Do We Live In A "Stop And Go" Universe?

spaceref.com ^ | 27 May 03 | staff

[AndrewC]

Sorry, not X-rated.

[RightWhale]

the cosmological red shift assumption?
The Red Shift is not an assumption.

The cosmological red shift assumption is indeed in question. The assumption is that the more distant the light source the faster it is receding from us. Could something else than mere velocity cause the observed shift in spectra? Also, this article throws a monkey wrench into the expansion of the universe model since it means the orderly distance measurements and therefore the timeline would be thrown off.

[AndrewC]

Want the serious stuff? Here is a link to the abstract and from there the paper itself. Better get it before someone starts charging for the knowledge.

Cosmological Results from High-z Supernovae

[RightWhale]

Yes, I have the paper. It's kind of lengthy, and that's just the list of co-authors.

[FreedomCalls]

the universe is speeding up, with galaxies zooming away from each other

Vishnu's breathing? Maybe he just inhaled.

Uh Oh -- maybe he's going to wake up.....

[WKB]

Anyone who drives is familiar with the frustration of being caught in "stop and go" traffic, a phenomenon found in urban areas all over the world

Rush Hour????

[AndrewC]

It's kind of lengthy,

Eh, 50 pages, but nice human interest portions e.g.

We began observing our 37 candidate objects at the Keck-II telescope on 1999 November 8. Our aim was to determine the nature of each object and to measure its redshift. Of these 37, two turned out to be active galactic nuclei at redshifts of 1.47 and 1.67; one was an M star and two were galaxies with H emission admitted because of mismatched R filters; five had disappeared, suggesting either that the discovery was well past maximum or the detection was spurious; four were judged to be Type II supernovae from spectra or blue color; two were too bright to be of interest for our purposes, I  21 mag in bright host galaxies, possibly nearby SN II, for which we did not spend time to get spectra; three were SN Ia with 0.3 < z < 0.7 which we chose not to follow; seven were faint candidates for which we did not have time to get spectra; and 11 were the candidate SN Ia which we chose to follow. These are shown in Figure 1.

[ladyinred]

I do not mind all of the ridicule I will get for saying that once I got past the headline of this article, I was lost! Does that mean I am speeding up, or slowing down?

[RightWhale]

This would create a sense of urgency. If the universe expands too quickly it could get away from us forever and we could be left with just the local galactic cluster somewhere down the line. Not a real hopeful situation.

[RightWhale]

No, but it good to see people come by to take a look at what scientists are up to. They're building our future, you know.

[The Shootist]

Red Shift, more correctly Doppler Shift, is an observable fact.

The article only demonstrates that we don't know everything.

Again I'll point to Occam's Razor. The simplist explanation is usually the correct one.

The further away we look, the longer the wavelengths. What causes wavelengths to lengthen? The Doppler Effect, a known, proven and testable phenomenon.

Anything else and you might as well believe in Warp Drive.

[gcruse]

Not to mention...

The fact that red shifts appear to be quantized has interesting implications for the study of the universe. This suggests that the red shift may be caused by something other than the expansion of the universe, at least in part. This could be a loss of energy of light rays as they travel, or a decrease in the speed of light through discrete levels. Maybe there is some other explanation.

[Hot Tabasco]

"Right now, the universe is speeding up

THAT explains why my 3 day memorial day weekend only resulted in a day and a half of work! I woke up this morning thinking it was only Sunday!

Time to get our Senators involved to fix this crisis.......

[Hot Tabasco]

I for one would be interested in knowing what makes a universe stop.

The walls of the box we are expanding in.......

[Hot Tabasco]

These place the following constraints on cosmological quantities: if the equation of state parameter of the dark energy is w=-1, then H0 t0 = 0.96+/-0.04, and O_l - 1.4 O_m = 0.35+/-0.14

Read your link but feel their interpretation of 0.35+/-0.14 would be more accurately represented by >.0034/-+3/.543 factored to .937HO/.332

But hey, what do I know, I'm only a rockette scientist....

[PatrickHenry]

If the universe expands too quickly it could get away from us forever ...

I blame Jimmy Carter. We didn't have these worries before he put us all on daylight savings time.

[MHGinTN]

I wonder, RW, could it be that dimension time 'echos' between future and past, kind of like a wave in a pan that rebounds off of the side and back across to the other side, back and forth?

[AndrewC]

I'm only a rockette scientist....

What a racket, rockette! Don't wreck it! But I don't reckon you will.
A. Raconteur

[tictoc]

For visionary scenarios that knock your socks off with their sense of wonder, it used to be that we had to buy paperbacks with lurid covers (and read them huddled under the blanket with only a flashlight for illumination while listening for the footfall of mistrustful parents).

Mythical giants such as Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson or Robert Heinlein wrote for Analog, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Astounding, publications whose role today has been usurped by "respectable" publications drily titled "Science" or "Nature".

For sheer mind-blowing sweep across the eons, it doesn't get any better than articles like the one above, or this one: The Big Rip: New Theory Ends Universe by Shredding Everything.

Who knew that the geeks in lab coats possessed a sly sense of humor to rival Fredric Brown's or William Tenn's?

If our species survives the next 19 billion years (and there are serious doubts about this, given our Sun's projected fate) here are some signs that scientists of the future will want to look for.

• A billion years before the end, all galaxies will have receded so far and so fast from our own as to be erased from the sky, as in no longer visible.
• When the Milky Way begins to fly apart, there are 60 million years left.
• Planets in our solar system will start to wing away from the Sun three months before the end of time.
• When Earth explodes, the end is momentarily near.

At this point, there is still a short interval before atoms and even their nuclei break apart. "There's about 30 minutes left," Caldwell said, "But it's not quality time."

Is it good or bad that the eggheads at institutes of advanced research are developing disturbing scenarios that are stranger than fiction? Neither; it just is. We live today in an era that the visionaries dreamed about. The future is now. And I like the way my tax shekels are being spent.