Science by Press Release Failure
Oh come on. Your theory "predicts" an "aging" universe, not one that was "ancient" 10 Billion years ago! You can't ignore the fact that every "prediction" about the how the galaxies would be younger as we looked further back in time has been blown away. It's been going on for years now.
As usual, a load of pure & unadulterated ignorance from Mozina. Despite Mozina's arrogant posturing about "every prediction" and "going on for years", in fact exactly the opposite is true. The observational evidence
overwhelmingly confirms that galaxies look exactly the way they were expected to look in the early universe, and that has in fact been going on for years.
As a source for the celebrated
Birkeland model of the sun, Mozina has relied on a newspaper article from the New York Times, written by an anonymous reporter who sat in on a lecture. Heaven forbid that mozina would actually reference Birkeland's own scientific writings. And now, to proclaim the ultimate downfall of cosmology, what do we get? Press releases from science news websites. This bodes ill for Mozina.
The two press releases cited below are supposed to show that the observed growth of galaxies is too fast to be accommodated in the standard, lambda-CDM cosmology.
This is a 2005 news report on the discovery of a massive galaxy in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The object was reported to be a galaxy about as massive as the Milky Way, with a redshift distance that places in an infant universe roughly 800,000,000 years after the big bang. The object was designated HUDF-JD2. See the discovery paper,
Mobasher, et al., 2005. The news report leaves out a crucial piece of information that was not left out of the research paper. The object HUDF-JD2 exhibits a multi-band spectral energy distribution (SED) that is consistent with a high redshift (about 6.5), which would make it a galaxy comparable to but actually slightly smaller than the Milky Way (6x10
11 solar masses compared to 10
12 for the milky Way), and placed in a universe roughly 800,000,000 years old. However, its SED was also seen to be consistent with a redshift about 2.5, which would make it a much smaller galaxy in a universe already 2,700,000,000 years old. The discovery authors explicitly stated that they could not distinguish between the two, a fact that was left out of all the news reports at the time.
Chary, et al., 2007 extended the SED into the farther infrared channels and demonstrated that in fact the object is most likely a small starburst galaxy, about 1% as massive as the Milky Way (about 10
10 solar masses), at a redshift about 1.7, when the universe was about 3,900,000 years old. The problem is that a photometric redshift, rather than a spectroscopic redshift, can be fooled if you don't have enough bands in the multi-band SED. In this case, the optical-near IR SED still looks like a redshift 6.5 galaxy. However, adding the far infrared bands makes it look like a much closer, dust enshrouded starburst galaxy. This object has been discredited as a high redshift galaxy for 3 years, another fact which did not make the webpage news. If Mozina were in the proper habit of using scientific literature to back his scientific claims, instead of appealing to news reports and press releases, he might well have figured this all out for himself years ago.
This is a 2004 press release that tells us ... "
A rare glimpse back in time into the universe's early evolution has revealed something startling: mature, fully formed galaxies where scientists expected to discover little more than infants." Again, the associated research paper is
Glazebrook, et al., 2004. This one is a little more interesting. Let me start by showing the abstract, with emphasis added by me at the end:
Hierarchical galaxy formation is the model whereby massive galaxies form from an assembly of smaller units. The most massive objects therefore form last. The model succeeds in describing the clustering of galaxies, but the evolutionary history of massive galaxies, as revealed by their visible stars and gas, is not accurately predicted. Near-infrared observations (which allow us to measure the stellar masses of high-redshift galaxies) and deep multi-colour images indicate that a large fraction of the stars in massive galaxies form in the first 5 Gyr (refs 4-7), but uncertainties remain owing to the lack of spectra to confirm the redshifts (which are estimated from the colours) and the role of obscuration by dust. Here we report the results of a spectroscopic redshift survey that probes the most massive and quiescent galaxies back to an era only 3 Gyr after the Big Bang. We find that at least two-thirds of massive galaxies have appeared since this era, but also that a significant fraction of them are already in place in the early Universe.
Now keep in kind that according to Mozina ... "
every "prediction" about the how the galaxies would be younger as we looked further back in time has been blown away." But the paper clearly says that at least 2/3 of the massive galaxies formed only after the universe was 3 billion years old. I don't call that being "blown away". We also need to be clear on what "massive" means. The 150 galaxies in the paper range in mass from about 10
9 to 10
11.5 solar masses, compared once again to about 10
12 solar masses for the Milky Way. So the galaxies on the bottom of their list are only 0.1% the mass of the Milky Way. And note that according to the abstract, a significant fraction of these galaxies are formed before the universe is 3,000,000,000 years old. OK, so 2,000,000,000 years old is certainly before 3,000,000,000 years old. If a "massive" galaxy takes 2,000,000,000 year to form, is that supposed to "blow away"
every prediction for how young galaxies should look? What exactly is the problem I am supposed to perceive from this paper, because I don't see one. The text of the paper, like the abstract, does not venture into anything more precise than "before 3,000,000,000 years". The highest redshift galaxy that looks "old" has a redshift 1.8, which puts it in the universe at an age of 3.7 billion years. I don't see a problem there either.
The main sequence lifetime for the sun is about 10
10 years. But the main sequence lifetimes fall fast with increasing mass because the proton-proton and CNO fusion cycles are very sensitive to the increased central temperature that comes with increased mass. So, for a stellar mass in solar masses, a good approximation is
tstar/tsolar = (Mstar/Msolar)-2.5 where
tstar is the stellar main sequence lifetime and
Mstar is the stellar mass. So a 3 solar mass star has a main sequence lifetime of about 640,000,000 years. So if a "massive" galaxy in the early universe has a lot of massive stars, they will look red & old pretty quickly, on astronomical time scales. Plenty of time to look "old" in a billion years, even less. I don't see how the formation of a "massive" galaxy in anything over a billion years is any problem at all, let alone a problem that "blows away"
every prediction.
And here we are supposed to believe there is a "critical flaw" in our baryonic mass estimates for the universe.
... but for anyone following the conversation, here was the recent article in question that suggests that our mass (normal mass) estimation techniques are critically flawed:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090819145846.htm
Yet another news report, this one on a study of the initial mass function (IMF) for low-mass galaxies in the local universe. The research paper associated with this study is
Meurer, et al., 2009. It has long been known that low mass stars significantly outnumber high mass stars, and that low mass stars are hard to see because they are intrinsically dim, and especially hard to see in the glare of high mass stars. The authors in this study combine space based ultraviolet imagery from GALEX, with ground based hydrogen-alpha observations, in an effort to determine how much of the low mass population is overlooked (low mass stars will show up more favorably against high mass stars in the ultraviolet imagery). According to Mozina, this is supposed to indicate a "critical" problem in determining baryonic mass, so severe as to render dark matter obsolete, that we will soon see that all of the dark matter is just unseen ordinary matter. But this kind of modification to the IMF will make a difference to the baryonic mass of the universe on the order of 1%. But you need to increase the baryonic mass by a factor of 5, not a factor of 0.01, to compete with dark matter mass. So the study cited by Mozina is about as irrelevant to the central question as one could be.
Well, there you have it. "Science by press release" is right up there with "science by pretty picture" in Mozina's quiver of impotent arrows.
!
!
!
