Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003

Dec. 26 — The funny thing about discoveries is that they often produce new mysteries, too. This year was no exception, as many remarkable space science findings generated puzzling problems for astronomers to look into.

IN SOME CASES the puzzles are brand new. Other times a discovery merely confirms how little we knew. Either way, there’s plenty for astronomers to do.

Here then are the Top 10 Space Mysteries that astronomers will be pondering in the New Year and beyond:

Nobody knows what the heck it is, but it is officially repulsive. And man, is it powerful! More powerful than gravity, even.

While gravity holds things together at the local level (and by local I mean within galaxies and even between them, forming galactic clusters), some unknown force is working behind the scenes and across the universe to pull everything apart. Scientists have only come to realize this dark force in recent years, by discovering that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing pace.

The past year was a good one for proving that dark energy is at work. Calculations have been refined: The repulsive force dominates the universe, comprising 65 percent of its makeup.

(Similarly unseen and exotic dark matter makes up 30 percent of the universe, leaving us with a universe that contains just 5 percent normal matter and energy.)

Two curious ideas related to the accelerating expansion, both of which emerged in 2002: All galaxies are destined to become frozen in time or, perhaps, time never ends.

Mars simply will not give up its most coveted secrets. Ultimately, the big quest for NASA and all the Mars scientists is about whether there is life, but before that’s answered, there is the question of liquid water, a requirement for life as we know it.

Despite two major discoveries of water ice in 2002, nobody can figure out yet whether any of it might exist in the melted state.

Meanwhile, clues mount. In one compelling study released in December, dark streaks on the surface were attributed to salty, running water. But many experts remain unconvinced. NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft is circling Mars as you read this, hunting for more evidence.

Something is eating at the black hole at the center of our galaxy. And whatever is bugging the gravity monster manifests as an utter lack of appetite.

In October, astronomers announced they’d watched a star zip around the black hole that anchors the Milky Way, all but proving the impossible-to-see object is actually there. Meanwhile, the region around the black hole is an active place, as the Chandra X-ray Observatory showed early this year.

However, the black hole is not devouring enough matter to generate the tremendous X-ray output seen with other supermassive black holes. Scientists are so far unable to fully explain the stark contrasts they’ve seen, this tremendous diversity in black hole behavior.

Hints emerged this year, however. A study in January suggested mergers between two black holes might serve as an on-off switch for the activity. Then observations announced in November showed two black holes involved in a pending merger. Astronomers now need to tie all this to a firm explanation of the differences between the mediocre output of our black hole and the brilliant illumination surrounding others in many distant galaxies.

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you try to run from a monster and you’re legs go round and round but you don’t get anywhere? The quest to understand the origin of life isn’t much different.

In fairness, it must be pointed out that there is little data to work with. Earth does not retain a record of what went on billions of years ago, when life got going.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of wild ideas. Scientists now generally agree that life could survive a trip to Earth from Mars, in the belly of a rock kicked up by an asteroid impact. A study in November revealed why a Mars rock lands on Earth once a month, on average. A wilder idea, that bugs simply rain down from space inside comet dust, gained support from a second scientist in December, who claimed to have found some of these space bugs in Earth’s atmosphere.

Most mainstream scientists, however, figure there’s a good chance that life on Earth was cooked up in a soup of pre-biotic chemicals right here on the planet. The ingredients — water and organic chemicals — may well have come from space, but Earth likely acted as the incubator.

The answer (and a lot of well-funded researchers are asking the question and debating the possibilities) bears on how likely it is that life might have begun elsewhere, on Mars or around another star.

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.

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.

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