constrains it so that it must be more massive than 10 GeV. That's not really a problem for the idea of DM but it does demolish the apparent results from the other collaborations that were searching for DM, such as CoGeNT, DAMA and CDMS. Those apparent detections were clearly just background events in view of the new LUX results.

[area51drone]

He's shitting his pants because a multi million dolllar experiment with no real results looks terrible politically.    I'm glad someone did it, but I guarantee some bureaucrat is going to look at this and say "why are we wasting money on this guy's ideas."   Scientists are not the only ones who decide where to spend grant money.

Look, I'm not saying I know more about this than the next guy.   I do have a math/engineering background, but the furthest physics I took in college were the 100 level calculus courses (gravity, waves, electricity, magnetism etc), and I have not read every dark matter article I could get my hands on.   I don't know how to explain it, but it doesn't feel like it's the right answer to me.   Any time I hear of something with a fudge factor or a constant (other than something that is derived constant such as the earth's mass)  bothers me.    Dark Matter is a fudge factor.   It's theorized because the currents models we are using are wrong.   They're good approximations, like Newtonian physics, but they're still missing something important, and it's very possible that the physics that are generally accepted do not apply well on a cosmological scale.   What the correct answer is I don't claim to know.    I could be wrong.  I hope the people who are much smarter than I am figure it all out.   

[Agent : Orange]

He's shitting his pants because a multi million dolllar experiment with no real results looks terrible politically.    I'm glad someone did it, but I guarantee some bureaucrat is going to look at this and say "why are we wasting money on this guy's ideas."   Scientists are not the only ones who decide where to spend grant money.

He's got funding for the next few years, and his is one of many direct detection experiments. I do agree that in a few years it will be more trouble to get the next generation of these things running if no new results are found by LUX in the high mass range. Even though they're important the granting agencies will probably not generally understand the importance of null results.

Look, I'm not saying I know more about this than the next guy.   I do have a math/engineering background, but the furthest physics I took in college were the 100 level calculus courses (gravity, waves, electricity, magnetism etc), and I have not read every dark matter article I could get my hands on.   I don't know how to explain it, but it doesn't feel like it's the right answer to me.   Any time I hear of something with a fudge factor or a constant (other than something that is derived constant such as the earth's mass)  bothers me.    Dark Matter is a fudge factor.   It's theorized because the currents models we are using are wrong.   They're good approximations, like Newtonian physics, but they're still missing something important, and it's very possible that the physics that are generally accepted do not apply well on a cosmological scale.   What the correct answer is I don't claim to know.    I could be wrong.  I hope the people who are much smarter than I am figure it all out.   

Well, when it comes to what you've written here, I do agree with the spirit of what you say.

DM was proposed entirely because we don't see enough mass where there should be mass according to our understanding of nature. So we say it is there but we don't see any light from it, ie it is dark. We also know from observation that not more than 20% of the mass deficit can be made from burned out stars. So what is the rest? If it's made of particles then it may be detectable (ie with an apparatus like LUX). If not there will never be a detection.

As you say there will also not be a detection if the problem is with our understanding of the laws of nature. If LUX does not see anything in the next stage (by 2015) then the interest will shift in this direction and the new paradigm will be in studying modified gravity models. The problem with these is that general relativity is so good at describing the world we measure there is not yet any shred of evidence that stands against it, so the way in which to modify it to account for dark matter is not clear. By tweaking something over here, you lose something over there. And models with DM are very good at explaining galaxy scale phenomenon (gravitational lensing) to cosmological scale stuff. So how do you get all of that from modifying gravity? That's the real challenge.

So I can see where you're coming from and I agree that may be one way out - it's not that we need to add unobservable mass, it's that our fundamentals are wrong.

[area51drone]

Yes, I fully understand why they want dark matter to be real, and I understand why its necessary to try to figure if it is real, it just doesn't seem right to me, but I think you understand that by now.

Have you seen some of the work on the electric universe theory where they talk about galaxies that are moving by each other yet the standard scientific theories state that one is vastly further from the other because of the redshift?   I can't remember if the guy who was explaining it had a theory as to what was creating the redshift, but his argument was pretty convincing that redshift is not necessarily what we think it is.   One white crow, right RCH?     We barely understand the true nature of light at this point.  Especially at the quantum scale.  They're just recently finding ways to slow it down and or stop it.   I would not be surprised if they start finding ways to bend it using magnetism and electricity, if they haven't already.  Once you start going down the road where gravity isn't the only thing to affect radio waves, then it's a whole new ball game.  (I think.... LOL)    It's easy for me to be an armchair skeptic, since I know so little on this topic.

[Agent : Orange]

Yes, I fully understand why they want dark matter to be real, and I understand why its necessary to try to figure if it is real, it just doesn't seem right to me, but I think you understand that by now.

It may very well be that DM is not the right explanation and that the fundamentals of the universe need to be modified to explain it. I just don't know of any theories that do as good a job as DM at explaining all the observations.

Have you seen some of the work on the electric universe theory where they talk about galaxies that are moving by each other yet the standard scientific theories state that one is vastly further from the other because of the redshift?   I can't remember if the guy who was explaining it had a theory as to what was creating the redshift, but his argument was pretty convincing that redshift is not necessarily what we think it is.   One white crow, right RCH?     We barely understand the true nature of light at this point.  Especially at the quantum scale.  They're just recently finding ways to slow it down and or stop it.   I would not be surprised if they start finding ways to bend it using magnetism and electricity, if they haven't already.  Once you start going down the road where gravity isn't the only thing to affect radio waves, then it's a whole new ball game.  (I think.... LOL)    It's easy for me to be an armchair skeptic, since I know so little on this topic.

A lot of the electric universe stuff pushes the envelope of credibility much further than DM does, and a lot of the claims made by promoters of the EU make much less sense than DM. The wave nature of light was understood with Maxwell's laws in the 1800s, and the electroweak theory from the 60s describes the interactions of light in the quantum picture. The redshift of distant objects is well understood in terms of the relativistic doppler shift. The nature of light, especially at the quantum scale, is well understood. There are new discoveries being made in materials science and the production of condensates which can slow light, but to claim that it is not understood is a severe misrepresentation. Large scale birkeland currents are not observed, though the EU predicts them.

Just saying that there are a lot more problems with the EU than you might suspect. Replacing DM with this explanation makes more assumptions and is more speculative than DM in the first place.  As I said previously I'm open to a new explanation of DM by modifying physical laws. But it won't be through the EU, which has been shown to make bad predictions on many scales.

[area51drone]

Hmmm...   you're saying we *fully* understand the nature of light?   Maybe I haven't read enough, but I don't think we do?  Just because people say redshift is accurate doesn't mean that it is, IMO.   No one has ever been able to see if it is really gazillions of miles from here to another galaxy and that that galaxy is moving toward or away from us.   There's no way to test the models on a cosmological scale.   When you find the one white crow that defies the redshift theory, then what do you say?

From my understanding of what physicists know of light, we can know the probability of light moving from point A to point B in a straight line, but in actuality, it's possible that light can travel in every direction before it actually hits B.  If we can't even know what direction light is truly taking, then how can we understand it?   Do we know exactly why and how photons are absorbed and released in different directions by atoms?  I'm asking out of lack of knowledge here, clearly you know this stuff far better than I do, so I'm curious.   Do we even know why there is a wave-particle duality?  Do we even know what mass really is?   I mean, we can see how particles interact, but WTF are they?  There are shitloads of particles.

Yes, materials science is what is slowing light and I think I saw that they were stopping light, but what is in a material?  Energy/mass/who knows what else that we don't completely understand, right?  What's to say that there isn't some other force or forces on a cosmological scale that is affecting light beyond gravity?

I'm not saying the EU theory is correct.  I don't even understand most (probably all!) of it.  But if what I saw was correct, then there are big problems with redshift at a minimum, which throws everything into question, IMO.

[Agent : Orange]

Hmmm...   you're saying we *fully* understand the nature of light?   Maybe I haven't read enough, but I don't think we do?  Just because people say redshift is accurate doesn't mean that it is, IMO.   No one has ever been able to see if it is really gazillions of miles from here to another galaxy and that that galaxy is moving toward or away from us.   There's no way to test the models on a cosmological scale.   When you find the one white crow that defies the redshift theory, then what do you say?

I'm only going to be able to respond to part of this now. I have to get out the door to start my day.

Classically, the behavior of light is described by Maxwell's equations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations), which describes all electricity and magnetism. The quantum counterpart of these laws are quantum electrodynamics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics). Along with Relativity this is one of the most tested theories in the history of science. There are questions of the mathematics that are involved, and by no means is everyone satisfied with them, but their success cannot be denied.

Redshift is a consequence of the doppler shift. Without it, no radar device would work. It is not a point of contention in modern physics. The doppler shift of distant objects is measured by comparing the spectral lines of a known substance in the lab (say Hydrogen) with the spectral lines observed from a distant object, which are shifted due to the relative speed of the object. This shift is the red/blue shift, which gives the speed of the object. The doppler effect has been observed for objects both outside the galaxy and has been used to measure the speed of objects within the galaxy as well. In which case the redshift and other distance measures agree with one another. On cosmological scales, redshift occurs because the universe is expanding and the expansion stretches the wavelength of the light rays that are coming to us. The distance-redshift relationship was well-established in the 30s by Edwin Hubble and forced Einstein to abandon his notion of a static universe. I can understand skepticism of the methods used to measure redshift, but the nature of the shift is pretty well nailed down. There has been no white crow found that provides evidence against, so there's not much I can say about it.

[area51drone]

I am familiar with what redshift is and how it works.   I understand there are models that have been proven from our local standpoint, and that radio waves are understood to the extent which we can and have tested them.   I'm not arguing maxwell or einstein, but just as Newtonian physics broke down, there's no reason to suggest that what is currently accepted doesn't break down at extremes either.   Black holes were thought to be relatively well understood until Hawking came out with his radiation theory, as a more (somewhat) modern example of not knowing about the extremes, correct?

Trying to dig up what I saw here...

http://electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm

To me, the couple of examples here represent the redshift problem.   I think the video I watched on the subject had a couple different examples, but I can't remember.    Also, just quickly looking through these electric universe arguments, I recall being struck by the temperature argument, what are your thoughts on this?

(see http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/BB-top-30.asp )

[area51drone]

Agent.. now dark matter and Art Bell's Dark Matter have something in common.. they both don't exist.

[Agent : Orange]

Haha! I was just thinking about how LUX was prophetic...

I'll have to get back to you about your links. There's other stuff afoot!

[area51drone]

Agent, I haven't finished watching this "overview" of Dark Matter yet, but their basic explanation in the first 10 minutes of why dark matter must exist just makes me want to puke.   Sure, on the surface it seems like what they're saying is true, but they really don't go into the depth necessary to show any other theories (if there are any) and why dark matter is a better explanation.   There is one part in the show where they even talk about axions that were made up to explain a problem with another theory - that cracked me up.    Scientists shouldn't be making anything up just to prove their theories.   Also, they have this lame guy spinning a ball around his head, claiming that that's how dark matter holds galaxies together, man that was an awful example.   

I think what is more interesting after watching just the first part, is that they're basing their argument for the existence of dark matter in the arcs of the spiral galaxy arms, and that means all of the stars are travelling at the same speed, rather than the ones on the outer parts of the arms moving at a different rate.   Also they talk about gravitational lensing - which I think you mentioned prior.

With regards to the arcs on the arms, I don't fully understand how that could show how quickly they're moving as a fact.  Just because their model might predict a certain curvature of a spiral galaxy doesn't mean their model is correctly predicting the gravitational effects on a galaxy sized scale.   It also does not account for galaxies that are not spiral in nature, the information might be out there, I don't know.

In terms of the gravitational lensing, how do they know that  there are not enormous black holes floating randomly out in space by themselves that have swallowed up, say an entire galaxy or two, that are causing the lensing effects?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g9gQW61rLqQ#t=602

[onan]

Reading you two guys is some of the best fun I have had on this forum. Thanks

[Foodlion]

Reading you two guys is some of the best fun I have had on this forum. Thanks

Touche!

[Agent : Orange]

Urk, once again I'm just running out the door, I will try to get back to you later tonight. As my replies get longer and more in depth the time to write them also becomes longer, and it's becoming more than I can generally spare in one block. Plus, my time online has been mainly spent rubbernecking at the car accident the Art Bell Quits thread has become so I'm sure you can understand.

There are many interesting things to say about the things you've mentioned and I think that some of these things are more reasonable than you might think.

[area51drone]

Plus, my time online has been mainly spent rubbernecking at the car accident the Art Bell Quits thread has become so I'm sure you can understand.

Guilty here too.  I wasted so much time on that thread that I try not to look at it anymore.   Falkie dragged me in with the video evidence of the money order I sent him, but that was the last time I think I looked at that thread.    Looking forward to your responses though.  I have a zillion questions, dark matter or otherwise that I'd like to run by you....  and I do realize that it's easy to ask a question and takes time and energy to respond, so I along with onan and Foodlion appreciate your being involved in the conversation.