Dec. 26 — The funny thing about discoveries is that they often produce new mysteries, too. This year was no exception, as many remarkable space science findings generated puzzling problems for astronomers to look into.
Posted on 12/28/2002 4:46:38 AM PST by The Raven
Dec. 26 — The funny thing about discoveries is that they often produce new mysteries, too. This year was no exception, as many remarkable space science findings generated puzzling problems for astronomers to look into.
IN SOME CASES the puzzles are brand new. Other times a discovery merely confirms how little we knew. Either way, there’s plenty for astronomers to do.
Here then are the Top 10 Space Mysteries that astronomers will be pondering in the New Year and beyond:
1. Dark energy:
Nobody knows what the heck it is, but it is officially repulsive. And man, is it powerful! More powerful than gravity, even.
While gravity holds things together at the local level (and by local I mean within galaxies and even between them, forming galactic clusters), some unknown force is working behind the scenes and across the universe to pull everything apart. Scientists have only come to realize this dark force in recent years, by discovering that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing pace.
Having no clue what it is, they’ve labeled it dark energy.
The past year was a good one for proving that dark energy is at work. Calculations have been refined: The repulsive force dominates the universe, comprising 65 percent of its makeup.
(Similarly unseen and exotic dark matter makes up 30 percent of the universe, leaving us with a universe that contains just 5 percent normal matter and energy.)
Two curious ideas related to the accelerating expansion, both of which emerged in 2002: All galaxies are destined to become frozen in time or, perhaps, time never ends.
2. Water on Mars?
Mars simply will not give up its most coveted secrets. Ultimately, the big quest for NASA and all the Mars scientists is about whether there is life, but before that’s answered, there is the question of liquid water, a requirement for life as we know it.
Despite two major discoveries of water ice in 2002, nobody can figure out yet whether any of it might exist in the melted state.
Meanwhile, clues mount. In one compelling study released in December, dark streaks on the surface were attributed to salty, running water. But many experts remain unconvinced. NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft is circling Mars as you read this, hunting for more evidence.
3. The Milky Way’s middle:
Something is eating at the black hole at the center of our galaxy. And whatever is bugging the gravity monster manifests as an utter lack of appetite.
In October, astronomers announced they’d watched a star zip around the black hole that anchors the Milky Way, all but proving the impossible-to-see object is actually there. Meanwhile, the region around the black hole is an active place, as the Chandra X-ray Observatory showed early this year.
However, the black hole is not devouring enough matter to generate the tremendous X-ray output seen with other supermassive black holes. Scientists are so far unable to fully explain the stark contrasts they’ve seen, this tremendous diversity in black hole behavior.
Hints emerged this year, however. A study in January suggested mergers between two black holes might serve as an on-off switch for the activity. Then observations announced in November showed two black holes involved in a pending merger. Astronomers now need to tie all this to a firm explanation of the differences between the mediocre output of our black hole and the brilliant illumination surrounding others in many distant galaxies.
4. The origin of life:
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you try to run from a monster and you’re legs go round and round but you don’t get anywhere? The quest to understand the origin of life isn’t much different.
In fairness, it must be pointed out that there is little data to work with. Earth does not retain a record of what went on billions of years ago, when life got going.
Meanwhile, there is no shortage of wild ideas. Scientists now generally agree that life could survive a trip to Earth from Mars, in the belly of a rock kicked up by an asteroid impact. A study in November revealed why a Mars rock lands on Earth once a month, on average. A wilder idea, that bugs simply rain down from space inside comet dust, gained support from a second scientist in December, who claimed to have found some of these space bugs in Earth’s atmosphere.
Most mainstream scientists, however, figure there’s a good chance that life on Earth was cooked up in a soup of pre-biotic chemicals right here on the planet. The ingredients — water and organic chemicals — may well have come from space, but Earth likely acted as the incubator.
The answer (and a lot of well-funded researchers are asking the question and debating the possibilities) bears on how likely it is that life might have begun elsewhere, on Mars or around another star.
More at the link
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
That's an easy one. The democRAT party.
They did. His name is Robert Reich.
I would say that we actually do, though not everyone is on board at this moment. There has been a lot of really good grounding work in this area over the last few years. The real problem is that even fairly smart people can get really stupid when they approach this particular problem (e.g. Penrose), so it is almost like arguing religion for many people. Fortunately, there is a small contingent of individuals who don't go brain-dead when working on things like this and can keep things strict and rigorous without waxing eloquent about vague abstractions in the utter absence of evidence.
We can learn many interesting things from this, but it isn't an answer in the big scheme of things. At best it gives us the proper perspective on the nature of the computational mechanics of the universe.
Who's to say that a Creator doesn't use randomness.
I would have used the word, God....but that's a rather simplistic, man made term for something that is well beyond our ability to comprehend.
I did a quick Google search. This work seems to be mentioned only by creationist-oriented websites. No peer-reviewed journal seems to have heard of the authors. So I'm skeptical.
It's even worse. Lambert Dolphin is the the primary funder of Barry Setterfield and his C-decay model, which is the advancement of the Montgomery & Dolphin paper. The C-decay model is a primary exhibit of what happens when people don't pay attention to significant figures in their work. Garbage in, Garbage out.
I figured. If the speed of light were discovered to be variable, I'm certain I would have come across it in a mainstreem publication. Actually, it would be headlines, worldwide. Nobel Prize stuff, not hidden away in cultish websites.
There isn't observed quantization of redshift, no matter how much Tifft can massage the data. Why hasn't he released a new catalog in the past 11 years?
12. If quasars are supposed to be unbelievably bright objects out on the edge of the universe, how to explain their unmistakable association with relatively close, low redshift galaxies?
So unmistakable that none of the associations have ever definitively been shown to actually be anything more than line of sight projections. Not only that, the number density of "associations" aren't indistinguishable from the number density of "associations" that are generated from an isotropic and homogeneous population of quasars and galaxies. Strange, eh?
13. Given 11 and 12, how to explain their distribution by quantization values and non-random alignment across these galaxies?
Since 11 and 12 are not given, why bother with the rest?
15. Based on 11-14, why are such findings regularly suppressed by reviewers for major astronomy journals and by their editors?
Maybe because the findings are not good science, and never will be good science? Having worked within the current paradigm (MA, astronomy), I can say that the BB interpretation has a lot going for it. I always wonder how Arp etal would interpret the findings of the Gunn-Peterson trough, a prediction of the BB paradigm that was found to exist in a distant quasar recently. Unfortunately, they appear to be silent on the issue...
These points are detailed in a book titled "Seeing Red" by Halton Arp. IMHO, Arp makes some very good points about the distribution of quasars around active galaxies, and the quantization of red shifts. On the other hand he devotes a significant portion (perhaps justified) of the book bitterly complaining about the treatment he has received from the scientific mainstream.
You can find the book here: Seeing Red
It's also a mystery that could kill the human species eventually, if they don't kill each other first.
Earth has very limited resources as our populations steadily increase. Eventually, Earth will be completely overcrowded and it's resources depleted. If the human race doesn't start cracking some of those mysteries, the human race will be doomed within the next thousand years or so.
If our state of knowledge of the tools available to science [math, mainly] is viewed as the skin of a balloon, a bumpy balloon with us inside, then imagine we can see the "mechanics" of the universe only from where we look through the skin of the balloon. Then through modern math research we are steadily pushing the skin of the balloon outward but only at certain points. Eventually, --here is an article of faith,-- part of the skin of the balloon will be pushed out far enough that we can see the "mechanics" in a new and more useful way. The view still won't be correct, it can never be, but it will at least answer our trivial questions of today while posing new questions we lack the math to ask today.
A couple of generations of cannibalism would go a long way to reducing the pressure.
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