Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know of any other evidence for dark energy, other than that mathematical physicists think the equations would be prettier with some, although they sort of wish there was more. It is quite embarrassing that the value was so close to zero without being zero, so that might be one embarrassment less. We already knew there was likely to be something fishy about the most distant supernovas, because we have two dive…
Hmm. Is this new result in the right direction to solve the Hubble Constant problem?
Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
51–60 of 295 posts
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#52To know if the universe is expanding, we need to know the following: how far away things are, and whether they're moving away from us. In an accelerating universe, there's evidence that things were moving away from us slower in the past. The evidence that things are moving away from us is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of any light travelling through it also expands, shifting it towards the red end of t…
That's how I understand it. But maybe there are other standardizable objects. The sense I got from TFA is that there aren't .
[0] There is an explanation of this calibration here: https://aasnova.org/2019/07/26/tldr-the-trgb-gives-us-anothe...
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#53To know if the universe is expanding, we need to know the following: how far away things are, and whether they're moving away from us. In an accelerating universe, there's evidence that things were moving away from us slower in the past. The evidence that things are moving away from us is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of any light travelling through it also expands, shifting it towards the red end of t…
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#54To know if the universe is expanding, we need to know the following: how far away things are, and whether they're moving away from us. In an accelerating universe, there's evidence that things were moving away from us slower in the past. The evidence that things are moving away from us is that as the universe expands, the wavelength of any light travelling through it also expands, shifting it towards the red end of t…
I'm not an astronomer, but "tired light" makes more intuitive sense to me to explain the redshift. In effect, we already know that matter can affect light through gravitational interaction. Since light is travelling so fast and far it seems intuitive thst interstellar matter, as fleeting as it is, could act to slow light down over these great spacetime distances.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. Is this new result in the right direction to solve the Hubble Constant problem?
Haha, it would be fun if we now have three Hubble constants.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this have any affect on the search for dark matter? Are the two interconnected at all?
No. Dark matter is assumed to exist from the excessively quick rotation of stars around the cores of galaxies. Dark energy is/was assumed to exist in anomalous expansion of the universe based on redshifts.
That's what initiated Zwicky's notion in the '30s. It is far from being the only, or even the main, evidence for dark matter (which can be read as "mass effects we can detect not associated with matter we can currently detect").
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#57The main take is that our current models having gravity as the main driving force shaping our universe is a misunderstanding - hence rejecting the idea of dark matter / dark energy that was "invented" to make for math for gravity work with the observations of expansion.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#58"...Prof. Young-Wook Lee (Yonsei Univ., Seoul), who led the project said, "Quoting Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I am not sure we have such extraordinary evidence for dark energy. Our result illustrates that dark energy from SN cosmology, which led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, might be an artifact of a fragile and false assumption."" Is he implying that other cosmologists…
"Dark energy" is a conventional term to describe some energy of unknown source that has the effect of accelerating space expansion with time. We call "dark energy" the thing that explains this observation, whatever that thing might be (we just assume it's some form of energy since it produces motion, acceleration, in a way seemingly opposed to, and stronger than gravity, but for all we knew it could be fluffy creatures from the 7th dimension, "energy" is just an educated guess).
If you remove the observational discrepancy, then you remove the need for "dark energy" to exist in the first place.
The article precisely suggests that:
- there was no such observational discrepancy, rather errors in calculations following observation
- reality is thus shown to conform to our current equations; it's our interpretation of the pretty pictures we took that was wrong all along; this is now corrected.
If true, it's the end of dark energy as a cause because the consequence is gone.
At no point (before or after it's proven or disproven) does "dark energy" imply a postulate on "what it actually is" — and chances are, when we explain previously unknown phenomena, the finders come up with a new theory and ad hoc terminology. Rarely the word sticks when it's just too good an intuition — e.g. the "atom".
Note that "dark matter" is exactly the same, it's a conventional term to denote some matter-like unknown object that has the effect of giving galaxies their characteristic shapes and interactions forming much larger patterns (structure about as big to individual galaxies as galaxies are to individual stars).
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If these are both overturned it will be a huge blow to "scientists" credibility This is nonsense. Scientists have been wrong in several occasions, it is just part of the profession. For example, in the years leading to the discovery of relativity, many physicists believed there was something called "ether" that worked to fix the speed of light that they had evidence to be the same in all directions.
When chemists were asked, at the end of the 19th century, whether the the atoms in their molecular diagrams were real, they always said, "No, that's just a model we use." It wasn't until Brownian motion needed actual atoms that they began to say atoms had objective reality. Cosmologists could learn a lot from 19th-century chemists.
Re: Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error
#60"...Prof. Young-Wook Lee (Yonsei Univ., Seoul), who led the project said, "Quoting Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I am not sure we have such extraordinary evidence for dark energy. Our result illustrates that dark energy from SN cosmology, which led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, might be an artifact of a fragile and false assumption."" Is he implying that other cosmologists…
> Is he implying that other cosmologists have proceeded as if dark energy is well evidenced? I thought dark matter and dark energy are simply placeholders for a discrepancy we see between our models of the universe and our observations. No?