Bjarne on: Dark Energy, only an illusion.

[Reality Check]

The left Hubble Deep Field image is the original but I think it has been doctored and that the actual image looks more like the one to the right:

[URL]http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/9080/hdfh.jpg[/URL]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Both images have been 'doctored". You "doctored" one. Someone else "doctored" the other.

The real problem is that you did not understand the article.
Strange red galaxies a 'missing link' in history of the universe? is about images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope (not Hubble)

 

[Anders Lindman]

Both images have been 'doctored". You "doctored" one. Someone else "doctored" the other.

The real problem is that you did not understand the article.
Strange red galaxies a 'missing link' in history of the universe? is about images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope (not Hubble)

I know that. What I mean is that the 'strange' red galaxies are not strange at all and that the Spitzer image is correct and shows ordinary galaxies and that they appear red simply because the photons have traveled so far through the vacuum. The Hubble deep field images have been enhanced so that the galaxies don't look so red in them.

And the word 'doctored' is perhaps too strong. Here is how the Hubble image was processed:

"The data processing yielded four monochrome images (at 300 nm, 450 nm, 606 nm and 814 nm), one at each wavelength.[8] One image was designated as red (814 nm), the second as green (606 nm) and the third as blue (450 nm), and the three images were combined to give a colour image.[9] Because the wavelengths at which the images were taken do not correspond to the wavelengths of red, green and blue light, the colours in the final image only give an approximate representation of the actual colours of the galaxies in the image; the choice of filters for the HDF (and the majority of Hubble images) was primarily designed to maximize the scientific utility of the observations rather than to create colours corresponding to what the human eye would actually perceive.[8]" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field#Data_processing

So they don't claim that the colors in the Hubble deep field images are correct. And I think that the more correct colors would show a significant shift to red.

 

[Anders Lindman]

The evidence is that the universe is flat (from WMAP).
This means that even without dark energy it will expand forever.

The WMAP data shows the background microwave radiation. That radiation too has lost much energy when traveling so far through the vacuum. Today scientists assume that there is ZERO loss of energy for photons traveling through the vacuum energy as I understand it. My guess is that's a false assumption and that the vacuum energy indeed causes photons to lose energy and thereby redshift.

And if the assumption is wrong, then it's not certain that the universe will expand forever. And think about it: does the universe expand even without dark energy?! What causes that expansion if not dark energy?

 

[Reality Check]

The WMAP data shows the background microwave radiation. ...giberish...

WMAP measures background microwave radiation.
The evidence from WMAP is that the universe is flat.
This means that even without dark energy it will expand forever.
This means that with dark energy it will expand forever and faster.

 

[Reality Check]

I know that. What I mean is that the 'strange' red galaxies are not strange at all and that the Spitzer image is correct and shows ordinary galaxies and that they appear red simply because the photons have traveled so far through the vacuum.

The problem is that you still do understand the article: Strange red galaxies a 'missing link' in history of the universe?

After analyzing the possibilities, the team determined that a blend of the 12.7 billion light-year distance with lots of dust best fit the data. In other words, the redness was not a trick of the distance; these neighboring galaxies would still be red if observed by someone in their local patch of the cosmos.

 

[Bjarne]

Nothing - that is the point and one of many reasons why Lener's theory is invalid, i.e. it is unable to predict the observed perfect black body spectra of the CMB.
Errors in Eric Lerner's "The Big Bang Never Happened"

Lerner can't be perfect when he also did not know exactly what happen 13 - 15 billion years ago
I think it could support his thesis when he assumed that whole galaxies / a whole universe of galaxies from time to time explode.

 

[Anders Lindman]

The problem is that you still do understand the article: Strange red galaxies a 'missing link' in history of the universe?

The vacuum energy is not dust! The vacuum energy is everywhere and causes photons to redshift.

 

[steenkh]

The Hubble deep field images have been enhanced so that the galaxies don't look so red in them.

If the galaxies looked "red" it would mean that there is some filter mechanism removing other colours. Red-shifting means that photons are shifted from their original wavelength towards red. That means that red photons have moved into the infrared, but on the other hand ultraviolet photons have moved into the visible spectrum. As long as the light from the galaxies contains energy not yet shifted into or past red, we would expect to also see other colours in the visible spectrum reaching Earth.

 

[Reality Check]

Lerner can't be perfect when he also did not know exactly what happen 13 - 15 billion years ago
I think it could support his thesis when he assumed that whole galaxies / a whole universe of galaxies from time to time explode.

You are even ignorant of Lerner's debunked theory !
He is not a total idiot. His ideas had

• No whole galaxies exploding.
• No whole universes of galaxies exploding.

Errors in Eric Lerner's "The Big Bang Never Happened"

 

[Anders Lindman]

If the galaxies looked "red" it would mean that there is some filter mechanism removing other colours. Red-shifting means that photons are shifted from their original wavelength towards red. That means that red photons have moved into the infrared, but on the other hand ultraviolet photons have moved into the visible spectrum. As long as the light from the galaxies contains energy not yet shifted into or past red, we would expect to also see other colours in the visible spectrum reaching Earth.

Yes, the ultraviolet photons will redshift towards ordinary visible light. But my idea is that for galaxies very far away most of the higher frequency photons have redshifted so much that when they reach Earth they appear red. It depends of course on what the initial spectrum of the light was. Only if there were a huge amount of very high energy photons in the faraway galaxies would they appear white in color.

Here is an example of the light spectrum for a galaxy: http://cas.sdss.org/dr5/en/astro/images/spectrum.gif

From: http://cas.sdss.org/dr5/en/astro/

Notice that there are less high frequency photons than photons with lower frequencies.

The vacuum energy in empty space causes photons to redshift and the higher energy the photons have the faster they lose energy. In this very interesting video Bjarne posted two galaxies who are connected with each other show a different redshift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kePDAAEZ_s

The reason for that is that one of the galaxies has a light spectrum with a much larger amount of high frequency photons. When using the current standard model for redshift the difference between the galaxies doesn't compute and is an anomaly. When using the model of redshift caused by vacuum energy friction the difference is explained as a natural consequence.

 

[Reality Check]

The vacuum energy is not dust! The vacuum energy is everywhere and causes photons to redshift.

The vacuum energy is not dust!
And I never said so! Neither does the article!
Strange red galaxies a 'missing link' in history of the universe?

Still, the international team reporting the results pushed data-analysis techniques to their limit to tease out the dim galaxies. The team, headed by the Center for Astrophysics' Jiasheng Huang, also had to grapple with why the galaxies were so red and dim. Three options seemed possible:

• The galaxies could host a large population of older, redder stars and be somewhat closer than the 12.7 billion light-year distance.
• They could be extremely dusty and even closer.
• They could be so distant that the universe's expansion has stretched the wavelengths of light they emit deep into the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

After analyzing the possibilities, the team determined that a blend of the 12.7 billion light-year distance with lots of dust best fit the data. In other words, the redness was not a trick of the distance; these neighboring galaxies would still be red if observed by someone in their local patch of the cosmos.

The pre-print for the paper is Four IRAC Sources with an Extremely Red H-[3.6] Color: Passive or Dusty Galaxies at z>4.5?
The best fit to the data is cosmological redshift + lots of dust.

The vacuum energy is everywhere.

The vacuum energy does not cause photons to redshift. What causes cosmological redshift (and is not the best fit to the data from these galaxies) is the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the cause of the acceleration of that expansion.

 

[Anders Lindman]

The vacuum energy is not dust!
And I never said so! Neither does the article!
Strange red galaxies a 'missing link' in history of the universe?


The pre-print for the paper is Four IRAC Sources with an Extremely Red H-[3.6] Color: Passive or Dusty Galaxies at z>4.5?
The best fit to the data is cosmological redshift + lots of dust.

The vacuum energy is everywhere.

The vacuum energy does not cause photons to redshift. What causes cosmological redshift (and is not the best fit to the data from these galaxies) is the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the cause of the acceleration of that expansion.

Oh, I misread the article. It says: "After analyzing the possibilities, the team determined that a blend of the 12.7 billion light-year distance with lots of dust best fit the data."

So their explanation is that there IS dust in this case that causes them to appear red. Ok, but that seems like an ad hoc idea to me.

The current redshift model has unexplained problems:

"The history of the redshift is traced and a variety of problems listed in addition to two major anomalies. One of these anomalies is the quantized redshift, which was first noted by Tifft in 1976 and has been confirmed a number of times, most recently by Bell in 2003. The second anomaly is the breakdown in the redshift/distance relationship, evidenced by the observations of distant Type Ia supernovae, that has revived interest in the existence of the cosmological constant." -- http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Links/Papers/Setter.pdf

 

[MRC_Hans]

The vacuum energy is not dust! The vacuum energy is everywhere and causes photons to redshift.

The first part is correct. Vacuum energy is indeed not dust.

The rest is speculation. Nobody really knows what vacuum energy is, least of all you.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

So their explanation is that there IS dust in this case that causes them to appear red. Ok, but that seems like an ad hoc idea to me.
http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Links/Papers/Setter.pdf

Just a moment! 'Appearing red' is not the same as red shift. The appearance of a galaxy depends on its all-over spectral content, but red shift has to do with the shift of spectral lines towards the red.

Basically, if something has a specific colour, it will appear redder when red shifted, but the emission spectrum of a galaxy extends many octaves into blue, past the visual band, so even a heavy red shift does not make it appear red; we just see a different part of the band.

When a galaxy 'appears red' it means that the shorter light wavelengths coming from it have been filtered away, for instance by dust.

Another thing is that if the light passes through a lot of dust, its spectral lines tend to get mixed up with the absorption spectra from the dust, which can make its original red shift difficult to determine.


Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

The vacuum energy in empty space causes photons to redshift and the higher energy the photons have the faster they lose energy.

No, this is wrong. We are able to extract the individual red shifts for different colours. If they were red shifted differently, we would have known, and nobody would have attributed it to expansion.

Do you even know how red shift is measured?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift

Hans

 

[Anders Lindman]

Just a moment! 'Appearing red' is not the same as red shift. The appearance of a galaxy depends on its all-over spectral content, but red shift has to do with the shift of spectral lines towards the red.

Basically, if something has a specific colour, it will appear redder when red shifted, but the emission spectrum of a galaxy extends many octaves into blue, past the visual band, so even a heavy red shift does not make it appear red; we just see a different part of the band.

When a galaxy 'appears red' it means that the shorter light wavelengths coming from it have been filtered away, for instance by dust.

Another thing is that if the light passes through a lot of dust, its spectral lines tend to get mixed up with the absorption spectra from the dust, which can make its original red shift difficult to determine.


Hans

My idea is that photons from galaxies very far away will have redshifted very much so that most of the spectrum is microwave radiation and only a small part of it in the visible light spectrum. This will make the faraway galaxies appear red but the light from them will of course still cover a lot of frequencies, only that the spectrum has shifted and NOT in a linear way since higher frequency photons lose energy faster than lower frequency photons when traveling through the vacuum energy.

Dust would perhaps cause a similar effect, but that's a special ad hoc idea in order to fit the current standard theories into observed data.

 

[MRC_Hans]

My idea is that photons from galaxies very far away will have redshifted very much so that most of the spectrum is microwave radiation and only a small part of it in the visible light spectrum.

Galaxies radiate deep into the gamma part of the spectrum. But if course, if you get them red shifter enough .....

This will make the faraway galaxies appear red but the light from them will of course still cover a lot of frequencies, only that the spectrum has shifted and NOT in a linear way since higher frequency photons lose energy faster than lower frequency photons when traveling through the vacuum energy.

Don't you read my posts? The higher frequencies are NOT red shifted more than the low ones. We can observe that they are not.

Dust would perhaps cause a similar effect, but that's a special ad hoc idea in order to fit the current standard theories into observed data.

No, dust does not red shift any of the light, it attenuates it, higher frequencies most. We can easily distinguish between selective attenuation and red shift.

Hans

 

[Anders Lindman]

No, this is wrong. We are able to extract the individual red shifts for different colours. If they were red shifted differently, we would have known, and nobody would have attributed it to expansion.

Do you even know how red shift is measured?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift

Hans

I haven't actually studied how redshift is measured. What I know is that the standard theory says that the redshift is caused by an expansion of space. That would cause a linear redshift so that all frequencies of light are redshifted in an equal amount. Actual observations show that this is not the case, and in fact that the redshift is not linear like that, and to explain it they come up with the idea of how the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace, when the natural explanation is simply that photons with different frequencies lose energy at different rates; high frequency photons lose energy faster than photons with lower frequencies.

Check out my earlier post #4930: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7825973&postcount=4930

 

[Anders Lindman]

Don't you read my posts? The higher frequencies are NOT red shifted more than the low ones. We can observe that they are not.

See my previous post.

 

[Anders Lindman]

Let me explain why the vacuum energy may cause photons to redshift.

"Vacuum has friction after all

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle says we can never be sure that an apparent vacuum is truly empty. Instead, space is fizzing with photons that are constantly popping into and out of existence before they can be measured directly. Even though they appear only fleetingly, these "virtual" photons exert the same electromagnetic forces on the objects they encounter as normal photons do.

Now, Alejandro Manjavacas and F. Javier García de Abajo of the Institute of Optics at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid say these forces should slow down spinning objects. ... So over time, a spinning object will gradually slow down, even if equal numbers of virtual photons bombard it from all sides." -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927994.100-vacuum-has-friction-after-all.html

Then some may claim that this only applies to particles with mass and photons have no rest mass. I doubt that this is true, but ok let's say that it's true, then consider the thermal Casimir force:

"Observation of the thermal Casimir force

Quantum theory predicts the existence of the Casimir force between macroscopic bodies, a force arising from the zero-point energy of electromagnetic field modes around them. A thermal Casimir force, due to thermal rather than quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field at finite temperature, was theoretically predicted long ago. Here we report the experimental observation of the thermal Casimir force between two gold plates." -- http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v7/n3/pdf/nphys1909.pdf?WT.ec_id=NPHYS-201103

"Outer space is not a perfect vacuum, but a tenuous plasma awash with charged particles, electromagnetic fields, and the occasional star." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum

So, is it IMPOSSIBLE for the thermal Casimir force in space to affect photons?