Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003

Space.com ^ | dec 26, 2002 | Robert Roy Britt

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Early in this century, astronomers noticed that distant galaxies had peculiar light spectra. Specifically, the galaxies' light spectra were shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. In 1929 astronomer Edwin Hubble compared the galaxies' spectra with their distances, calculated using different methods, and showed that the amount of "red shift" was proportional to distance. Hubble and others realized that the most obvious explanation for the "red shift" was that the galaxies were receding from Earth and each other, and the farther the galaxy, the faster the recession.

If an astronomical object is moving away from the Earth, its light will be shifted to longer (red) wavelengths.

If the same object were moving towards the Earth, its light would be shifted to shorter (blue) wavelengths.

[Joe Hadenuf]

LOL!

I do believe that if man ever plans on doing any real intersteller space travel, to actually colonize, or explore other planets in this solar system, other solar systems in this galaxy and beyond, they will be doing it without rocket type spacecraft. They are just to dang slow, even at light speed.

What type of travel that will be, I haven't a clue.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Why a millenium? Limit to what?

[RightWhale]

Why a millenium?

Dunno. It's probably like for engineering projects that are designed for a lifetime of 20 years. That is essentially the same as forever when a present worth analysis is done. 1000 years is another way of saying forever. Most people who survive to adulthood have about 50 years working life, maybe 100 years of life altogether, so anything beyond that would be essentially forever.

[Joe Hadenuf]

1000 years is another way of saying forever. Most people who survive to adulthood have about 50 years working life, maybe 100 years of life altogether, so anything beyond that would be essentially forever.

Actually, I was thinking in terms of the human species, and earth surviving as a planet in the next 1000 years or so, not an individuals life span. And I would guess if humans survive the next 1000 years on earth without killing each other first, they are going to have big problems with depleted resources, over population, and who knows what else, etc.

1000 years is a blink of an eye in astronomical, cosmological terms.

[RightWhale]

The world, or our involvement with the earth as a species will end in the year 2253 with a probability of 98% according to a statistical theory. 1000 years would be beyond forever according to that.

[donh]

BTW, I don't see any evidence that would point to how life could survive a fall to earth.

insect egg cases & pollens would float down. They float off by the tons every year.

[donh]

Sub-light speed is plenty fast enough to populate the
universe with humans within the time frame of a single
geological epoch. It's easy and practical, if you don't
try to send humans, or other impractical cargo to start
with.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Sometimes I think we are just about there. Or later than we think.

[RightWhale]

That's right. The entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across. It has probably been seeded and reseeded several times [10 assuming spores drift at 0.02% of the speed of light] in the past few billion years.

[ThinkPlease]

There has been observed quantization of quasar redshift for well over 15 years. That is, it has been recognized as such. Looking through older data reveals the same.

Care to present a reference?

Yes, they've definitively been shown to be more than (especially other than) line of sight projections. Not only are they near galaxies more often than could be predicted based on random distribution (which would have to be the case if the quasars were way out on the edge of the visible universe as they had been described, unless you'd like to posit something to explain their clustering around (relatively) nearby galaxies), but they are 1. found in association with particular types of galaxies, 2. are aligned across those galaxies, often in pairs and in pairs of pairs, and 3. the nearer the quasar to the galaxy, the higher the redshift. These repeated and different types of observations occurring again and again in concert defy chance association in any way that it is commonly used in astronomy.

So definitive that you can show me all of those examples. Great, thanks. I've seen Arp's claims, but he's never definitively shown that they are nothing more than simple projections.

Ha ha. Nice try, but no winner. If you divide the total number of cities over 1,000,000 in the U.S. by the total number of counties and then describe the yearly number of murders in those 1,000,000+ cities by the average distribution of the total population throughout the total number of counties, you'd end up saying that there was no association between city size and number of murders: they're all spread out equally. But this happened because of what you did by averaging the total number of murders in a small number of counties throughout all the counties of which most had no or few murders. This is a misuse of statistics.

Nice straw man. Your example is a blazing example of bad science. Please come up with another straw man to knock down. Let me put it in a way you can understand. Quasars don't cluster around galaxies. If Arp's hypothesis holds, then logically they should. They don't. That's the first of many problems with Arp's theories.

It's not merely the interpretations that are being suppressed, but the observations themselves, as well as the attempt to make more such observations, are being suppressed.

Not really. It's funny how much of Arp's work gets published. For someone who's work has been "suppressed", he has an awful lot of publications in ApJ and A&A.

Having obtained a Ph.D. in an experimental versus a relatively observational science such as astronomy, I know how much stock to put in current paradigms.* Compared to the biological sciences, the relative paucity in astronomy of experimental data (and the correspondingly greater power of contradictory data to undermine paradigms and careers) combined with the relative scarcity of researchers and instruments and research money goes a long way toward explaining the relatively great emphasis placed on "paradigms" in astronomy and the extraordinary lengths to which people will go--including their extremely tight control over the instruments necessary for doing the observation--toward protecting their turf from competing paradigms and the observational data that would support them.

Have you considered that bad science is a factor on the part of the people not getting time?

There has been observed more than one such interaction. The reaction by Big Bangers? Ignore it or ridicule it or just whistle by the graveyard.

I don't think so. Since there are no unambigouous results, it's pretty easy to ignore them, or bury them in the bad science graveyard.