The Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio news this morning
carried an interview with Chris Mullis about a galaxy cluster,
discovered initially with X-rays and then confirmed
spectroscopically with the VLT.

http://www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/~cmul...rch/xmmuj2235/

Discovery of an X-ray-Luminous Galaxy Cluster at z=1.4
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503004

The interview should soon be available at:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/brkfast/

Chris Mullis et al. say their technique could be used to find
many such objects with relative ease.

. . . XMMUJ2235.3-2557 is likely more massive
than RDCS1252-29 (previously the most massive, distant
cluster known at z = 1.24).

They estimate the cluster is 9 billion light years away. In
the interview Chris Mullis indicated that he thought the cluster
must have begun forming 11 billion years ago. He referred to
the age of the Universe as being 13.7 billion years.

He indicated that this cluster is a major challenge to theories
of galaxy formation - which will need to be revised in order to
account for them forming and collecting themselves into clusters
so rapidly.

I think that a better approach would be to question the Big Bang
Theory. All we need to disprove it is a mechanism by which
light is redshifted 1 part in about 15 billion per year of
travel in the intergalactic plasma. See

http://astroneu.com/plasma-redshift-1/

for such theories and discussion of problems with the BBT and
some alternative theories, concerning:

Heating and acceleration of stellar coronae and winds.

How galaxy clusters do not resemble the shapes one would
expect to result from gravitational formation, but rather
the liquid between bubbles in a foam. I propose the void
IGM is heated to extreme temperatures by a plasma redshift
(I plan to reformulate this as sparse particle redshift)
of distant starlight, creating high enough pressures,
despite the very low density, to push galaxies (and their
more massive surrounding coronae) into the cluster or
supercluster shapes we observe.

Plasma (sparse particle) redshift occurring close to quasars -
so the Lyman forest is local to the quasar. This would also
explain the failure to find the transverse proximity effect
with a foreground quasar - a failure which directly challenges
the Doppler / expansion assumption about redshift on which the
Big Bang Theory is based.

A theory of dark matter in galactic halos consisting of black
dwarfs and their collision fragments. This would be
impossible if the galaxies are less than 14 billion years
old or so, since (according to conventional theories, which
I think are probably fine) stars would take too long to cool.
However, if we we abandon the BBT and consider that galaxies
are probably much older than this, with some as-yet unknown
source of matter/energy, then they could be old enough to
generate collapsed and cooled stars with a mass exceeding that
of the luminous stars. I propose how these would eventually
wind up in widely dispersed elliptical orbits around a spiral
galaxy - so explaining the long-standing problem of galactic
rotation curves.

Pointers to Jerry Jensen's critique of the conventional
analysis of supernova light curves. This conventional finding
of time dilation would need to be disproven in order to
abandon the BBT.


- Robin http://astroneu.com http://www.firstpr.com.au