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cosmology

  1. Puppycow

    Researchers spot black hole feeding at 40 times its theoretical limit

    I thought this was interesting: Researchers spot black hole feeding at 40x its theoretical limit (Ars Technica) This "theoretical limit" is called the Eddington Limit, but it doesn't seem to actually hold true. It does seem to solve the problem of how supermassive black holes came to be so...
  2. Gord_in_Toronto

    We're Shrinking (Sort Of)

    An alternate view on the Expanding Universe. Could the expanding Universe truly be a mirage? It seems to be reasoning by analogy: But I can't see anything intrinsically wrong. :eye-poppi Link to the original paper here (I only read the abstract)...
  3. Gord_in_Toronto

    Good News on the Black Hole Front

    If anyone has been following along since Stephen Hawking died. Black Holes Finally Proven Mathematically Stable There is still much work left to be done as: If some one would care to produce a 200 page summary, it may help my lay comprehension as: :boggled:
  4. Puppycow

    The Crisis in Cosmology

    I checked to see whether there was already a thread about this, and there sort of was one a few years ago, but it didn't have a very snappy title and didn't get very many responses. Anyway, what this is about is various observations that don't seem to agree with the Lamda CDM model of...
  5. Skeptic Ginger

    Curious About the Universe Expanding

    I'm just curious about peoples' thoughts, I know there is no answer we could test. Watching the current solar cycle, the magnetic field gets stretched until it snaps back, (reversing the poles I believe). In my Universe contemplating this morning I wondered if the Universe expansion would...
  6. L

    Cont: I don't think space is expanding Part II

    Continued from here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=348218 As usual the split point is arbitrary and participants are free to respond to posts from the original thread. I always find it interesting how those with alternative models accuse others of dogma and...
  7. Gord_in_Toronto

    Merged Black Holes Shedding Information / The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End

    In all honesty this is beyond my understanding but the cosmological implications are, to say the least, interesting. and https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-black-hole-information-paradox-comes-to-an-end-20201029/
  8. J

    Some very cool stuff from astronomers etc

    In a very active thread here in this board, a couple of astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology topics have come up which many regular readers may not have heard of. First, expansion of the universe. Yeah, the results are pretty clear: if General Relativity (GR), then the universe seems to be...
  9. R

    Why isn't the universe spinning?

    This question may be poorly posed, but what I'm looking for is an understanding based on some deeper underlying principle that would lead to it. As far as I understand the universe as a whole isn't spinning. If it were that would seem to mean that it's not isotropic, right? And it is...
  10. steenkh

    Why does maps of the CMB not show the Milky way?

    I have looked at some maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background, such as the one in the Wikipedia article on the CMB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background I wonder why the Milky way is not visible as a smudge across the cosmic equator. Do these microwaves pass right through a...
  11. E

    Evidence against concordance cosmology

    This thread is to discuss evidence against “concordance cosmology”. Concordance cosmology is the name used for the dominant model for cosmology. The basic hypotheses of concordance cosmology are 1) The universe is expanding. This means the space between galaxies is expanding, not space within...
  12. R

    Galaxies detected beyond the limits of Hubble

    Galaxies detected beyond the limits of Hubble! The paper Ultraviolet Luminosity Density of the Universe During the Epoch of Reionization looks at archived Hubble images and finds fluctuations in the background light. They conclude that these match what is expected for galaxies at a redshift z >...
  13. F

    Fine-Tuning Problem in Cosmology

    We've had a bit of a heated discussion in the R&P section about whether fine-tuning is a problem in cosmology. So I thought I would take a poll. This is the best summary of the fine-tuning problem that I could find: "Embedded within the laws of physics are roughly 30 numbers—including the...
  14. Olowkow

    ABC StarStuff with Stuart Gary

    It occurred to me as I was listening to the latest episode of StarStuff that I don't recall anyone ever mentioning this exceptional podcast on any JREF threads. http://www.abc.net.au/science/starstuff/ This is an Australian Broadcasting production that I have been enjoying for many years...
  15. W

    Richard Tarnas's View of Cosmology/Consciousness

    Can you guys debunk what he is trying to say? This is from realitysandwich.com/98/psyching_out_cosmos Thanks According to contemporary cosmology, our solar system emerged from titanic accidents. Gases swirling together in the void of deep space randomly formed stars and planets...
  16. icebear

    Merged Radical New Thesis on Human and Solar System Origins

    This one is not sci-rfi, in fact it's academically robust, but the authors claim to have created a century's worth of work for scifi and romance novel writers. Consider the axis tilts of planets in our system. If our system had formed from a swirling disk of solar material as textbooks...
  17. D

    Do those who espouse crackpot astronomy truly not understand astronomy?

    What triggered me to start this thread is this post, by icebear, in the Why is there so much crackpot physics? thread. Here's an extract (bold added): I could, of course, have chosen any of dozens of other posts from this part of the JREF forum, over the past year or so. In the example above...
  18. T

    Cosmology Questions

    Hi all, I have a few questions about cosmology. 1) What is the cosmic microwave background - how did it form. I've read Wikipedia and a couple of other sites but for the life of me I can't work out what it is. Is it a gigantic ejection of stuff that was formed during the BB and is still...
  19. Perpetual Student

    L. Susskind -- The "Megaverse"

    This is a fascinating 15 minute interview of Susskind discussing the fine-tuning question: SUSSKIND __ Fine Tuning Any thoughts?
  20. dogjones

    Speed of light - not constant?

    http://www.livescience.com/29111-speed-of-light-not-constant.html Cue YECs yelling they've been vindicated. But any rational thoughts on this?
  21. dogjones

    Spinning black hole generates a mass of questions

    So, this black hole is rotating at a shade under the speed of light. Would this mean that its mass is increased via relativistic effects? If so does that affect its gravity? Perhaps its event horizon has a larger radius than it would if it were not spinning so fast? Which leads me to a query...
  22. Puppycow

    How large is the universe?

    yaX4iGw-b_Y Also in Hi-def on Youtube And here's another interesting one: Cosmic Journeys : The Largest Black Holes in the Universe Astronomy is just mind-boggling. :boggled: According to some theories, the whole universe is like 1024 times larger than the observable universe. IOW, the...
  23. LarianLeQuella

    Science Predicts and Finds a new way to make X-Rays

    New Type of Cosmic Ray Discovered After 100 Years (Don't blame me for the innacurate article title, I prefer the one I used for the thread.) Nothing particularly earth shattering about this announcement or discovery, but in the article, they said (emphasis mine): You see, someone was able...
  24. DeathDart

    Halton Arp The Silence of HST is Deafening

    The Quasar is said to be a very distant object with an incredible energy output. Halton Arp appears to have evidence supporting a view that Quasars are expelled by Active Galactic Nuclei AGN. The Hubble Space Telescope HST could take excellent images of Arp's anomalies and put the matter to...
  25. Zeuzzz

    What kind of science is cosmology

    Currently cosmology has greatly advanced in terms of theory and observation. Some of the parameters of the concordance or LCDM cosmological model are stated with a near absolute precision. But over 96% of the universe is constituted of "matter" of an unknown nature (the term matter is a misnomer...
  26. Gord_in_Toronto

    It Really is "Turtles all the Way Down".

    Sometime in the my dim distant past, before the days of the Internet when paper still ruled, I remember reading an article in ISTR a science fiction magazine that claimed the the Universe was a Black Hole because it was of the right density to be one -- the size of a black hole been dependent on...
  27. D

    How did crackpot Electric Universe papers get published in a peer-reviewed journal?

    The Open Astronomy Journal, part of Bentham OPEN, has laudable aims: Yet Special Issue #002, in Volume 4 (2011), entitled "Some Initial Thoughts on Plasma Cosmology", is pure, distilled Electric Universe crackpot anti-science! :jaw-dropp None of the five papers in that special issue shows any...
  28. James Redford

    The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything

    Below is an article that I recently wrote. It concerns the Omega Point cosmology by physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler, which is a proof of God's existence based upon the most reserved view of the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity...
  29. P

    How dependent is the Universe on initial conditions?

    I just finished watching George Smoot's TED talk on the Design of the Universe. In it, he says that "tiny fluctuations" in the otherwise smooth distribution of matter were ultimately responsible for the structure we see in the universe. My understanding is that those fluctuations are the...
  30. D

    unifying gravity and electromagnetism

    We are familiar with the idea that mass and energy are equivalent from the famous equation E= mc2. If mass and energy are one and the same, why do we need two different forces- gravitational and electromagnetic? As photons ‘aggregate’ into matter, the resultant decrease in the number of ‘free...

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