Blast from nowhere... GRB 070125

"Here we have this very bright burst, yet it's surrounded by darkness on all sides," said team member Brad Cenko of the California Institute of Technology. "The nearest galaxy is more than 88,000 light-years away, and there's almost no gas lying between the burst and Earth." Click HERE for the full story.

A mystery so far. But maybe not. The explosion was a long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) typically associated with the death of a massive star. But images taken after the burst faded showed no galaxy at or near the location. A "Dark Matter" burst?

I think we will find that all of this "missing" dark matter is not missing at all - we just cannot see these objects with our current telescope. My prediction is that once we have more powerful telescope in operation, we'll find that dark matter isn't dark or missing but merely too faint to be seen with our previous generations of telescope.

Considering that we're still surprised to find "faint" dwarf galaxies very near the Milky Way - and most of them by serendipitous activities at that. It should not surprise us then that we are not seeing that the universe is most likely flooded with matter (that is not missing) simply not shining or radiating bright enough for us to see at great intergalactic distances.

So, dark matter - perhaps an appropriate name - is most likely not missing at all and really no mystery at all.

This GRB probably occurred in a starburst region that may have been pulled away from a nearby galaxy gravitationally at some point in the dim past.

Larry and Jim's Most Excellent Adventure

In a new twist, with the premise that "dark energy" is real, two physicists are claiming that we may be destroying the universe simply by looking at it. Click HERE for the gruesome details.

"Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 [of our universe with proposed dark energy] we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe," Prof Krauss tells New Scientist."

"Prof Krauss says that the measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the decay of the void to zero - back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving was falling rapidly. "In short, we may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our universe and made it more likely it will decay," says Prof Krauss. Not all agree, since his interpretation hinges on one of the issues at the heart of quantum theory - do you need people to do the observing?"

Fine, except that ALL of this dark energy stuff hinges upon our perceptions of the light curves of, and our expectations that the luminosity from, Type 1a superenovae should appear as invariable. One nudge either way and the whole premise collapses. And it will - because already, Type 1a supernovae have been found to have curious differences in luminosity and light curves.

This is as bad as the global warming nuts... how arrogant.

Dark Energy? There Ain't None!

I will explain why this hoo-hah about Dark Energy is all a bunch of boo-bah!

As you know, much has been written about the existence of "Dark Energy"... yet nothing has been written. About as close to the truth as you can get are comments like: "We have no idea what it is". Of course. That IS true.

Let me tell you the brief story how this came to be.

All this dark energy stuff started a few years, in 1998 to be precise, when a few astronomers started taking measurements of Type 1a supernovae. Actually, it was the High-Z Supernova Search Team that did this. Their measures of this special class of supernova indicated to them that perhaps the expansion of the universe was actually going faster with time (accelerating).

The whole dark energy idea comes from an attempt to reconcile the measurements of the type 1a explosions with the amount of matter that was thought to be in the universe. Pretty hefty stuff, if you know what I mean. Anyway, to make this simple, let me simply say that measurements of the luminosity and the measurements of the redshift of the far away supernova are integral to this "discovery". There is one thing assumed to be at the core of all of this - type 1a supernova explode with the same absolute magnitude (light given off) everywhere in the universe. In other words, it will always be a certain brightness - no matter what. They use this "brightness" as a "standard candle". And of course, if you know exactly how bright something is, you can then determine how far away it is by it's apparent dimness to us. Simply put, if it's brighter, then it's closer. They can measure this very accurately. They then look at the redshift of the star (measured spectroscopically) and can then link it's redshift with it's distance.

OK, so they did all that. And they stood back and said "Uh-Oh"! The measurements seemed to indicate, remarkably, that our universe was not behaving as we thought it should. The results indicated that stars very far away from us seemed to be expanding away at a far faster rate than was expected. I won't go into the Big Bang or the expansion of the universe thing here, you can do that yourself if you read the Wikipedia. Suffice to say though that these observed results and the conclusions reached by the High-Z team indicated something "strange" was at work. So, without much more than that, everyone jumped into the pool and decided they had something called Dark Energy at work here. And of course, since no one knows anything about it, we must study it and create new hypothesis, et al. Grant money - here we come.

Well, you know, sometimes we're so dumb when we work in groups. Here's how widely this Type 1a "standard candle" has been accepted: "The similarity in the absolute luminosity profiles of nearly all known Type Ia supernovae has led to their use as a secondary standard candle in extragalactic astronomy." [source: click here].

So now, here comes the Dark Energy killer. You see, it turns out that Type 1a supernova CAN HAVE different luminosities after all. Uh-Oh!! Meaning, obviously, that all these speculations about the universe accelerating wildly (Watch out, here comes the Big Rip) are wrong. They're based on conclusions from a premature assumption. Oh man... that's bad news for this exciting new field of study.

What did this? Here's the quote: "A new discovery is casting doubt on the idea that a type of star explosion shines with equal brightness wherever it occurs in the universe. The finding could have implications for estimates of the size of the cosmos. Type-1a supernovae are typically used as standard indicators of distance in the vast expanse of the universe. But the discovery of a Type-1a supernova more massive than was thought possible could force astronomers to rethink their ideas about the luminous objects, scientists reported today." [Source: click here].

So, of course we're going to find that Type 1a supernovae do NOT all have a standard luminosity when they explode. Heck, we ALREADY know that now. And of course, we will find that there are various factors at work that we have either not yet discovered or do not yet understand. That simple.


No BIG RIP. No unexplainable accelerating expansion. No dark energy to have to come to grips with.

Oh... there WILL be bigger mysteries in store for us. But for now, we can put Dark Energy to rest. Hopefully we DO, before our "science by consensus" methodologies make us even dumber.

Dark Matter = Dwarf Galaxies and Short Stars

I disagree with the following quote:
"Galaxies don't have enough normal matter to hold together the giant clusters of galaxies they are in, leading scientists to speculate on the existence of gravity from unseen "dark matter" pulling to keep galaxies together. Although what dark matter actually is remains a mystery, Hubble did help show how much there is of it out there, by looking for how much dark matter's gravity warps space-time and thus distorts light from distant galaxies. The space telescope helped reveal there is some five or six times more dark matter than normal matter in the universe." [Source: Click Here].

I say, "No mystery here!". Look, physicists and astronomers are human. Just like you and I, they too want a big salary and a fast car and a fancy home. And like the rest of us, they too have egos. What better way to feed that wallet and feed that ego than to come up [cue spooky music here with the howl of wolves far away in the background] a "mystery". Yes sir. However, as a reward for coming here to read this poor little blog, I'll give you the answer to what the "mysterious" [wolves howling] dark matter is. It's simple.

Dark matter is simply the matter we do not see - yet. Hey, I told you how easy this is. OK, let me explain.

We've known for some time that our Local Group has several members that are much smaller than our "typical" spiral galaxy: Sextans A and B, Canes Dwarf, Tucana Dwarf, IC 1613, M32, and even the Magellanic Clouds to name a few. Click HERE for a good view.

Well, it should come as no surprise that there are actually many more dwarf members of low luminosity in our Local Group than what we thought. It was discovered that there are a heck of a lot more low luminosity dwarfs, very near even, that are so dim we only just found them just recently. A lot of them. And we haven't seen them because of their small size and low visibility. Heck, that sounds like a lot of "dark matter" to me.

So, imagine trying to see these faint dwarf galaxies in the Hercules Cluster... we won't see them. Too dim, too far, too small. But - there are millions of them between the galaxies. They too are members of galaxy clusters everywhere - just as they are here.

Oh, this idea will be a tough fight for some astronomers who have staked their reputations on the silly mystical notion of "dark mysterious matter", or researchers desiring more grant money, but in the end, you'll find that "Dark Matter" is not mysterious at all.

In an intergalactic frame of reference, dark matter is nothing more than dwarf galaxies that are far more numerous than we ever thought. In an intragalactic sense, we will see dark matter manifested as brown dwarfs, and dim red dwarfs, and dark planets that we've never accounted for or even thought existed. Given the scale and scope of both of these dark bodies, their effects over large areas of space, become significant.

Viola'

No more mystery... all is well.
You've read this first HERE!

New Earth Discovered

Really Cool... Earthlike planet discovered!
Click HERE

How can you in two places at once when you're really nowhere at all

Physi­cists say they have made an ob­ject move just by watch­ing it. This is in­spir­ing them to a still bold­er proj­ect: put­ting a small, or­di­nary thing in­to two places at once.

Click HERE for the FULL Story

Large Hadron Collider - Black Holes on Earth?

NORWICH (Reuters) - Deep underground on the Franco-Swiss border someone will throw a switch next year to start one of the most ambitious experiments in history, probing the secrets of the universe and possibly finding new dimensions.

Click HERE for the FULL story

Relativity Drive

"Any crackpot can rough out plans for a warp drive. What they never show you is evidence that it works. Shawyer is different. He has built a working prototype to test his ideas, and as a respected spacecraft engineer he has persuaded the British government to fund his work. Now organisations from other parts of the world, including the US air force and the Chinese government, are beating a path to his tiny company."

Click HERE for the FULL story

Astronaut Business is Tough Stuff

(AP) HOUSTON - An astronaut collapsed twice Friday, a day after she returned to Earth in the shuttle Atlantis, and officials attributed her wobbles to the adjustment from 12 days at zero gravity.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper left the welcome-home ceremony at the hangar at Ellington Field but was not taken to a hospital. Officials said she was doing fine.

Click HERE for FULL Story