First Stars In Universe Detected (in 1964 actually, well, maybe...)!!!

NOTE: Off-topic newsgroups removed...

"Double-A" wrote in message...
ups.com...

Rev. 11D Meow! wrote:

And they are only 6,660 years old!!!

Well, so much for needing to fight for whether Intelligent Design is
true or not.

This PROVES ID is true!!!


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...starlight.html

Yippee!

Yee Haw!!

Yahooie!!!

neener neener neener

Can't be.

That would be 655 years before the universe was created!

Now *there's* a hearty LOL for ya, AA! g

The article was about the apparently lumpy CIB, the cosmic
infrared background (as opposed to the smoother and more
isotropic CMB, the cosmic microwave background).

And it appears to prove Gamow et al. wrong about the CMB.
While the CMB is less anistropic (lumpy) than the CIB, it is
*still* not perfectly smooth. So while the CIB does appear to
be remnant radiation left over from some of the older very
luminous objects, so does the CMB appear to be. I propose
that the CMB is remnant radiation still coming at us from even
*older* luminous objects (NOT from an initial "Big Bang").

Put this together with the following, and perhaps people won't
be so quick to say that the CMB is evidence or "proof" that
there was a Big Bang beginning...

(Note to J. Zinni: I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing this
for Double-A and everybody else! g)

Okay, let's follow current reasoning in astronomy/cosmology.
From our vantage point here on our planet Earth, the farther
out into space we look, the longer back into the past we are
peering.

When we look at that absolutely gorgeous "star" just a bit
west of Orion the Hunter and Taurus the Bull, the very close
planet Mars, we can only see Mars as it was a little over 3
minutes ago. And we know this is because Mars is presently
about 35 million miles away, and the Sun's light which comes
to us from Mars by reflection travels just over 186,000 miles
per second. So it takes about 187 seconds for Mars' light
to reach Earth.

That absolutely gorgeous planet could explode, and we
wouldn't know about it for a minimum of 3 minutes!

So when we look at Mars, we are peering 3 minutes into
the past. With the stars, the calculations are much easier if
we use "light years" to measure their distances from Earth.
The nearest stars (next to the Sun) are the Centauri group,
and they're about 4 light years distant. So we are peering
about 4 years into the past when we view these stars. The
same principle holds true for all radiations of all objects in
the sky. The bright star Sirius is 8.6 light years away. The
awesome galaxy in Andromeda is over 2 million light years
in distance. And so on.

So the farther away we look, the farther into the past we
can see. Therefore, if we look "far enough", we ought to
see the "earliest stars and galaxies" which were formed just
after the Big Bang. And the CIB, the cosmic infrared
background radiation, is light from older stars which has
decreased down to the invisible infrared range, but which
was once (long, long ago) emitted in the visible light range.

This brings us to perhaps a new slant on the Uncertainty
Principle, doesn't it? We can state with some certainty
that the farther away an object is from Earth, the more
UNcertain we can be as to whether or not the object still
exists and still radiates energy.

The Sun is about 8 light minutes away from Earth, so we
can be pretty darned certain that it's still there, and it's
still going to be there at the next sunrise. The Centauri
Group of stars is "just" 4 light years away, so they're
probably "still there", also, as is Sirius and other closer
stars.

And the Andromeda galaxy, while a whopping 2 million
light years away (if Earth were scaled down to the size of
a grape, the Andromeda galaxy would still be about a
trillion miles away), is probably still "up there" even though
we can only see it 2 million years in the past. The reason
we can be reasonably certain of this is that we can roughly
estimate the ages of stars in Andromeda, and some of them
are relatively "young". Our Sun's lifetime will run about 11
billion years, so 2 million years is a cakewalk for most stars.

Hopefully, it is becoming clear to you that the farther away
we look, the more uncertain we can be whether or not the
object we are looking at has blown up or whatever, and no
longer exists.

So let's assume for the moment that the Universe is about
14 billion years old as our current theory holds. This must
mean that many of the very far objects we can see (and
perhaps a certain number of closer objects we can see)
have extinguished in some manner and no longer exist. And
here's the clincher -- their light is still getting to us because
they were rather long-lived, to the tune of several billion
years or so. This is not true of the so-called Big Bang,
though.

When the light from any object reaches us, then what? It
must hit our eyeballs for us to see it. But some of that
light only passes "near" us. Some of the light only passes
"near" Earth and then keeps on going. We cannot see it,
for it is moving away from us.

The Big Bang, if it did happen, was a one-time happening.
It happened -- and then it was over, and space expanded.
This begs the question, "Why would we still be sensing any
radiation from this one-time happening?" The radiation
which would have been emitted from a Big Bang beginning
would all be on the outer edges of the expansion. There
would be no residual radiation which keeps on being
emitted and finally gets to us dampened down to the range
of microwaves 14 billion years later. All the radiation from
the one-time event called the Big Bang would be well
beyond all the galaxies, all the stars, and our planet. This
energy would be "out in front of us" in the expansionary
scheme of things.

However, what *would* still be reaching us is radiation
from objects that emitted their radiations for a much longer
period than a one-time Big Bang-type radiation emission.
So the sources of the CMB are similar to the sources of
the CIB. Except that the CMB sources began emitting
their light at some point *before* the CIB sources began
radiating.

So... radiation from even earlier, older stars in the Universe
was detected some time ago in 1964 by Arno Penzias and
Robert Woodrow Wilson, who received a Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1978 for their discovery of the CMB. And yes,
i still believe they deserve the prize, don't you?

The CMB is no more evidence for a Big Bang single event
than the CIB would be. The now-microwave emissions of
the CMB came from sources which were just farther away
(and took longer to reach us) than the now-infrared
emissions coming from sources of the CIB. And some of
them may still exist. Of this we can be very uncertain.

Yet we can be VERY certain that the Big Bang no longer
exists, can't we? (IF it ever did exist, of course.) So how
can radiation that came long before us, happened and then
was over and ended long before us, precisely how can this
radiation be sensed by us any more than the Sun's light
from 10 or 20 years ago can still be sensed?

happy days and...
starry starry nights!

--
Fly to the stars,
Flee to the wind,
Settle for Mars,
'Tis round the bend.

Indelibly yours,
Paine http://www.savethechildren.org/
http://www.painellsworth.net