Dark Matter: Hidden Mass Confounds Science, Inspires Revolutionary Theories

I know I'm being a pest with this and I apologize.

But the relatively new discovery of the annihilation fountain and clouds seems to be - from my layman's eyes - a possible indirect clue for analyzing black hole, dark matter, or whatever is going on at the center of the Milky Way.

I also apologize for the bad link. This is the correct link:

OSSE Annihilation Fountain Images

Wow. I read through all this, and absorbed as much as I could.

Reminds me of when I used to get into debates on the Bible with other people. One day I decided it might be better to read it from beginning to end if I was going to continue trying to think I knew what it was about.

Before I read it, I thought I knew a lot about the Bible. After reading the entire thing, cover to cover, I realized I knew absolutely nothing!

So Now I know how Einstein felt..when he said something like "The more I know, the more I realize how little I know".

My memory fails me, I have a distinct memory of reading an artice not to long ago, Thought it was NYTimes but did a search without results. The thesis was something to the effect that the expanding universe was steadily decreasing the overall electrical potential of the universe. This was having the effect of changing the interior distance of electron shells in all matter. The result, it was claimed, would skew the spectra we were observing and alter the frequencies in a way that is now explained solely by redshift. Presumably an electron falling down a shell -releasing a photon of fixed frequency-would issue a photon of uniformly shifted frequency if all those shells were altered on a macro level.

I won't even go so far as to say "it's just crazy enough to be true" but just want to know if anyone else recalls the article. (If not I solemnly swear I will never read another Science Fiction novel based on Velikovsky's work again)

Seems to me though that if it is true it might partly explain galaxies spinning too slowly, (since we measure their rotation by redshift)

(I swear I am not stalking you) Our Galaxy is "100 million light years side to side" I learned it from Monte Python. that means of course that for galaxies of our size seen edge on (the ones we can most accurately measure speed on) many of the stars we can see are 50,000,000 light years closer to us than the ones we can see at the edges. I don't know how much relativistic stretch we expect to see within that distance, but regardless, the very redshift we use to measure recession and blueshift to measure approach, thereby determining the rotational speed is a relatavistic effect, is it not?

I don't think you'll see relativistic speed effects in the galaxy rotation. However, if you can resolve the different parts optically you will see doppler shifts in the spectra of the stars between the side rotating toward us and the one rotating away. The bright mass at the center will match the average redshift--which comes from its overall distance from us--of the entire galaxy.

Nope, but thanks fot the link, looks like a good site to keep tabs on. No mine seemed to be positing that some weakening process (I thought it was an electrical or magnetic field) might alter the frequencies at which light is emitted from bodies over time. A g type star emits a recognizable spectral line. The red shifting of further/older g type stars would in this model at least partly be from an actual lower energy emission besause the electron shells were tighter around the nucleus.

The implication was this weakening was caused by expansion so accepted reasons for red shifting would still be true, if less so than thought.

Previous caveats still apply.

That sounds more like the hit Physics news story about the Fine Structure Constant:

Physics News 410, January 13, 1999

IS THE FINE STRUCTURE CONSTANT CHANGING? The inherent strength of the electromagnetic force is characterized by a parameter called the fine structure constant (denoted by the Greek letter alpha), defined as the charge of the electron squared divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light. The size of alpha determines how well atoms hold together and what types of light atoms will emit when heated up. And just as the elastic band keeping a swimsuit snug will gradually relax with time, so it is reasonable to ask whether an atoms' elasticity (or alpha) might also vary with time, an idea broached by Paul Dirac in 1937. A group of scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia (John Webb, jkw@edwin.phys.unsw.edu.au) test this proposition by sampling ancient light emitted by ancient atoms, and comparing them to modern light from modern atoms. In particular they looked at the relative spacing of doublets of absorption lines in the spectra of several types of atoms in distant gas clouds lying in front of still more distant quasars. The spacings, not easy to tease out from the faint spectra, are proportional to alpha squared. After taking into account Doppler effects owing to the expansion of the universe, the Australian scientists find that there is a consistent change in alpha with increasing redshift (z), especially above a z of one. Owing to the caution needed in claiming a "measurement" of alpha change, the researchers prefer to think of their result as constituting a new upper limit on the fractional alpha change for z>1 of about 2 parts in 10,000. (Webb et al., Physical Review Letters, tent. 25 Jan. 1999.)

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