This is Greg. He is a burrito. He is also a giant mutant who happens to be mad right now.

30 November

• Nemesis
• Managers of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft mission expect to get a full stream of data during this week’s flyby of the Saturnian moon Enceladus, according to a release from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission for NASA. Cassini resumed normal operations last week after going into safe mode on Nov. 2.

29 November 2010

• Astrobiology Magazine discusses growing crops on other planets. Related discussions are gardens on the international space station, here and here.
• Despite the large amount of progress made towards flight rationale – called for in relation to Discovery’s External Tank (ET-137) stringer cracks – teams are heading into another week of deliberations, with a large amount of work ahead of them. Although STS-133 is threatening to move into next year, NASA managers will continue to evaluate the opportunity to make a late December window.
• Discovery.com discusses an unpublished paper submitted to the arXiv preprint service by world-renowned Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and co-author Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia. They have announced a pattern in the CMBR that could reveal events that occurred before the Big Bang. The new proposal contradicts the current model of an early inflationary period.

28 November 2010

• Discovery Magazine discusses the Large Hadron Collider and the finding that the big bang behaves like a liquid.

27 November 2010

• Arianespace are back on the pace, with another dual launch taking place yesterday via their Ariane 5 ECA launch vehicle. The European workhorse is lofting HYLAS 1 and Intelsat 17 into their transfer orbits, with lift-off on time at 18:39 GMT – launching from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

26 November 2010

• The European Space Agency has announced that two of 31 mission proposals have been chosen for additional development funding. The CarbonSat mission would quantify and monitor the distribution of two of the most important greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, also released through human activity: carbon dioxide and methane. Data from the mission would lead to a better understanding of the sources and sinks of these two gases and how they are linked to climate change. The FLEX mission aims to provide global maps of vegetation fluorescence, which can be converted into an indicator of photosynthetic activity. These data would improve our understanding of how much carbon is stored in plants and their role in the carbon and water cycles.
• The Soyuz capsule with the three crew members of ISS Expedition 24/25 — Fyodor Yuгchikhin, Shannon Walker and Douglas Wheelock– landed softly at 07:46 Moscow time in the Kazakh steppe, a Mission Control Centre source told Itar-Tass.

25 November 2010

• China launched the second Shen Tong-1 military communications satellite via a CZ-3A Chang Zheng-3A (Y19) launch vehicle, providing secured voice/data communications services for PLA ground users in Ku-band. Receiving the designation ZX-20A ZhongZhing-20A, the satellite was launched from the Xi Chang Satellite Launch Center, in Sichuan Province at 00:09 loca time on Friday.

24 November 2010

• A Christmas mission may be the cards for Discovery’s final mission, as managers at the Program Requirements Control Board (PRCB) decided against shooting for the early December launch window opportunities. More work is required on assessing the status of External Tank (ET-137), resulting in a move to the December 17-20 window – although this target remains preliminary at best.
• The fifth Ariane 5 mission of 2010 was given the go-ahead today for its November 26 liftoff with Arianespace’s dual payload of the Intelsat 17 and HYLAS 1 satellites.

23 November 2010

• Observers tracking movements of the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B secretive space plane report the spacecraft is dropping altitude, a possible sign the clandestine mission is near landing as it approaches the limit of the its design life.

22 November 2010

• The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial space transportation, granted SpaceX the one-year license for re-entry of the Dragon capsule. This was the first time it sanctioned a re-entry operation.

21 November 2010

• ULA launched the most powerful unmanned rocket, a 23-story Delta IV Heavy. The rocket launched at 3:58 PM Phoenix time from Cape Canaveral, carrying a classified National Reconnaissance Office spacecraft. It was the firm’s eighth launch of the year.

20 November 2010

• The launch attempt of the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy with a National Reconnaissance Office payload was scrubbed November 19.

19 November 2010

• Orbital Sciences Corporation used their Minotaur IV launch vehicle to loft eight satellites for the United States Government and university research programmes on Friday night. The mission, designated STP S-26, launched from the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska one minute into a 90-minute window, with a lift-off time of 20:25 pm Eastern (01:25 UTC).
• The NASA spacecraft that flew close to a distant comet earlier this month found itself hurtling through an unexpected cosmic ice storm, scientists revealed today. Speeding at 27,000 mph, the Deep Impact craft flew within 435 miles of comet Hartley 2 on 4th November – only the fifth time a comet had been viewed up close. Spectacular new images from the flyby revealed a blizzard of white specks surrounding the nearly 1 1/2-mile-long peanut-shaped comet.

18 November 2010

• Problems surrounding STS-133 have led managers to slip the launch date to December 3.

17 November 2010

• SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s commercial spaceliner built to fly paying passengers on suborbital thrill rides,made its third gliding flight from its mothership — the WhiteKnightTwo — high above the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. This latest glide test involved the piloting skills of Pete Siebold, along with co-pilot Clint Nichols.

16 November 2010

• Japanese scientists have concluded the Hayabusa probe limped back to Earth with the first flakes of an asteroid ever returned to terrestrial labs from deep space.

15 November 2010

• NASA plans a news conference on 18 November to discuss findings by EPOXI during the rendezvous with comet Hartley 2.
• A cosmic explosion seen 31 years ago may have been the birth cry of the youngest black hole ever observed, which could help researchers understand how black holes are born and evolve.

14 November 2010

• The Russian-U.S. company International Launch Services (ILS) is scheduled to launch a Proton-M heavy carrier rocket with the SkyTerra 1 satellite at 10:29 AM Phoenix time today (08:29 p.m. Moscow time or 17:29 UTC) from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. The satellite is designed to provide voice and data services in L-band.

13 November 2010

• The Spaceship Company recently broke ground for its new final assembly, integration and test hangar at Mojave Air & Space Port. The new building, a 68,000-square-foot, clear-span, 737-sized hangar including offices, will serve as TSC’s operating headquarters once complete. It will be used primarily for the final assembly, integration and testing of TSC’s vehicles before they enter service, according to the company.
• Shuttle repair crews are working this weekend to keep Discovery on track for a launch during a seven-day window that opens Nov. 30, a possibility even after new damage was uncovered Friday. Another cracked part was found on the shuttle’s external tank, next to one already under inspection.

12 November 2010

• The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that the next launch of the H-II Transfer Vehicle 2 (HTV2) cargo transporter to the International Space Station (ISS) has been scheduled for 20 January 2011. The launch window opens at 3:29 PM Japan time (06:29 UTC).
• A leaking hydrogen vent line attachment fitting on the side of the shuttle Discovery’s external tank was removed and disassembled overnight, revealing an unevenly compressed internal seal. The quick-disconnect hardware also may have a less concentric fit than pre-fueling measurements indicated.

11 November 2010

• The website NASASpaceflight, has the details on the cracks found in the external tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery.
• Aerojet successfully test fired its AJ26 rocket engine at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The AJ26 engine is an oxidizer-rich, staged-combustion LO2/Kerosene engine with a pintel injector. It achieves very high performance in a lightweight compact package. Based on the NK-33 engine originally designed and produced in Russia for the Russian N1 lunar launch vehicle, the liquid-fuel AJ26 will provide boost for the first stage of the Taurus II launch vehicle. The engine tested today is the first of four engines to be tested at Stennis throughout the next several months. This testing is being conducted to support the Taurus II Initial Launch Capability (ILC) in the third quarter of 2011.
• Beset by management problems, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is like to cost 1.5 Billion more than budgeted, and slip from a launch in 2014 to late 2015.

10 November 2010

• A new study from Galaxy Zoo’s second crowd-sourced scientific effort, buoys the idea that galaxies with central bars somehow encourage the formation of big, blue and short-lived stars, and funnel gas and dust to supermassive black holes lurking at their cores. In the process, bars may quickly consume star-making materials to leave behind only a “dead” galaxy of red and fading stars.
• The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has returned an image of a wandering cloud of gas and dust from an area of the well-known Pleiades star cluster. Starlight from Merope is slowly destroying the small nebula.

9 November 2010

• NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy. “What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center,” said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. “We don’t fully understand their nature or origin.”
• Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., expect the Cassini spacecraft will resume normal operations on 24 November, after the spacecraft went into safe mode on 2 November.
• NASA hopes to lay the groundwork over the next six months for developing an affordable heavy-lift launch vehicle with $7.5 million in study contracts it plans to spread across 13 U.S. companies. The study contracts, announced Nov. 8, are NASA’s initial response to the 2010 NASA Authorization Act, which requires the agency to begin work this year on a vehicle capable of lifting at least 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit by 2016.

8 November 2010

• China unveiled an image of the Bay of Rainbows taken by the lunar orbiter Chang’e-2 from a designed altitude of 18.7 kilometers. The image was taken on 28 October, and covers the area that China plans to land its next mission.
• A new theoretical model of Solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) will be presented at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the APS Plasma Physics Division. The Sun sporadically expels trillions of tons of million-degree hydrogen gas during a CME. Such clouds are enormous in size (spanning millions of miles) and are made up of magnetized plasma gases, so hot that hydrogen atoms are ionized. CMEs are rapidly accelerated by magnetic forces to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second to upwards of 2,000 kilometers per second in several tens of minutes. CMEs are closely related to solar flares and, when they impinge on the Earth, can trigger spectacular auroral displays. They also induce strong electric currents in the Earth’s plasma atmosphere (i.e., the magnetosphere and ionosphere), leading to outages in telecommunications and GPS systems and even the collapse of electric power grids if the disturbances are very severe.

7 November 2010

• Super Earths may be hostile to life, suggests a New Scientist article. “Rocky planets a few times heavier than Earth that we thought might be life-friendly may lack one vital feature: a protective magnetic field. Planets are thought to owe their magnetic fields to an iron core that is at least partly molten. But a simulation of super-Earths between a few times and 10 times Earth’s mass suggests that high pressures will keep the core solid, according to Guillaume Morard of the Institute of Mineralogy and Physics of Condensed Matter in Paris, France, and his team (arxiv.org/1010.5133).”

6 November 2010

• NASA states that Discovery’s launch delay shouldn’t impact the shuttle fleet retirement schedule

5 November 2010

• Discovery was making her first real attempt to launch on Friday, as the loading of her External Tank (ET-137) picked up following approval by the Mission Management Team (MMT). Tanking had been nominal until a leak was detected on the Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate (GUCP) – causing managers to carry out testing prior to detanking – ultimately leading to a delay to November 30.
• At 8:20 PM Phoenix time, the ULA team successfully launched the fourth COSMO-SkyMed satellite for Boeing, the Italian Space Agency, Ministry of Defence and Thales Alenia Space. The ULA Delta II 7420-10 configuration vehicle used a ULA first stage booster powered by a Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne RS-27A main engine and four Alliant Techsystems (ATK) strap-on solid rocket boosters. An Aerojet AJ10-118K engine powered the second stage. The payload was encased by a 10-foot-diameter composite payload fairing. COSMO-SkyMed 4 is the final satellite in the initial constellation for this system. Each of the four satellites is equipped with a high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar operating in X-band.
• NASA and JPL have released more information on comet Hartley 2.
• The Spaceship Company (TSC), which plans to be the first to carry paying passengers into space, will break ground on its Final Assembly, Integration and Test Hangar (FAITH) production hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port on Tuesday, 9 November 2010. The company is owned by Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic and will produce the White Knight Two and Space Ship Two vehicles.
• Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is awaiting U.S. regulatory approval to launch its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo vessel as soon as 20 November after more than a year spent tying up loose ends associated with the recoverable space capsule’s re-entry license application.

4 November 2010

• Mr. Hartley’s amazing comet. Images from EPOXI.
• Bad weather has again delayed the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery.

3 November 2010

• The Mission Management Team (MMT) evaluations into the anomalies on the redundant Main Engine Controller (MEC) on SSME-3 have concluded with the approval for the required flight rationale, clearing Discovery to press ahead with Thursday’s launch attempt. Discovery’s next challenge is out of her control, with an 80 percent chance of unacceptable weather at T-0.

2 November 2010

• Discovery has been given another hurdle to negotiate ahead of her opening launch attempt, after an electrical issue was noted on the redundant Main Engine Controller (MEC) on SSME-3. The original problem had been classed as cleared, following cycling and troubleshooting. However, a Mission Management Team (MMT) meeting later on Tuesday decided to scrub for at least 24 hours to work towards flight rationale.

1 November 2010

• Kuiper Belt Objects Don Coats of Many Colors

We also know that light slows down when going through some mediums such as air, water or glass. The slowdown is merely an illusion because light resumes it’s original speed as soon as it exits that medium, and energy is conserved.

To be able to visualize this, think of a rainbow. Light travels in air at a certain speed, then hits the water vapors, which slow it down – within the drops of water. Light breaks into its several wavelengths and therefore we can see each wavelength separately within the drops of water – each represented by a different color of the spectrum. And then once light exists the drops of water, all wavelengths speed up and recombine again, and the rainbow disappears.

Since we do know of mediums that slow down the speed of light, doesn’t that leave a possibility that there are other mediums out there that speed it up? Speed it up so it’s in fact faster than the speed of light? I once read about an experiment using cesium vapor, where light left the room before it even entered. But if light has a constant speed in a vacuum, slows down in air, water and glass – which are some form of “matter” – would light speed up in anti-matter?

Anti-matter particles do not to exist for longer than a fraction of a second, since they cancel out with matter particles. The idea is that matter and anti-matter should always cancel out and that at the time of the Big Bang, some imbalance occurred which caused matter particles to tip the scale and outnumber the anti-matter ones, therefore our world exists today. Just recently, NASA’s orbiting Compton Gamma Ray Observatory recorded a fountain of anti-matter positrons streaming from a blackhole in the middle of our Milky Way galaxy.

A blackhole is a star with so much mass that it can no longer hold itself, to the point where it collapses into extreme gravity and deforms the spacetime fabric. Gravity is so high in a blackhole that not even light can escape. This turns these blackholes into an insane amount of energy source, a phenomenon that we can actually see through the exploding quasars at the center of each galaxy, pumping loads of recycled matter and anti-matter radiation back into our universe. E=mc2, so if mass is extremely high in a blackhole, and light is even faster than the speed of light, this results in the greatest energy outcome we know of. But can light exist in a blackhole? Or does it come out before it even makes its way in?

Back in the days when we did not have the technology to find and locate blackholes, Einstein was not certain that they existed, and believed that if they do exist, that time travel would be possible. Could blackholes be some sort of time machines? By speeding up light -faster than the speed of light- light actually exits the black hole before it even enters it. But if light cannot exist inside a blackhole, can something exist at all? Our world is defined by light, and is a reflection of light. If light does not exist in a blackhole, what exists in there?

Image via Wikipedia

Pallab Ghosh, the BBC‘s science correspondant has written an article about how the science community should have a better dialogue with the general public.

I’m sorry, but did i miss something? Generally something scientific isn’t reported on unless it has an impact on commerce, ease of living or if it’s to do with cloning.

So when anything is reported on, the public see it as a big leap, thinking it is totally over their heads and just came out of thin air. In reality, the ideas and inventions that come into the public domain have been developed and worked on for years, sometimes decades previous to any form of public release.

The unfortunate thing is, if you don’t stay even slightly tuned in to what’s going on in the scientific community, you will have a hard time understanding what is going on. Then when it comes to explaining things, scientists at any level sound like arrogant know-it-alls, I tried explaining what a spectrometer was to my mum, as it’s my project for my final year at university but no matter how i tried to word the explanation, i felt i was talking down to her. Which made me feel horrendous as she has 2 degrees – though not in a scientific field.

It also arises in the article that the public only see science as being justifyable if it has a commercial outlet. This is a sad fact of the modern age where people take advantage of things they are being taught, things that are being done, and things that have made their lives easier.

The CCD for example, an accidental discovery which won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009. Is now used every day in digital imaging software. Photographers who never did any science past GCSE? Yeah, you have them to thank for that.

Accidental discoveries and ground breaking theories can only come about with appropriate funding, and the freedom to pursue what could been seen to be commercially “relevant”.

The 2 new satellites Herschel and Planck which are surveying the cold dust of space (Herschel) and investigating the Cosmic Microwave background (Planck) could one day lead to discoveries and inventions not even conceived yet, which could be conceived by the youing scientists who will miss out on furthering their education through post graduate oppotunities, because the public do not understand it’s relevance, and hence can’t see it’s funding potential.

So in this new age of science cuts and finalcially restricted research subjects, who knows what discovery could be over-looked? Curing cancer,  create infinite energy, discover more efficient space travel…. Or even just help us take better pictures.

Related Articles

• Hot (and cold) spots of the cosmos (cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com)
• “Planck:Planck’s first science results and the release of an extensive compact source catalogue” and related posts (sci.esa.int)
• Planck’s new view of the cosmic theatre (spacefellowship.com)

Cosmic Microwave, Background Radiation

Full sky image of the complete Universe, highlighting the cosmic microwave background radiation.  I believe this image is significant in the way that it dovetails with the reality that the Universe had a beginning.

Iran declares war mullets.

Fascinating Wikipedia article on “Bombe,” the decryption device that decoded the Enigma machine on German U-Boats.

A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God is available for free as an audiobook for the month of July from Christianaudio.com.  Use coupon code:  JUL2010.  (HT:  JT)

The U.S. Government is now Cyber-Policing the Internet (and the people of the United States) with a new agency that seems to report to the NSA.  The new logo for said department also contains a mysterious code in the logo, “9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a.”

Update:  It appears that the code has already been easily broken, details here.  (HT:  Aaron Massey)

Inventor of the pixel suggest new medium of transmitting picture.

Reading on Kindle and iPad up to 10% slower than their print counterparts.

La explicación es verdaderamente muy simple.



(click para agrandar)



Sentemos la base

La imagen fue tomada por un satélite que detecta radiación electromagnética que va desde el infrarojo hasta las ondas de radio, siendo estas últimas menos energéticas que las primeras. Nosotros también podemos detectar radiación. Nuestros ojos son sensibles a la parte “visible” del espectro de radiación, por debajo de esto se encuentra la luz infraroja, la cual podemos sentir en la piel como calor, y por encima, la luz ultravioleta, que podemos “detectar” en cierta medida bronceándonos al sol. Más nos quemamos la piel, más rayos UV. Pero por debajo del infrarojo existe radiación como las microondas y la radio. Nadie puede detectar zonas de servicio WiFi o escuchar una estación de radio sin ayuda de un equipo electrónico. A su vez, cuando nos sacan una radiografia (rayos X, por encima del ultravioleta), no sentimos nada.



(hagan click para ver mejor la imágen)


Todo lo que existe produce radiación eletromagnética mediante básicamente dos mecanismos distintos: vibración o interacciones entre partículas. Al comienzo del universo, hubo un momento en el que la temperatura era de 2,7K, o -270,45 °C, que es muy cerca de la mínima temperatura posible. A esta temperatura las cosas irradian principalmente microondas. Ahora, de la misma forma que cuando miramos las estrellas, las vemos en el pasado porque la luz que nos llega tuvo que viajar durante miles de años, con esto ocurre lo mismo. La radiación de fondo de microondas es algo que permea el universo entero, y es el ruido que quedó de fondo de un momento del Big Bang, mucho antes de la formación de las estrellas y galaxias. Esta no solo es una foto del universo, si no que es una foto conjunta de cómo el universo se veía hace mucho tiempo, y de cómo se ve ahora.



¿Qué podemos ver?

Primera duda: ¿Por qué es un óvalo? Por las mismas razones que los mapamundi lo son también, para reducir la distorsión inherente al representar una imagen tridimensional en un plano.

Segunda duda importante: ¿Por qué es violeta? Como no vemos lo mismo que ve Planck, debemos representar las ondas infrarrojas, las microondas y las de radio de alguna forma. Usamos colores. En este caso, el infrarrojo es blanco/azul y las ondas más largas (hacia las ondas de radio) son progresivamente más rojas. Para más información lean esta entrada anterior.

Tercera duda: ¡¿Qué es todo lo demás, que puedo entender de todo esto?! Primero, la franja que atraviesa la imagen horizontalmente es nuestra galaxia. Si, un respiro de familiaridad bien merecido. Como es un disco y estamos dentro de ella, la vemos como una línea. Agarren un plato, colóquenlo a la altura de sus ojos y verán una línea. Esto es lo que se ve. ¿Pero cómo, si yo dije que era una imagen del universo en el pasado, antes de la formación de las galaxias? Lo que sucede es que en la imagen está toda la información captada. Las cosas que hoy irradian ondas a las cuales Planck es sensible también han sido captadas. Luego serán removidas estas fuentes de luz de la imagen final. Imagínense sacar varias fotos, desde el mismo lugar, a un edificio frente al cual pasa mucha gente caminando, y después combinar las fotos para obtener una foto del edificio sin gente.

Las plumas violetas que se extienden hacia los polos es polvo que sale volando de nuestra galaxia. No quiero entrar ahora a describir eso, pero eso es lo que es. Por lo demás, acá hay una imagen que muestra estructuras conocidas, o al menos, conocidas por los astrónomos… pero está Orión, ¡esa la conocemos!



(click para agrandar)



Por último, les sugiero que complementen esto con una visita a esta página, Chromoscope.net, donde pueden ver esta misma imagen y cambiar para ver luz visible, ondas de radio, rayos x, etc. Muy útil y muy interesante.

Espero les haya servido esta explicación para entender la foto y para poder explicarles a sus amigos que espero vayan a buscar al nerd del grupo para saber más.

Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team

The two more years of mapping data have further beaten down statistical uncertainties in the cosmic background map, allowing analysts to refine what it tells us about the cosmos as a whole. If the new, revised results didn’t make much news, it’s because they show modern cosmology to be steady on course. The better data only firm up confidence in what we already thought we knew.

Maybe ESA’s Planck probe might be the next step in discovering some unknown irregularities missed by WMAP, but Planck’s first results will most likely not be released for about another year. So we will have to wait and see.

(One thing I thought interesting that the new data set showed is that instead of the 13.73 ± 0.12 billion year age of the universe was redefined to 13.75 ± 0.11 ) Also WMAP discovered the first direct evidence of helium existing before the first stars (which was predicted, but finally backed up)

According to the Big Bang model, the Universe expanded from an extremely dense and hot state and continues to expand today. A common analogy explains that space itself is expanding, carrying galaxies with it, like raisins in a rising loaf of bread. The graphic scheme above is an artist's concept illustrating the expansion of a portion of a flat Universe.

Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître a Roman Catholic priest and professor of astronomy and physics published a paper in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels with the title A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae. His paper described an expanding universe, beating Edwin Hubble by 2 years, and provided the first observational estimation of what became known as the Hubble constant. Lemaître didn’t realize what would happen if you ran is theory of an expanding universe backwards but 4 years later he introduced his Hypothesis Of The Primeval Atom which later became known as the Big Bang Theory due to a sarcastic comment by Fred Hoyle since this directly contradicted his pet steady state theory. Hoyle’s main objection was that the Big Bang Theory implied a creator, as in the Kalam cosmological argument, while the steady state theory didn’t.

Big Bang Expansion

That objection, although it gave us a nicer name than Hypothesis Of The Primeval Atom, was based on a faulty assumption. The Big Bang does not state that the universe was created ex nihilo, as a large number of creationist believe, but it says there was an expansion of the universe. Creation ex nihilo is something creationists and particularly the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim but it is not something claimed in science since it is a clear violation of the first law of thermodynamics. As far as the universe being finite or infinite, once again a creation of the universe ex nihilo is an untenable position. Run the expansion backwards and you do come to a point commonly called the singularity, a ‘point’ where general relativity gives us infinite density and infinite temperature [general relativity breaks down at this 'point']. As Lemaître thought, when the universe was contracted to this ‘point’ space and time didn’t exist. Lemaître was wrong. Spacetime, at least spacetime as we know it, didn’t exist but the Big Bang was an expansion so spacetime or should I say prespacetime was present. Curiously enough this can be seen by considering an infinite universe. If the universe after the Big Bang and it’s ensuing inflation is infinite, then it must have started as infinite. The same can be seen with a finite universe only it is somewhat harder to see than with an infinite universe. That is the reason you see the word point, when I refer to the singularity, surrounded by inverted commas.  Steady State Theory is no longer a theory given any credence in scientific circles. The last nail in its coffin was the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.

Some further reading

• New Look at Big Bang Radiation Refines Age of Universe
• Redshift by Cosmic Dust trumps Hubble and Tired Light Theories
• Before the Big Bang
• Is The Universe finite or infinite? An interview with Joseph Silk

5) The Expanding Universe

In 1929 Edwin Hubble made the discovery that the Universe is actually expanding. This had direct implications throughout physics and astronomy. It was the reason Einstein called his cosmological constant “the biggest blunder” of his life.

Hubble used Cepheids, commonly known as “standard candles”, to get the relative distances of various galaxies. He then plotted this against their known redshifts. What he discovered was that these redshifts increased as a linear function of distance. That is, the Universe was uniformly expanding. In 1998 it would be discovered that this expansion was actually increasing in speed, contrary to expectations.

4) Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

In the early 60′s, Robert Dickie was searching for the radiation that should have been left over if the Big Bang model was correct. He had assembled a team to look for what science had predicted, but he was beaten to the punch by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. And they weren’t even looking for the CMB.

Using a Dickie radiometer (designed by Dickie himself), Penzias and Wilson happened upon an interfering sort of fuzz while doing other research in 1965. They assumed it was coming from some nearby source, perhaps New York. After ruling out all the obvious possibilities (including pigeons), they were unable to conclude precisely what it was. They published a paper describing their results, which Dickie then used to correctly interpret as the discovery of the CMB. Penzias and Wilson won Nobel Prizes in 1978.

3) The Structure of DNA

There’s the saying that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. This is crucially true, but the essence of the saying can be broaden to another area in biology: nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of the structure of DNA as discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. I dare say, aside from Darwin’s discovery of how evolution happens, the discovery of the molecular shape of DNA has been the most significant event in all of biology. Interestingly, it shouldn’t have happened the way it did. Watson and Crick were one of several teams studying the structure. One member of another team, Rosalind Franklin, had actually produced accurate images of the molecule on her own, but determined she wasn’t ready to present her findings quite yet. Her teammate, Maurice Wilkins, would have none of that and decided to show her images – covertly – to Watson and Crick. They almost immediately recognized its significance (and to an extent Franklin hadn’t quite grasped): DNA formed as a double-helix with a uniform width all the way up its length.

Franklin’s work has unfortunately been drowned in history because of Wilkins’ betrayal, not to mention the fact that she is a woman in science – and that’s no easy task (especially in 1953).

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received their Nobel Prizes in 1962 – Franklin got nothing.

2) General Theory of Relativity

Albert Einstein described his general theory of relativity in 1915, updating Newton’s ideas on gravity. He presented one of the most brilliant ideas man has ever had, fundamentally changing our understanding of how the Universe works. His science knocked down the notion of absolutes within spacetime, indeed, even helping to define the term. (Credit does not go directly to him, but his theory of special relativity was key in the development of the concept, and general relativity is an expansion of special relativity.)

Einstein received his Nobel Prize in 1922 (for 1921). (It was given for work as it specifically pertained to his special theory of relativity, not his theory of general relativity.)

1) Life on Mars

For the life of me, I don’t understand why no one seems to care about this. NASA recently announced it had reexamined a meteorite discovered in 1984 and confirmed that it contained within it microbial life which did not originate on Earth. While that may seem unfitting for a post about 20th century discoveries and events, the meteorite was originally described in 1996 to much fanfare. Over time a quiet consensus grew that the shapes in the rock could be formed via geological processes. The recent analysis blew those concerns out of the water.

The above diagram is the familiar schemata showing the Big Bang, but with a tiny theoretical point just behind the initial singularity (the faint dot just to the left of the yellow circle). It is only – and can only be – a theoretical point.  We can imagine it, we can discuss it hypothetically, but it can never be proven because of the initial heat of the Big Bang. That heat has been estimated at 10^32 Kelvin. The initial heat, so great that it borders on the inconceivable, effectively establishes a fundamental limitation on what can be known about the universe.

The tiny point on the diagram represents the “indeterminate point”. Though science may look back to the Big Bang, it can never describe the indeterminate point because of lack of information. The reader will pardon any excessive redundancy; perhaps this theoretical point should be called the “Great Indeterminate Point”. The initial heat obliterated any information that would have been left theoretically before the Big Bang. We can barely detect information from the initial singularity, so can we really expect to find information from a time before the Big Bang?

What we know is that the Big Bang began with immense heat. Professor Gamow predicted that background radiation from the initial singularity would still be detectable.  As a professor at George Washington University, he published often. His teacher in Russia, Friedmann, had also concluded that the universe began with an initial singularity.

Hubble, the famous astronomer and Oxford graduate who worked with Vesto Slipher, observed that the universe was expanding. He based his observations on data he recorded through his astronomy work using the giant Mount Wilson telescope, and in doing so, he built upon the work of Slipher. LeMaitre, too, believed that the universe began with an initial singularity.

Professor Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, has described the initial moments that followed the Big Bang in his book, “The First Three Minutes”. According to Weinberg, the initial moment was one of incredible heat. Any reader who doubts this can review Professor Weinberg’s book.  It was a moment of such incredible heat that one can hardly imagine it.

After Professor Hoyle derisively labeled Gamow’s concept “The Big Bang Theory”, the name became a part of our vocabulary. Gamow, known for his sense of humor, named Alpher and Bethe as co-authors of the paper; Herman joined later. (Any reader or researcher who wishes to learn more on the topic can visit the Library of Congress.) Professor Gamow was teaching at George Washington at the time along with Alpher, his assistant.

Wilson and Penzias, both at ATT at the time, stumbled upon the background noise that confirmed the Big Bang. Years later, George Smoot and his team at Berkeley produced a map that shows the cosmic background radiation. Wilson, Penzias, and Smoot all received Nobel prizes for their work, and it has been conclusively established that the universe began in an initial moment of tremendous heat.

Let us presume, for sake of argument, that the indeterminate point is at 10^(-3) beyond the Big Bang. What information do we have about such a moment? How do we collect information about that moment? If our best instruments can barely detect the background radiation from the initial singularity, how can know anything about a theoretical point beyond the Big Bang? What physical proof can Professor Penrose offer for a time beyond the Big Bang?

Would it be easier if the scientific community were to begin analysis at a full one second beyond the Big Bang? We lack information about anything beyond the Big Bang, so how can we know anything about such a theoretical epoch? Indeed, what information do we have about anything that theoretically existed before the Big Bang? How is it that we are to proceed on exploration of anything beyond the Big Bang?

The theoretical point on the other side of the Big Bang cannot be proven because of lack of information. With it falls all other notions, concepts, and conjecture about what may have happened beyond the Big Bang.

What lies beyond the Big Bang? There be dark, ugly dragons beyond that point.  Seriously, with the dearth of physical evidence on what occurred after the Big Bang, how is that we can expect to gather evidence of anything beyond it? Exactly where do we start?

It is true that we have the Cosmic Microwave Background information. That is only a faint perturbation in the radiation from the initial singularity. That evidence has been confirmed by Wilson, Penzias, and by the Smoot team at Berkeley who built the COBE telescope and confirmed it. Wilkinson at Princeton confirmed it.

Nothing has been presented to date that proves that anything physical exists or existed in the theoretical area beyond the Big Bang. To my mind, it would be a vain effort to attempt to prove that anything ever existed at the theoretical point.

Easter, 2009.

Copyright, 2009. Wade Hobbs, Jr.

The Big Bang is one of the fundamental theories (and I do mean “theory” in a scientific sense) of modern cosmology. It describes what happened just after the universe formed, how primordial matter was made, and the growth of structures like galaxies and superclusters of galaxies.

Being so fundamental in nature, it is not surprising that people who want to try to use astronomy to support a religious creation mythology try to mythify it, or at least cast enough doubt and suspicion on its plausibility that their adherents will take their word for it. (This is not a straw man on my part, but it is discussed in the broadcast (below) for several minutes towards the end.)

This entry is based on refuting the “Myth that the Big Bang Has Been Proven” Institute for Creation Research radio broadcast, originally aired on December 11, 1999, and re-aired on June 22, 2002.

Background Information

I don’t really have enough room here (and you likely don’t want to read) to go into the whole theory of Big Bang Cosmology, nor to really discuss in-depth the Three Pillars of evidence for the Big Bang theory (expanding universe, cosmic microwave background radiation, amounts of the light elements; sometimes the growth of large-scale structures is tossed in as a Fourth). Rather, as is generally the case when I discuss an ICR radio episode, I will address the claims as they come.

Individual Claims

Claim: “It seems like every time we turn on the TV, read the newspaper, or listen to the news, we hear about the big bang.” (at the beginning of the broadcast, by the narrator).

Response: Right off the bat, here, we have a straw man argument – they’re arguing against something that simply isn’t true. Honestly, think about it: When was the last time you picked up a newspaper or turned on the TV (unless it was a sci-fi show) and they were discussing the Big Bang?

Claim: “8 to 20 billion years ago, the date is not quite certain, the universe began suddenly.” (about 1 min 5 sec, Danny Faulkner).

Response: I’ll begrudge them this that when the show was originally recorded 10 years ago, the date wasn’t really certain, and estimates ranged from about 10-20 billion years for the formation of the universe. However, the latest data from the WMAP satellite places the age at about 14.1 billion years for the age of the cosmos.

Claim: “One of the misconceptions of the Big Bang theory is that, since the universe is expanding, the theory must be true.” (~1:30, Narrator). Immediately following, “It turns out this isn’t true at all, it turns out the expansion of the universe was discovered before the Big Bang model was developed. In fact, the Big Bang model was developed to explain why the universe was expanding.” (Danny Faulkner)

Response: I’m trying to find the logical fallacy that is effectively, “you’re either ignorant of the field, or you’re lying.” I think I can again politely refer to this as a straw man fallacy because he’s arguing against something that we astronomers don’t actually say. It is true that the expanding universe is one of the Three Pillars of the Big Bang. In general, logically, if something is getting larger today, it must have been smaller in the past. Unless something happened further in the past to change this, then the logical assumption is that it would continue to shrink the further in the past you go, until it was an infinitesimally small thing. But, this is not the only line of evidence, as I very briefly mentioned in my Background Information above.

The second sentence of this claim is, to my knowledge, mostly correct. But that’s how science works: We think something operates one way (originally, the “Steady-State” model saying that the universe has pretty much always been like it is today). But, new evidence (expansion) shows that our thinking was incorrect. Hence, we need to revise our models, or come up with new ones. I’m honestly not sure why they emphasize this except in the sense that it’s a subtle ad hominem attack (effectively, “You crazy ‘evolutionary’ astronomers don’t know what you’re doing, you have to keep changing your theories”) as well as a small tu quoque fallacy (effectively, “My evidence may not be valid, but neither is yours.”).

Claim: “One scientific problem with the Big Bang is that no like process has ever been observed so, science is supposed to deal with observation … yet no one has ever seen an explosion like a Big Bang. So right away, that places the Big Bang outside the realm of science.” (~2:00, Jonathan Henry)

Response: Ah, my first use of the False Continuum fallacy by attempting to argue that astronomers are guilty of the Inconsistency logical fallacy. In other words, he is implying that astronomers are being inconsistent in that we can’t have seen a Big Bang, therefore it’s faith, just like we’re claiming religion is faith because we can’t see (a) G/god(s). But the false continuum is that there really isn’t a fuzzy line of “scientific faith” in the Big Bang – there are real consequences and real predictions that come from it.

Unlike creationism, from where there can be no scientific evidence, “proof,” nor predictions from, models of the Big Bang predicted the existence of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR, or sometimes CMB) – the discovery of which resulted in a 3-way Nobel Prize – as well as predictions about the relative abundance of hydrogen to helium, lithium, and beryllium, which have so far been observed to be consistent with the Big Bang model.

It’s true, we can’t “see” the Big Bang, nor can we see another Big Bang simply by definition. But we can observe its effects and check for their consistency with that model. And so far, they support the Big Bang.

Claim: “One of the … predictions … has been that all matter in the universe aught to be distributed evenly everywhere.” (~3:00, Jonathan Henry)

Response: Again, ignorance, a lie, or politely a straw man. No one argues this to be the case because it’s OBVIOUSLY not the case (the fact that you sit separate from your chair, the air, the planet, and the solar system is proof that this is not the case). It may have initially been that when the theory was first developed that this was a consequence. But, that was quickly modified because, as I said, it obviously is not the case. We explain the non-uniform distribution as being caused by tiny fluctuations in the universe at the earliest times. Over hundreds of thousands of years, these grew into much larger variations in density, which led to the large-scale structures that we see today.

Claim: Paraphrasing this claim from Russ Humphreys (~4:15) – The Hubble Space Telescope has observed galaxies that formed about 700,000 years after the Big Bang, but this can’t be because galaxies take longer than that to form.

Response: This is actually a pretty neat science result (NASA Press Release, a more recent one than the show was referring to). What it shows is that galaxies were actually already being formed earlier than had been previously assumed, but that was only under one model of galaxy formation – a “Top-Down” approach where larger galaxies form first. What this is evidence for is more of a “Bottom-Up” mechanism, where smaller things formed first, in this case dwarf galaxies. So this is another case where there is a “distortion” of the facts. (Another related article.)

Claim: “Dark matter is the brain child of the fertile imagination of the Big Bang theorist who, not seeing the amount of matter that their theory requires invent other matter that we can’t see. … Dark matter … is pure speculation.” (~4:45, Russ Humphreys)

Response: Again, ignorance, a lie, or politely a straw man. To my knowledge, the ideas behind dark matter originally had nothing to do with the Big Bang. The problem was that stars in the outer parts of spiral galaxies were moving too quickly. In order to get them to move as fast as they were, our current understanding of physics required that there be much more mass, otherwise the stars would escape the gravitational pull of the galaxy because there wasn’t enough material that we could see to hold them all in. The alternative – which still have many proponents – is that our Newtonian theories of gravity need to be revised, that they work on the scales of humans, planets, and solar systems, but there may be a small term in the equations that only becomes noticeable on the scale of galaxies. You may ask, “What does this have to do with the Big Bang?” Good question. I’d like to know that, too, since the original Big Bang theories have nothing to do with dark matter.

Now, we can look at the CMBR and determine that there is a significant mass component to the universe that we can’t see, which we refer to as dark matter. WMAP results put it at about 23% of all the energy-mass of the universe being composed of dark matter. To to very quickly re-cap, the idea of dark matter originated because stars were moving too quickly for galaxies to be only composed of matter we could see, and this was later verified to be a “dark matter” by observations of the CMBR … it is not required for the Big Bang theory, nor would its existence or lack of existence have anything to do with whether or not the Big Bang model is correct.

Claim: “According to evolutionary theory, huge gas clouds were produced by the Big Bang. Soon these gas clouds collapsed into stars, planets, and galaxies, which emitted microwave radiation. Because of the pockets and clumps of these galaxies, there should be corresponding pockets of radiation. Therefore the Big Bang theory would predict that cosmic radiation would be uneven throughout the universe.” (~5:30, Narrator)

Response: I honestly don’t know what to say to this. What the narrator stated is equivalent to saying, “Water is dry.” It’s just wrong. One would think that if they have any sense of intellectual honesty, they would at least check on their facts.

The idea behind the CMBR can really be summed up in about 3 sentences: After the universe formed, it was very hot, and light (photons) could not move without being absorbed and re-emitted by atoms, which meant that the universe was opaque (kinda like a star). As the universe continued to expand, it cooled down, and eventually light was finally able to stream freely without interacting with the atoms. This first light, from when the universe became transparent, is what we see as the CMBR.

Now, what the CMBR reflects are the fluctuations in density in the universe at that time. Hotter regions of the CMBR indicate denser regions, and cooler indicates more rarified regions. The reason that it is in the microwave has nothing to do with galaxies, stars, and planets emitting microwave radiation, it’s because the radiation comes from so far away (back in time) that the light has been stretched into the microwave wavelengths. If we existed billions of years ago, it would be higher-energy light, even to the point of visible, and the entire sky would literally glow with it.

For more information on the CMBR, visit the WMAP Overview.

Claim: Paraphrasing this claim from Russ Humphreys (~6:00) – The variations in the CMBR are 10x smaller than what scientists predicted, but this is now claimed as proof of the Big Bang.

Response: As I said above, this is the nature of science. I honestly don’t know if this claim is correct, but even if it is, it does not take away from the idea that the CMBR was directly predicted from the Big Bang theory. Different perturbations of that theory can be used when it’s not well-constrained by other data. Based upon the best available data at the time, astronomers may have predicted the variations would be larger than they found them to be.

That they were discovered to be smaller meant that they had new constraints on their models and could go back and revise them to better fit the data, which can then be used to make future predictions. This has nothing to do with showing that the Big Bang is wrong, just with revising the specifics, which is how science works. Creationism, on the other hand, hasn’t changed in hundreds of years because there is only one piece of “evidence,” the Bible.

Claim: Paraphrasing this claim from Otto Berg (~7:30) – The biggest problem with the Big Bang is how to account for the formation of life? How could life evolve from a dead cluster?

Response: This is a straw man. The origin of life has absolutely positively NOTHING to do with the Big Bang (nor, for that matter, does it have anything to do with evolution).

Claim: “All life has carbon in it … [but] it’s an extreme improbability that carbon would have formed … since [the universe] was only 25% helium. [For carbon] to form, it would require two helium atoms to combine at exactly the right velocity with enough energy but not too much energy, it would collide and form a beryllium atom, and that beryllium atom would combine with another helium atom – with the right velocity, not too much not too little – to form the carbon atom. If you think about the improbability about that carbon atom — it’s very improbable. All life has carbon.” (~8:30, Otto Berg)

Response: I’m not sure why a particle physicist doesn’t know this, but Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (the third pillar) does not produce carbon, or if it does, it’s very very little. The early universe was pretty much like a star – except the whole universe was a star. Protons and neutrons fused to hydrogen, or deuterium, and deuterium could fuse into helium. But these conditions did not last very long, and they only had time to really fuse about 23-24% into helium-3 and helium-4. A very little bit of lithium-7 was created, but only a negligible amount (if any) of carbon. So if nothing else, he’s actually correct, but it’s a non sequitur.

Today’s carbon formed in stars. Massive stars, generally more massive than the sun, can easily reach the temperatures and pressures required to make forming carbon not a statistical improbability. We’ve known this for decades, as it’s relatively basic nuclear physics. Where did the carbon in life today come from? Past generations of stars. Carl Sagan put it well: “We are star stuff.”

For more on the fusion processes in stars, you can see the Fusion beta page of my revised astronomy website (please note that the bulk of the site is not yet finished, but that page is reasonably complete and fairly extensive).

Final Thoughts

The Big Bang is far from a myth that young-Earth creationists may have you believe. Is it “Proven?” Or is it a “Fact?” No. But really nothing in science is. A “Fact” means that it is TRUTH, that it is known beyond all doubt. As I discussed in my LHC particle two months ago, that’s not how science works. It only takes one verified and inexplicable observation to destroy a theory.

But from a scientific standpoint, a “Theory” is as close to a “Fact” as we can get. The Big Bang Theory has been tested and revised over almost the last 100 years. It has withstood efforts to disprove it, and it still remains the foundation of modern cosmology.

Herschel is shown in the upper portion of the figure at left. Planck is in the lower portion of the figure.

Herschel will contain the largest primary mirror ever deployed in space at 3 meters, or 11.5 feet. It will be the first space observatory ever to study the far infrared and sub-millimeter waveband, something that is very difficult to accomplish from ground based observatories. After placement in orbit, commissioning will take six months with a planned mission length of three years.

Using a liquid helium cryostat, its telescope and instruments will be cooled to near absolute zero enabling it to probe the cool universe for information on how stars and galaxies formed and evolved.

Planck will carry out the most accurate survey ever of the cosmic microwave background radiation permeating the universe. Measurements of the temperature of the CMBR is estimated to be within a millionth of a degree Celsius.

Named after Max Planck (1858-1947), the founder of quantum theory, the mission will complement and improve upon the data provided by NASA’s WMAP spacecraft.

NASA this week released five years of data collected by WMAP that includes three major findings:

1. New evidence that cosmic neutrinos fly all around the universe penetrating everything in their path;
2. Clear evidence the first stars created a cosmic ‘fog’ after more than 400 million years; and,
3. New constraints on the expansion of the universe in the first trillionth of second of birth.

WMAP measures the oldest light left over from the beginnings of the universe. This light lost energy as the universe expanded over the last 13.7 billion years such that now the energy is seen as microwaves, which the WMAP is designed to detect and measure. Microwave light seen by WMAP when the universe was only 380,000 years old shows neutrinos constituted 10% of the universe, photons 15%, dark matter 63%, atoms 12% and not much dark energy.

WMAP data shows the present universe to consist of 4.6% atoms, 23% dark matter, 72% dark energy and less than 1% neutrinos. Neutrinos were so plentiful in the early universe they affected the microwaves that WMAP sees suggesting that with 99.5% confidence, a cosmic neutrino background element was present.

WMAP has also found new insights into when the first generation of stars began. The glow from these stars created a thin fog consisting of electrons in their surrounding gas that scatters microwaves, like light from a car’s headlights scatters when shined into fog. This fog began about 400 million years after the big bang and lasted for 500 million years.

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation map

Lastly, WMAP data now places constraints on the inflation scenarios of the early expansion of the universe, with some scenarios eliminated altogether.

Results of this WMAP data were issued in seven papers submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.

See this link for the actual NASA news release: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/mar/HQ_08076_WMAP_release.html

Consider, very carefully, the defining data points of the realms in which we will be working are considered by most scholars as not yet found, perhaps not yet reachable. Renowned professional scientists and physicists have not responded to requests or simply discontinued email discussions.Several realms – threads – come to mind: