The Universal fudge factors
Posted on 07/19/2016 12:47:11 PM PDT by MtnClimber
For nearly 20 years, physicists have known that the expansion of the universe has begun to speed up. This bizarre acceleration could arise because some form of mysterious dark energy is stretching space. Or, it could signal that physicists' understanding of gravity isn't quite right. But a new study puts the screws on a broad class of alternative theories of gravity, making it that much harder to explain away dark energy.
The study is also path setting because it exploits an effect called weak lensing in which the gravity from closer galaxies distorts the images of more distant ones. "That's the future," says Bob Nichol, an observational cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the study. "If you look to the next decade, there's going to be an explosion of this data."
Physicists had expected the universe's expansion to be slowing as the galaxies pull on one another with their gravity. But in 1998, two independent teams traced the history of the universe's expansion by studying type 1a supernovae: stellar explosions whose colors tell when they went off and whose brightness reveals how far away they are now. Both teams found that the expansion is speeding up, suggesting that dark energy is blowing up the universe like a balloon.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
There is so much we don’t know.
Fixed it.
Over exposure to dark energy creates goths.
Dr Kaku says whenever we use words like dark matter dark energy or event horizon, it mean we’re clueless. We can make the math work by adding energy or matter into a formula but we haven’t really detected anything, only an effect.
The Universal fudge factors
I ment singularity, not event horizon.
“The analysis is tricky, however.”
One sentence that I did understand.
” but we haven’t really detected anything, only an effect”
We really never detect anything. We only detect the effects.
Agreed. Dark energy just seems so counter-intuitive, I wonder if we just have the shape of the universe wrong.
Locality sucks. ;)
Brilliant! LOL!
That’s what I said? I
Spaghettification anyone?
I’ll say it again. The entire understanding of our unverse relies on 1) The absolute “fact” that gravity is constant relative to mass throughout the universe and 2) That the that the speed of light is constant regardless of photon/light producing masses speed and trajectory relative to our perspective (and gravity).
What a relief! I really need to believe there is some unseen, unknowable (except by inference) force out there that is really driving things.
Entropy Rules!
Dark Energy Matters.
An unproven hypothesis. Twenty years before that, they KNEW that the universe was collapsing.
We cannot see to the 'end' of the Universe, and do not even know if there is an 'end'. We cannot detect that which we have not , and never will see.
You see, they are trying to account for acceleration, and basic mechanics teaches us that energy doesn't cause acceleration. There are only two components in an equation for acceleration: mass and force. The mass is accounted for; it is the mass of all the objects in the universe. So what we really need to account for is the missing force, not missing energy.
Luckily, the force we are looking for is already accounted for in the equations for the theory of general relativity, it was just misleadingly labelled by Einstein as the "cosmological constant". However, if you look at the equation for this "constant", you will see that it is not a constant at all, but the equation for a force. This is a fifth fundamental force of nature, hiding in plain sight for over a century, but since scientists have been myopically focused on unifying the four fundamental forces we had already discovered, they have no interest in admitting yet another fundamental force.
One interesting fact about this fifth force, though, is that unlike electromagnetism or gravity, the magnitude of this force increases with distance! That property alone is enough to demonstrate that it is truly a separate force, distinct from the other forces we have already studied.
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