dgruss wrote

Quote:
lyndonashmore: K Trumpler effect is the skeleton in the BB cupboard. First noticed in 1911 by W.W. Campbell and confirmed year in and year out by others ever since, is where young high mass stars consistently have a higher redshift than they should have (don't ask me why they dont call it the W Campbell effect!) text books say "it is largely ignored" I wonder why?

Arp has also discussed this.

Cyrek1 reply
The effect mentioned above is easily explained by the 'expansion of the light waves'. These objects are obviously high temperature emittimg objects.

My theory of the redshift as being caused by and intrinsic force that causes the light waves to expand explains the following:

Why we appear to be in the center of the Universe.
Olbers Paradox
The dark energy question
Arps redshift anomoly

Further explanation:
We appear to be in the center because all the light comming toward us is expanded regardless of where you would be in this SSU.

Olbers Paradox - The light expands into the infrared zone which is invisible to us from the very distant objects.

Dark Energy - The intrinsic force expanding the lightwaves is weakening as it expands because of the wider expanded light. This effects the RATE of expansion per unit distance. This creates the illusion that space is expanding.

Arps anomoly - High temperature objects will cause stronger intrinsic forces than lower temperature objects. Therefore, they would be creating a higher redshift.
Quasars are HIGH temperature emittimg objects.

__________________
aka Michael Cyrek

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Try this link, it gives ref to Arps paper on Trumpler effect. It is also mentioned in Stewart Clarks book 'redshift'

Cyrek1, anyone, anywhere, would appear to be in the center of the universe.

LyndonAshmore, I don't see a link... (I looked at the previous ones with Arp's results, but they only had abstracts.)

Edit: Jerry Jenson, I don't see how inflation was "magical"...

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Try this.

As for the ADS search, any papers from 1996 and earlier you should be able to download if you select the print or send pdf option below the abstract. For later papers you may need to go to the ApJ, AJ, or A&A websites and you can download them there if they are at least 3 years old.

In the original BB scenario, there was primal material, it expanded rapidly then started to condense into dusty galaxies, that evolved to the current state. We now know there is extensive galaxy cluster and super cluster structure dating back too much earlier than the original theoretical condensation.

The problem is: What was the mechanism that created all this structure, and how did the evidence of a primal event snake through it? As I stated before: Assuming the CMB is remnant of a primal event is like looking at the patterns in a waffle and stating "Somebody obviously put this batter through a strainer". I don't think the analogy could be clearer, or more accurate.

The same problem exists in the microwave anisotropy. Ned Wright & company insist this is the “sub pattern within the waffle” that proves the strainer theory. But when you look at the contamination in the CMB, obviously the emissions from our own galaxy mess it up the most. So shouldn’t the emissions from all the other galaxies cause similar effects? Of course! But they can’t: Even with Dark Matter and Energy stuffed into the equation, to account for structure formation, the weak peaks must be the results of Sachs Wolfe effects rather than ZKG effects. Why do we see ZKG (inverse Compton) effects from our own galaxy, but not from any others? Sorry Ned, this pet theory is seriously flawed by gross, unsupportable suppositions.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Dusty? Is that what current theory says? Or are you just being poetic? I'm not criticizing, I'm nitpicking...
49.9% Hydrogen, 49.9% Helium, Trace amounts of Li... It must be lithium dust...

But, yes. The CMB data should account for other galaxies. I've never heard of a report that says they've 'subtracted' this from the CMB. JJ, you're on to something, aren't you?

__________________

Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

What about gravitational waves? A relatively recent SciAm article had something on the possible effects of gravitational waves on the early universe... Didn't see it anywhere else, though, and SciAm isn't Nature. I forget the details of the article... must read it again, then I'll have to do some searches to see if stuff like it can be found anywhere else...

As for the formation of galactic clusters and superclusters, I've already put up a link about how inflation can account for that... Look at the "cosmic strings" link if you haven't already.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Sorry about the link, still got a hangover from the celebrations. Try this one. There are lots just type in”Trumpler redshift star” into a search engine
http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/DOPPLER/Doppler.html
Anyway, how about this for censorship? I received this e mail about Ashmore’s paradox (www.lyndonashmore.com) which is now a peer reviewed paper accepted for publication and I got this e mail which I have edited below to preserve the confidentiality of the sender
Dear Mr. Ashmore:
Let me introduce myself I teach both cosmology and undergraduate physics University.
Though the problem is now compounded by the psychology of public commitment, I think it would be appropriate if you were to discreetly withdraw your derivation from public view, and I politely suggest that you do that.
No way Hosay

I'm starting to wonder if you're still drunk... :roll:

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

I don't think current theory has a well-defined path between the initial, light element ratio, the CMB event and the imposing fractal structure . As far back as we can say with any confidence, the supercluster structure persists. Since none of this was in the original BB scene, the causal mechanism have been dreamed up after the fact and must be viewed with extreme skepticism.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Again: inflation. Phase transitions. You know how that works, don't you? Even Scientific American gets into it. (Though I won't say that cosmic strings exist until I see evidence of one.) And of course, there are other possibilites... gravitational waves, for example... Dark matter, though there is plenty of room for skepticism with dark matter made of WIMPs... And I believe some guy came up with a theory involving neutrinos, but that it fell out of favor (I must look that up...).

BTW, has anyone but Arp been able to reproduce Arp's results? Yes, I know I must sound annoying, but still...

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

It's a good question. The answer is yes:

Gutierrez&amp;Lopez-Corredoira (2004)

Lopez-Corredoira&amp;Gutierrez (2003)

Bell (2001)

Bell (2004)

chu et al (1998) . Arp was a co-author of this one, but Chu made the observations.

Zhu &amp; Chu (1995)

Burbidge (1997)

Burbidge&amp;Burbidge (1997)

Gullible Jones wrote

The Bohr model is not applicable to the hydrogen atom. And I'm pretty sure what Spaceman Spiff said about black bodies is right...

Also, you state that this is a hypothesis, and hypotheses do not "prove" anything. I do not see how this "proves" that the CMB isn't a product of the BB.

cyrek1 reply

The physics books say that it is (Bohr model).

The 'initial conditions' of the BB are a hypothesis. So is the inflationary infinitesimal period a hypothesis. Wheres the proof?

__________________
aka Michael Cyrek

BB is a theory, not a hypothesis.

And your argument doesn't help that fact that your hypothesis does not prove anything.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

On the subject of things hard to explain in mainstream cosmology:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ar_040628.html

Two things jump out at me in this article. The age of this supermassive black hole is being measured by redshift. The mass of the black hole is apparently also being measured by observing dopplar shifting of the infrared spectrum. Both of these mechanisms would be affected by an intinsic redshift.

So, would objects like this be easier to explain with an intinsic redshift?

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Do try not to take me too seriously.

Absolutely.

The galaxies are much smaller, the masar flows are much slower, not relativistic and behaving much more Machian. The size of the SMBH, if it is a BH at all is much much smaller - In fact, by the time all of the intrinsic effect is accounted for, it could disappear completely. Note that this also solves the problem of galaxy size and luminosity exceeding the Eddington limit: Eddington calculated the maximum based on radiation pressure.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Very likely. You've hit upon a point very similar to the early arguments for local quasars - namely that at their redshift distances they have extraordinary luminosities as can be seen in that absolute magnitudes for quasars range from -23 to -28. For comparison, large spirals with cepheid distances have absolute magnitudes no greater than -21.5.

Similar arguments can be made for some normal galaxies and Abell galaxy clusters as well. Move them closer than redshift says and the numbers become reasonable.

Hi Jerry,

I have just read most of your paper and really liked it. Here are various things which I hope will be of interest.

My (way too long) page: http://astroneu.com/plasma-redshift-1/ points to Ari Brynjolfsson's two recent papers on plasma redshift, the second of which refers specifically to SN1a light curves. I also discuss my own partly formed plasma redshift theory, and a bunch of ideas about quasar redshift, the heating of the solar corona, spicules, the origin of the CMB etc. For instance, in a very old Universe, I propose the CMB may arise from a large population of cold (3K) black dwarfs and their collision fragments. These generally form a diffuse cloud around spiral galaxies - a dark matter halo which has a significantly greater mass then the visible stars in the disc. Some would be ejected entirely. These black dwarfs would would attain the average black body temperature they see and both radiate and slighly absorb the CMB. Its just an idea - no quantitative estimates of how well this might explain observations.

I want to draw your attention to another major argument against the conventional BBT interpretation of quasar redshifts. Several papers report researchers' failure to find the "Transverse Proximity Effect" (TPE) with a foreground quasar.

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

According to the BBT, redshift directly predicts each quasar's distance, and when two high redshift quasars appear close to each other on the sky, the conventional theory is that TPE will be observed. The idea is that the background quasar has a Lyman alpha forest which is caused by neutral H clouds, some of which are located close to the foreground quasar. Quasars being so bright are predicted to photoionize any neutral H in their vicinity, so the prediction is that there will be an absence of Lyman alpha absorption in a part of the spectra of the background quasar which corresponds to the location of the foreground quasar. However, three sets of researchers find NO effect.

They consider three unpalatable or unacceptable explanations relating to the foreground quasar: that it is beamed towards Earth, that it turns on and off regularly, and that it is surrounded by some kind of cloud which shields the line of sight to the background quasar from being ionised. They do not consider the possibility that maybe the quasars are not where they assume them to be. I wrote to them suggesting this and received no reply.

My page has a lot of other stuff which will probably interest, amuse or annoy folks in this discussion.

In the same vein, here are some queries for BBT supporters and critics:

1 - What would a black hole outside a galaxy look like? I figure that neutron stars or pairs of neutron stars could be ejected from galaxies, by asymmetrical SN explosions, or by gravitational disturbance by another neutron star. Eventually, they would collect enough matter from the IGM to become black holes.

Also, black holes will eventually come close to each other and may gravitationally catapult one or both to velocities which cause them to escape from the galaxy. Maybe an asymmetrical GRB explosion could give a black hole enough velocity to escape.

I propose that quasars are black holes outside galaxies - with most of the redshift happening in the plasma nearby which they are sucking in. For various reasons which I can't entirely explain, a black hole in a galaxy doesn't have such a body of plasma, so its light is not significantly redshifted in its vicinity, and we observe it at the centre of a Seyfert galaxy.


2 - Many high redshift quasars have a Lyman alpha forest. Do low redshift quasars have this? Maybe its hard to observe them spectroscopically in this respect. What about high redshift galaxies? If they don't have Lyman alpha forests then this would support your argument that Lyman alpha forests and most of the redshift arise in the plasma close to the quasar. Lyman alpha forests are the most extreme of a range of absorption lines which are blueshifted by various amounts from the core's spectra.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310469 reports that these absorption lines are often remarkably stable. This is hard or impossible to understand according to the conventional explanation that these are clouds of relatively cool gas travelling velocities several percent the speed of light away from the core, for decades.


3 - Do BL Lac objects typically or always lack a Lyman alpha forest? If they do - and if we assume that some of them are at similar distances to high-redshift quasars, then doesn't that indicate that when we view ordinary quasars we are often seeing redshift and Lyman alpha absorption which occurs reasonably local to the core? If we assume the BL Lac light comes mainly from the end of the jet at a "lobe", then this would be an argument that most or all of this redshift zone is not covering the lobe.

- Robin

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Astrophysics of the Non-Exploding Universe

You know, I think I understand the whole universe finally. Perhaps because I just got drunk for the first time in my life. Kinda scary, if a bit off topic.

BTW, it is very hard to type after 9 shots of Hennessy.

__________________
Do try not to take me too seriously.

Perhaps with more practice...? Wouldn't recommend it, though.

Jerry - I'm a genius (barely) yet didn't comprehend but a fourth of what you said. Then again, I studied aerospace engineering, and later, networking, but not astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy, etc.

But I've always been fascinated by astronomy, and have read many theories put forth by others, to the point where even if I don't understand much of the material, I can still spot some of the flaws. Call it pattern recognition - who knows.

When I read your original poster, however, it rang truer than the Liberty Bell, and seems to address all the outstanding issues about which I've ever wondered.

Some others have mentioned some steep hurdles, some more realistic than others.

You can do it, Jerry - I know you can. You've got the drive, and the hurdles are workable, so go for it!

And maybe you ought to give Paul Allen a call... Even though I'm not well known, I've often written to big names, unannounced, with ideas of my own. About a third of the time they're happy to respond, and about one in ten of my ideas actually gets put into play.

But the depth and quality of your post is stellar, so I believe you're facing significantly better odds.

Good luck!

Bump!

GBJD,

Thanks for the vote of confidence: Your background is similar to my own, so we could be products of our own bias, but I think not.

Of course a lot of people have put together alternatives, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them include all of these pieces.

This is where I have decided to develop and promote these new cosmological concepts for two reasons:

1) Not everything is completely right. It is important for everyone to understand this is a framework and not a working prototype.

2) Defenders of the BB will continue to run up red flags and scoff. They refuse to come to terms with the inescapable hole they continue to dig based upon deep-rooted misconceptions. This situation will continue to presists, as it has for decades unless the entire scientific community helps pull the plug.

The BA is in a win-win situation on this. If we pull this off, he has earned golden share of the credit for debunking the BB.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

Like Hawkins paper on the failure of quasars to demonstrate time dilation, this should be considered a nullifying failure of the BB construct all redshifting is either Doppler or gravitational.

The Lyman alpha forest should not be expected in low redshift spectra in either explanation: The spectral lines are not displaced enough.

Another good point the clouds also must be wormy to avoid anything approaching the proximity effect. This sound like a job for a special variant of spectral indexing dark matter!

This is a difficult question to answer because intrinsic redshifts also may change the interpretation of the jet phenomon. For example, the jet could in some cases be an arm of a spiral galaxy that only has the appearance of velocity because it is less redshifted than the galaxy as a whole.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

_Or_ it means that TPE is not a necessary feature of proximate quasars. I don't see why it should be unless the quasars are near perfectly aligned. I have not read the papers inquestion, so I don't know how proximate they are, but if there's any appreciable angular distance bwtween the two, I see no reason for the effect ot be required.

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“The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.” – Earnest Renan

Eye-Zee seemed unimpressed with my view that the repeated failure to find the Transverse Proximity Effect with a foreground quasar is a serious challenge to the BBT. (Note: just saying "proximity effect" is not the same - this is short for the "longitudinal proximity effect", which AFAIK is the absence of Lyman alpha absorption at redshifts close to those of the main emission lines of the quasar.)

> . . . if there's any appreciable angular distance bwtween the two,
> I see no reason for the effect ot be required.

The researchers certainly do. They assume they think they know where the quasars are located according to a conventional interpretation of their redshifts. Then they figure that a particular part of the Lyman alpha forest of the background quasar should be generated in clouds which are a certain distance from the foreground quasar. Then, based on what they think they know about the foreground quasar's emanation of radiation which would ionize the neutral hydrogen which causes the Lyman alpha absorption, they calculate that these clouds should be fully ionized and therefore not absorbing at all. It looks like solid research, with a number of careful observations and detailed modelling to simulate what they think should be happening. The results are only explicable by beaming if the beaming angle is so narrow as to seem impossible given what else we think we know about quasars.

The researchers themselves are clearly perplexed at this failure to find the predicted effect, and devote a lot of effort to choosing between the three explanations they consider: the quasars turning on and off (AKA variability), beaming, and clouds absorbing the ionizing radiation. Generally, as I report in a message to Usenet newsgroup sci.astro.research, it seems that the researchers believe they have reliably ruled out beaming and cloud / dust obscuration, since most of the more recent papers (which I list, as best I can find them) are focused on the lack of TPE being a reliable indicator of quasar "lifetimes" or at least variability.

Please see this message "Transverse Proximity Effect with a foreground quasar" at

http://groups.google.com/groups?grou...astro.research

where I respond to similar doubts raised in a previous thread. I also mention a paper:

The Mysterious Absence of Neutral Hydrogen within One Mpc of a Luminous Quasar at Redshift 2.168
Paul J. Francis, Joss Bland-Hawthorn 2004 May 25 (Accepted MNRAS.)
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0405506

* We showed in 4.1 that if the region surrounding PKS 0424-131 were
* typical, we should have expected to have seen the fluorescent Ly
* alpha emission from a considerable number of clouds. We should also
* have seen internally ionised clouds. Instead, we saw nothing.


Please also refer to this section of my very long page:

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


There is continuing discussion on supernovae light curves on sci.astro.research. I pointed the participants to Jerry Jensen's paper and to this BA discussion too. I just wrote a detailed response regarding the uncorrected timescales of the graphs Fig 1 and 2 and Appendix A of a recent SCP paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309368. (This could take a day or more to be moderated and propagate through Usenet, which is probably a reason folks prefer this BadAstronomy.com discussion system.)

It seems to me at first blush (what's the latin for this?) the light curve for 1998be curve (z=0.644) is shorter than that of 1997as (z=0.355) - while if the SNe themselves were identical explosions, and if the redshift is caused by them moving away from us, then the resulting time-dilation would cause our observation of the 1998be curve to be 21.3% longer.

- Robin

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Astrophysics of the Non-Exploding Universe

Your reply, Robin, is detailed and quite out of my depth. I wasn't unimpressed, but my understading of the TPE may have been too simplistic.

Is it a requirement that a completely ionized gass have no interaction with the light passing through it?

__________________
“The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.” – Earnest Renan

Not absolutely, but in this instance there is a particular absorption reaction - Lyman alpha absorption - which gives rise to the "Lyman forest" of absorption lines in the spectra of many quasars. This only occurs in atomic hydrogen.

I gave the URL of a proper explanation:

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

with the intention that I wouldn't have to take up space here trying to explain the Transverse Proximity Effect and the significance of it not being found. A good explanation of the Lyman forest is:

http://astron.berkeley.edu/~jcohn/lya.html


Jerry, here are some challenges to your CREIL theory, as I understand it from:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0404207
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0401529

Or perhaps these are suggestions on explaining it in a way which handles some obvious objections.

I am highly suspicious of this "quantitisation of redshifts" business.
Is this a hard prediction of CREIL? Its pretty easy to test, and these
tests should be done with fresh data, not the old stuff which was
analysed in the past. I have the 2dF Galaxy and Quasar redshift data
here. I have written C++ code to read it into a common array. Then,
its easy to write code to analyse it. It will be easy to list all the
quasar redshifts, sorted in order. I can think of one fairly easy way
of looking for patterns in the distributions of redshift.

The most obvious objection to any redshift quantitisation is that it
should be washed out by the Doppler effects of the movement of the
objects. CREIL may have some explanation for why that doesn't occur,
but then I would say that it should also be washed out by the movement
of the clouds of plasma, gas etc. which are doing the redshifting.
Similarly, I would expect our movement within the local IGM or the
average of all IGM to have the same effect.

If you discuss redshift quantitisation, I think it would be good to
respond to these obvious objections, to make some concrete predictions
about this effect, and hopefully to point to or do some new research.


Here is another potential challenge for CREIL. You mentioned that CREIL
might explain the anomalous acceleration which was supposedly observed
with Pioneer 10 - or rather the anomalous behaviour of the microwave
beams used to measure location and velocity. In the recent
sci.astro.research thread:

http://groups.google.com/groups?grou...astro.research

someone pointed out that if this is a real physical effect, it should
show up with other spacecraft, which it apparently has. Debate on 23
May concerned whether or not such anomalies had shown up in Cassini.

Also, a press release on the small scale of the effect, and how it has
been detected in other craft:

http://www.holoscience.com/news/mystery_solved.html

A source of papers:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22pi...te%3AarXiv.org

I am not arguing for or against the possibility of either the purported
acceleration or any role that redshift or blueshift of microwaves may
play in it.

If CREIL has a hard prediction about the Pioneer 10 signals, I think it
would be good to generalise it to other spacecraft which use a
comparable system and to research whether or not these anomalies have
been observed.

I am wary about the idea of redshifting of really long coherence-length
signals. As far as I can see, if you have a laser with a really long
coherence-length output - such as 5 metres, which can be done - then any
attempt to redshift that light in a distance of 5 metres or less will
not work. By "coherence length" I mean the maximum length one half of a
split beam can be delayed by and still interfere with itself. (This is
rather informal, without specifying a certain amount of interference,
but it is good enough for this discussion.)

In this case, the laser can be considered to be a radio transmitter
putting out a sine-wave, and it doesn't matter what you do to the
signal, the exact same number of sine-wave peaks will be received by an
antenna which is anywhere near the transmitter. Any system which could
change the number of cycles received must be doing some kind of time
dilation etc.

Another way of looking at this is that the infinitely narrow spectrum of
a radio transmitter creates electromagnetic radiation with an infinitely
long coherence-length. I would predict such photons will never be
redshifted by my plasma redshift theories, or Ari Brynjolfsson's. But
for shorter coherence length "photons", especially the very short
photons which constitute black-body light, or the CMB - where the
coherence length is shorter than the distance between emitter and
detector - processes which affect the electromagnetic waves en-route
could alter the energy of what we later (at the receiver) regard as
"photons".

Returning to the Pioneer 10 observations . . . I haven't looked at this
matter and I don't know how coherent the radio transmissions to and from
the spacecraft are. But a continually transmitted sine-wave which
continues for long enough to stretch from Earth to the spaceship (which
may be how they did it, for all I know) has a coherence length way
longer than this distance, so I can't imagine anything between Earth and
the spaceship changing the frequency of the received signal, other than
some kind of time machine.

My understanding of, and belief in, CREIL is quite limited. I think it
is an intriguing idea to have redshift or blueshift according the the
temperature etc. of the gas / plasma and especially according to
whatever other electromagnetic radiation is impinging upon that
material. But I can't see how really long coherence-length
electromagnetic radiation such as narrow microwave transmissions can
be redshifted by a process which operates on the scale of individual
molecules, atoms or protons and electrons.

- Robin

__________________
Astrophysics of the Non-Exploding Universe

I have been backpedaling on CREIL, but only because the relativistic adjustments made to existing data make it extremely difficult to extract the raw data necessary to properly compare the half dozen redshifting mechanisms proposed. CREIL is a good candidate because it explains coherency, quasar spectra, the CMB the IRCB (Infrared Continuum Background) and the attenuation rate. The Blueshift of the Pioneer poses a problem for CREIL: Why is the 20 CM hydrogen peak redshifted, and the ~8 cm, if I remember right, Pioneer lines are blueshifted...

...The Pioneer probes were perfectly designed to detect this effect, for example, the transmitters were simple phase locked loops than returned a multiple of a sine wave transmitted to the probes from a carefully calibrated source. They were also spin stabilized and always pointing towards the transceiver, so the acceleration measured is quite certainly either a true acceleration of some wave function artifact.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

How about "we don't know yet, it's too early to say, there's not enough data to do decent tests?"This is pretty easy to test ... what should other galaxies emit, assuming they are like the MW? Do the nearby galaxies - both dwarfs (e.g. LMC, SMC) and not-so-dwarfs (e.g. M31, M33) - show these expected emissions?

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but isn't the SZE (Suyaev-Zel'dovich effect) an inverse Compton effect? AFAIK, ZKG isn't something you can 'see' from other galaxies anyway (since it's all about UHE cosmic rays, which are only observable here on Earth). Oh, and BTW, there are now several quite good observations of the SZE ... and they appear to be consistent with the concordance model (and standard physics).

Are you sure? AFAIK, the SDSS data is in the public domain (at least that up to July 2003), with a very nice front end (how long does it take to learn SQL?). You'd be well served to learn the stats yourself ... no matter what you hope to do in astronomy, the amount of data is simply too great to do decent analyses without appropriate statistical treatment. I have no idea what you mean by 'do astrometrics', but you surely have the basic math you need (assuming you've done at least a first year undergrad course in math), and the rest is the work of a day (or a week).

So, if you have a decent PC (esp lots of hard-drive space), a broadband connection (many cable companies offer multi-MB/sec these days), and maybe a good stats package (plenty available, may set you back ~$x00), you can do the work yourself!