Astronomers Spot Two Massive Galaxies Surrounded by a Halo of Dark Matter at the Dawn of Time

www.popularmechanics.com ^ | 12/06/2017 | By John Wenz

[Sgt_Schultze]

This doesn’t make any sense. If both galaxies date to the beginning of time, ostensibly to near the point of the “Big Bang,” they should both be moving AWAY from each other, since all matter would have scattered opposite the point of the explosion. There would have been no repelling force causing one galaxy to reverse course.

[zeugma]

I’ve come to believe that modern cosmologists have their heads up their asses almost as much as those pushing “string theory” hand-waving.

[zeugma]

The existence of Dark Matter was actually discovered by Fritz Zwicky back in 1933, when he noticed gravitational interactions between galaxy clusters that their visible mass couldn’t account for. He was an underrated scientist then and today.

He didn't actually 'observe' dark matter. What he did, was notice that his equations weren't balancing out the way he thought they should. So, rather than say "perhaps we need to figure out what's wrong with our current understanding of physics and cosmology, he invented something to balance things out again. I suspect we actually know less about the way things really work on both the large and small scales than we think we do.

[zeugma]

Was there a Piper at the gates of dawn?

he was playing on the Dark Side of the Moon.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Then I should run over tons of it with my lawnmower

Yes, but in very small amounts. As I tried to indicate, it only exists in large amounts over a very vast volume of space.
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So it exerts gravitational force on “ordinary”matter but isn’t affected by its own gravitational force. Do I have that right?

No. It doesn't clump because it has no electromagnetic or strong nuclear force, which is what causes matter to clump due to friction. Things like the earth are held together by gravity, but only because friction slows atoms down as they clumps together, rather than flying past one another.
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Or your premise is wrong

That has always been a possibility to cosmologists. Either Dark Matter exists or we don't completely understand the full nature of gravity over great distances. But one thing is certain: visible matter in the universe doesn't account for the gravitational interactions that we are observing.

[Telepathic Intruder]

That is a possibility. When cosmologists use “dark” to describe dark matter or dark energy, it doesn’t just mean we can’t see it. It also means we don’t know what it is. It could be that there is something missing in our own physics, or there is something actually out there that we can’t see. Either way, it is “dark”.

[Lurker]

“but only because friction slows atoms down as they clumps together, rather than flying past one another.“

You sure about that?

L

[Telepathic Intruder]

Yes. It is the electromagnetic force which causes atoms to interact in the first place. When you slam two bricks together, they don't just pass through one another because the atoms are repelling one another through the electrostatic force of electrons. Things like neutrinos have no electromagnetic force, so they're not affected. You have trillions of them flying through your body every second and you don't even notice them. Are they real? Yes, we can detect them only through the weak nuclear force in neutrino detectors.

By the way, I'm leaving out the Pauli Exclusion Principal because it just adds another layer of complexity. But that's the reason why matter also resists clumping instead of everything collapsing into a black hole.

[onedoug]

If inflation is correct, there would have been but an instant in the creation event before the physical laws of the universe were established, including an upper limit for the velocity of light, which prior to that "era" was virtually limitless. Thus the constraints on how far back in time - also thus created - we can see.

[TigersEye]

I’m afraid I’m not following that. If light had traveled even faster then than its current speed that would make it even more unlikely that it would still be arriving at our position now rather than having passed by billions of years ago.

[Telepathic Intruder]

The Big Bang didn’t just occur at one point in space. It occurred everywhere, because the Big Bang is creating space as the universe expands. Furthermore, the farther you look into space, the farther back in time you’re also looking, because light from that space takes time to reach us. When you look at the Andromeda galaxy which is 2.5 million light years away, you’re looking 2.5 million years in the past. When we look 13 billion light years away, we’re seeing 13 billion years into the past, when the universe was only 1 billion years old.

[Boogieman]

“But as it’s gravitationally interactive, one would expect to see huge globules of the stuff crashing into visible bodies throughout the cosmos. Yet no such interactions are seen.”

Obviously, it must be a nonluminiferous aether so it can project a gravitational field but can’t physically interact with regular matter!

/sarc

[Boogieman]

“Modern cosmologists invented dark matter to save the Standard Model, according to which, the universe should have flown apart by now.”

I think that was actually “dark energy”, which replaced the previous fudge factor known as “the cosmological constant”. Dark matter is the other fudge factor they invented to explain why galactic motion doesn’t appear to follow the standard laws of motion and gravitation.

[onedoug]

I ain’t no cosmologist. Though I can still see that as “everything is at the center of the universe”, as they say, that there are “epochs” which we see into gradually as our powers of magnification become greater.

When we look back 12 billion light-years, I wonder in absolute terms if what we’re seeing is even still extant.

And that it does seem all the more mysterious is part of how God designed it. And it makes me crazy as well.

[DannyTN]

what does it mean to talk about the universe expanding if the big bang occurred everywhere? How big was the universe when the big bang occurred?

If the Universe was 9 billion light years wide at the big bang and earth popped into existence 3 billion years ago at one edge Then may be we could be seeing light from 13.0 billion years ago that was generated at the far edge of the 9 billion light year wide big bang.

Q Continuum still seems more likely

[Telepathic Intruder]

The Big Bang is widely misunderstood in part because the phrase "Big Bang" was coined by someone who opposed the theory. It wasn't an explosion of matter, it is an ongoing expansion of space. Galaxies aren't moving apart because they are speeding through space away from each other, instead space is expanding between them. A common analogy that is used is to imagine that galaxies are dots on the surface of an expanding balloon. As the balloon expands, the dots get farther apart. The dots themselves are not moving across the surface. Now add one more dimension and that's pretty much what is happening.

There's quite a bit of hard evidence that the universe is in fact expanding. That tells us the universe was smaller in the past, and must have had a beginning, when it started out very small. There's hard evidence for that too.

"How big was the universe when the big bang occurred?"

According to the theory, the entire visible universe was once smaller than an atom. But we don't know how big the actual universe is beyond the visible horizon, so there's no way of telling.

[Windflier]

the other fudge factor

I wonder how many they're up to now? Dozens? Hundreds?

The amount of patching and band-aids on the Standard Model has gotten pretty ridiculous.

[DannyTN]

But again, if the univese was once small (whatever that means), then the inflation + the speed of the galaxy through space must be near the speed of light, for earth to be in the position to receive light from 13.0 billion years ago.

[Windflier]

There is a massive black hole at the center of every galaxy!

Modern cosmologists have stated a great many things as fact, which are merely inferred through mathematics, not actual observation.

The Standard Model failed to explain why galaxies hang together, so the mathemagicians were forced to invent a great attractor (black holes) to patch the theory.

When they came up with Dark Matter, they lost even lay people like me.

[Telepathic Intruder]

You're still going off a misconception. Again, the galaxy is not speeding through space. Space is expanding between the galaxies, increasing their distance from one another. And the Big Bang didn't occur at any particular point in space; it occurred everywhere in space because space is a result of the Big Bang. The light from near the beginning of the universe is still in every part of space, but having come from a certain distance depending on how long ago it occurred. For something 13 billion years ago, it occurred 13 billion light years away from our perspective, taking into account the expansion rate of space. But the light from then is very dim now and is difficult to detect, having gone 13 billion light years distance.

By the way, you do know that a light year is how far light travels in one year?