[Moderator Note: this thread was created by splitting posts from the How good are the best alternatives to the Big Bang theories? thread.

The content is excellent - addressing a set of observations which are heavily used to test modern theories of cosmology; but it's OT for the original thread.

The complete chain leading to this post of Jerry Jensen's is:
Jerry Jensen: the Cosmic Microwave background: It is a gaussian distribution of energy in a low frequency bandwidth. I think it is primarily a function of the electromagnetic field associated with the solar wind at terminal shock with energetic particles.
antoniseb->]Excellent question, but no.

The reason is that the helopause/terminal shock/solar galactic interface is not a specific barrier, but a rarified, statistical peak integrated across many light days. Also, as I understand WMAP analysis, high frequency components are intentionally filtered, otherwise there would be interference from the planetary magnetic fields (yes/no?). That being said, if this hypothesis is correct, the extreme burst of solar activity last December/January(?) might have been strong enough to cause a weak blimp in the background. It would be fun to look for this really small blip in the data. (If I can figure out how to, I will!)

The other reason, is if there is background microwave radiation associated with the helopause from our own sun, the same is true for every star in the galaxy, and we are close enough to be bathed in this net spectrum all the time. Remember, the WMAP is heavily contaminated along the galactic plane, and it is only an assumption that this is due to the Sache-Wolfe effect, and it is only an assumption that we can successfully approximate the power function of the Sache-Wolfe effect, and these two assumptions allow WMAP scientists to assume they have a valid signature of the rest of the sky.

When the BB theory was hypothesized, the CMB severly restrained the depth at which we expected to find galaxies and clusters of galaxies. We are literally way over our heads on this, with structure extending much too far for the the CMB to be a first-order witness of this event, and this is why a revirb or inflationary component was inferred. When we went looking for the reflection: The only available peak turned out to be orders of magnitude too small, so a knob was added that made all the bouncing baryonic matter just an afterthought to the universe as a whole. If baryonic matter is so insignificant, why do we see a microwave perturbation in the direction of the planetary plane at the 99% confidence level? Any local contamination that cannot be assigned to a specific source is killer: Without faith in the theory, we are left with a 99% probability our microwave vision isn't worth spit.

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jwj

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

You seem to be suggesting that the ripples seen in the Microwave Background temperature imply that the Sun has a constant magnetic field affect at the heliopause (it doesn't seem to, based on Voyager data). I read your answer but didn't see anything that connected to anything real. I was all vague handwaving. If the microwave background comes from the heliopause, we should see it change as the Sun rotates. We should see is change during the eleven year solar cycle. We should see it change with magnetic storms. But we don't It is constant, and very detailed.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Jerry: "the Cosmic Microwave background: It is a gaussian distribution of energy in a low frequency bandwidth."

Can you point to papers, from observations, which show this?

In particular, how does "a gaussian distribution of energy" square with "a near-perfect blackbody"?

Jerry: "I think it is primarily a function of the electromagnetic field associated with the solar wind at terminal shock with energetic particles."

To what extent can you show this?

In particular, what must its opacity (optical depth) be, in order for background objects such as distant quasars and local clusters to be clearly detected*?

Jerry: "Also, as I understand WMAP analysis, high frequency components are intentionally filtered, otherwise there would be interference from the planetary magnetic fields (yes/no?)"

Which WMAP paper did you get this from? To what extent were COBE "high frequency components are intentionally filtered"? Ditto, re BOOMERanG, ACBAR, DASI, and so on?

Jerry: "Remember, the WMAP is heavily contaminated along the galactic plane, and it is only an assumption that this is due to the Sache-Wolfe effect"

That's not something I've ever read (and it would surely be very, very surprising!); can you please point to WMAP (or other CMB research) which mentions this assumption?

*For example, see sections 7 and 8 in this WMAP paper (1.4 MB PDF document).

Not again this asinine nonsense about a transparent source giving rise to a blackbody spectrum.

Well, a blackbody distribution can be transformed to a Gaussian using the Boltzman equation, but I was referring to the distribution in the sky - it should be Gaussian, except for the effects of intervening structure.

I have to back track, just a little - the last time I looked, we were surrounded by stars, and we have reasons to believe that they are similar to the sun.

I stuck my head in a microwave oven to see how it works: I see bunches of accelerated electrons and a big harry magnet. The magnet bends the path of the electrons, and they don't like that - they emit microwaves in protest.

I couldn't leave my head in long or I would cook it, but the CMB has only an infintessimal fraction of the energy of a microwave oven, so we are roasting very slowing - cooking more from the UV from our sun, which is also kicking out accelerated ionized stuff at a prodigous rate in all directions. (How does it do that?)

We know these ionized particles can emit energy in the radio bandwidths, because when a storm of them reacts with the earth's magnetic field, we get all kinds of electronic noise.

Where ever there are Ions, there will be shot noise - white background. So what happens when they get to the helopause? We know there is a storm of cosmic rays interacting with the solar wind, we know cosmic rays have magnetic moments, and we know radio frequencies will be generated. We do not know what percentage of this energy will be mirrored back at us, the distribution should be a nearly perfect blackbody, we do not know the temperature. But look at the clues!

The CMB has a known vector. This was a mild surprise when it was discovered, but no one would not expect the solar system is not moving with respect to the local cosmic ray bath. It has been proven that the cosmic rays we experience are not directly associated with local stars, or even our own galaxy, so both the distribution of cosmic rays and the distribution of solar wind particles should be highly Gaussian. When a Gaussian source of magnetic field energy collides with a near blackbody source of ions, a near blackbody distribution of microwaves should be created. Where is it? What is the bandwidth, the temperature?

Finally, as antonised has pointed out, there should be local perturbations if the CMB is primarily local, and this is where I have to backpeddle slightly and state that every star in the galaxy should be producing this weak background in the very same way - the background is much brighter in the direction of the Milky Way, and WMAP researchers can only tell us that some of this interference can be filtered - if the microwave reflection of stars at their helopause is as I have described, there is no way to seperate this background from any cosmic residual - the CMB should be less intense in directions where there are fewer stars, and it is.

There is evidence of local contamination Antoniseb insists must be present in the direction of the Zodiac, which is the orbital path of the earth about the sun. We should expect this perturbation, and this pole should have the highest magnitude, because it directly effects the distance between the earth and the helopause. The CMB has no business exhibiting a perturbation in this direction; while a solar source of microwaves must be helocentric.

I could sit down and calculate what average energy and count of cosmic rays is required to create the known CMB signature (We have learned from the Voyager probes it is much greater than expected.) I would have to come up with free parameters describing the contribution stars within our galaxy, a vector magnitude for both the direction of the helopause and the motion of the sun relative to the mean cosmic ray distrubution. To me, this is far to many parametric assumptions to come up with anything I would have confidence in - there are more fertile fields to plow, but since I have been given the challange, I will see what I can do - give me two weeks. I think I can do it with five parameters or less, which is what the WMAP team used, and they don't have an explanation for what looks to be a local perturbation.

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jwj

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

I don't recall insisting that there must be local contamination in the direction of the zodiac, but I don't dispute that there would be some in that plane.

I think you will be hard pressed to do you calculation and get the uniformity we see in the area within 60 degrees of the galactic poles.

You also seem to be saying that you think that the excess temperature spikes we see are due to the microwaves given off by the heliopauses of neighboring stars... That will be an interesting correlation to see too.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Jerry, this thread was not started by you, so I don't know the extent to which you are comfortable with defending the (ATM) ideas that you have posted.

Before I proceed to challenge your ideas, would you mind letting us know if you are OK with addressing questions and challenges to what you have posted here?

It is a great exercise, and I stuck my neck out, so I should crank some numbers - I want to see if it is feasible., But I am swamped with drop dead lines at the moment - it will take some time.

Nothing is transparent. There should be radiate backwash at the extended boundary between the solar system and the rest of the galaxy. The question is only how much, and in what frequency bandwidth. The simple radiation transfer models I worked with a few years ago created a blackbody in the microwave range, but I did not have real data to work with. I am hoping to find some numbers on the particle counts and energy densities the Voyager probes are encountering.

I haven't looked at the analytical technique used to reduce the 2d and third year data, but for the first year data, they just used templates to mask out point sources, then scoured and smoothed the data pixel by pixel. That don't impress me much.

No, again referring to the first year data, they made a good case and model for using the spectrum inferred by galaxies similar to our own to identifying the point sources. What cannot be determined, is if there is residual noise (that really is the "CMB") emulating from stars, galaxies, and the microwave reflection of our own sun.

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jwj

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

This is complete nonsense. Even if whatever is doing the microwave emission emits as a perfect blackbody, it still does not amount to a perfect blackbody SED without the source being completely opaque. We wouldn't see a thing beyond terminal shock at FIRAS frequencies. At best you could make it a blackbody in the same sense the troposphere is a blackbody, but there is no way whatsoever you can justify a 99.995%+ blackbody as required by FIRAS limits without throwing standard radiative transfer physics out of the window.

Now it is my turn to sound incredulous. A good gravimetric chemist on a good day can return six places of accuracy on a large sample. A good spectroscopic chemist might return four. The glassware and lensing must be meticulously clean, the temperature and electric environment tightly controlled and the sample has to be uncontaminated by competing species and well understood.

Think about what these research teams are reporting: They can take a sample that has been pinballing through unknown eons of galactic structure known to radiate in the same spectral regions and report a pristine signature to 99.995% accuracy? That number has more fudge packed in it than a freshman lab loaded with premedies.

How do they do that? Read the fine print: “the apodazation function is an asymmetric smooth window function…

The destripper uses both sky and calibration data, producing the corrections spectrum by minimizing the discrepancy between multiple observations within the same sky pixel for the former, and deviations from the Planck (blackbody) spectrum for the latter.”

They assume the spectrum is a perfect blackbody, and massage each pixel until they can declare victory. Their notebooks should be drawn and quartered and boiled in oil, because the accuracy they are reporting is beyond alchemy: it is witchcraft.

That said, realistic estimates of the uniformity of the microwave background are impressive, and since the solar spectrum is not a true blackbody, it is a good argument that there must be a competing source. But it is a better argument, that if after all the masking, smoothing and power spectrum weighing, if after all of this spectral abuse, a statistical alignment with the path of the WMAP probe through solar space produces a 99% probability of alignment with the orbital plane relative to this 3.8x10^38 kilowatt ball of fire in our backyard, you better start looking at the sun, because when you sleep with an elephant and smell something funny, it is not a good guess to say "I think there is a mouse in the kitchen."

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jwj

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

Aside from being factually wrong, this also happens to be pure slander. If you are going to acuse my friends of deliberately falsifying their results, you had better be ready to prove it in excruciating detail, or shut up & go away.

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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

Which paper did you get this from?Which paper did you get this from?I'll wait until you provide the source of your quotes, then go read the paper(s) for myself, before making a detailed response.

My quick response is that you seem to have either misunderstood or misrepresented the FIRAS calibration and data processing methods (and possibly the results as well).Once we have the paper(s) before us, we will be in a position to examine your claims here in the appropriate level of detail.And, if I am not mistaken, you posted a link to a paper which you felt made your case in this regard, but which I felt showed just the opposite ... and you didn't follow through.

None of this addresses the claim, by Jerry Jensen, which got us started here (my bold): "the Cosmic Microwave background: It is a gaussian distribution of energy in a low frequency bandwidth. I think it is primarily a function of the electromagnetic field associated with the solar wind at terminal shock with energetic particles." (source)

So, I'm going to repeat a question I asked in post #3:I would like a straight answer please Jerry.

http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/...as_exsupv4.cfm

Check the pages under calibration and destripping of FIRAS data.

I am willing to concede corrections for point sources and galactic noise are reasonable, but not when this includes tuning the residuals until a clean black body emerges. And I can't buy into the sell that cosmic full-sky spectrums can be meaningfully washed cleaner than laboratory spectral analysis. What I think might be informative, would be to use the same techniques, but with a near black body, the bolemetric distribution of the sun, transformed to an appropriate spectral bandwidth and used as a reference. If the data can be smoothed in a similar function with similar error margins and normalizing equations, there is room for consternation.

A solid object is not required to create a background spectrum, and I think we can agree the optical depth is not an issue if we are talking about a microwave spectrum that is little more than a whisper. I haven't pulled up the Voyager data on the helopause yet, but so that you understand my argument, let's assume the solar wind is redirected and/or abated by cosmic rays between 120 AU and 170 AU, eating up the radial energy in the particles in the solar wind and molifying the cosmic ray count.

These cosmic rays have a large enough cross section, that they will interact with solar photons as well, so now we have two sets of radiation transfer functions to solve, and both of them will redirect some small fraction of solar energy back toward the sun. Is there enough redirected energy to detect? What is the bandwidth and the spectrum of the energy? A random range of cosmic ray energies interacting with a solar flux will create a nearly perfect blackbody in a lower energy distribution - I have played with these calculations, but would it have a peak in the microwave range and produce at least one of the peaks attributed to the microwave background?

Has anyone tried to answer these questions? Wouldn't one of the signatures of reflected (and transformed) solar energy be a full sky spectrum with moments that are aligned with the helocentric distance and the relative motion of the solar system in the local cosmic environment?

What I am really talking about is a solar SZ effect: Inverse Compton scattering. The WMAP team concluded that intergalactic cluster SZ effects are insignificant. Did they look close enough?

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jwj

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

So, is English not your native language?

So, in this sentence, what is "the former"? it is the sky data, and the destriper minimizes the difference between multiple observations of the same sky pixel in the sky data. And what is "the latter"? It is the calibration data, and the destriper minimizes deviations from a Planck (blackbody) spectrum for the calibration data.

Now, let us ask ourselves, what is the "calibration data"? How about, "it's the data taken whe FIRAS looks at the calibrator"? And what is the "calibrator"? It is a defined blackbody inserted into the FIRAS feed horn. by forcing the calibrator data to be a blackbody, when it is already known to be exactly that, the calibration is able to remove instrumental effects from the sky data.

Please note that nowhere in this analysis will you find the sky data being force fit to a blackbody. Nowhere will you find anything like this ...

Can you read? Can you think? Can you be honest? You owe somebody a big apology, and I for one expect to see it.

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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

Tim Thompson beat me to a response on this.

Let me simply add that, from now on, I shall be insisting that you back up every statement that you make, Jerry, six ways to Sunday ... the misrepresentation that Tim has highlighted is simply breath-taking (and, if you were my student, pretty close to being unforgivable).Actually, I don't agree at all.

In fact, in light of your serious misunderstanding of the basics of the FIRAS calibration, I insist that you show, in full and glorious detail, that it is indeed 'not an issue'.

Until you so do, all your claims are in suspended animation (for me, at least).Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't.

Unless and until you can show that it does, and does so by producing an intensity that matches that which is observed, your claim has (in my view) no standing beyond that of a word salad.Maybe.

But then why isn't there a doppler signature in such a 'reflected (and transformed) solar energy'? (COBE and WMAP's relative speed wrt any such reflected and transformed signal would be quite different from that wrt the Great Attractor (say)). If COBE could detect solar flares in the zodiacal light component of the microwaves it observed, why not in this Jerry reflected and transformed solar signal?

On top of which, we have the underlying issue of transparency ... if COBE and WMAP detected, unambiguously, some 200 point sources (WMAP), which were not only the number expected, but also included some very distant quasars, ...OK, now please, using WMAP team publications, support this claim of yours.

In particular, please make sure that you show, unambiguously, that the WMAP team did NOT detect the SZE for the Coma cluster.

That is Tim's interpretation of my interpretation: Let me try again:

'The destriper uses both sky and calibration data, producing the correction spectra by minimizing the discrepancy between multiple observations within the same sky pixel for the former...'

What is my argument? That the cosmic background includes, but is not limited to, a transformed reflection of the sun.

Why do background researchers insist this is impossible? The background is too consistent to be a reflection.

But what are they doing? 'Minimizing the discrepancy between multiple observations of each sky pixel.' Is this a valid assumption? - what if that pixel brightened by a slight increase in flux from the solar wind? Any evidence that might suggest that there is variability within the CMB that could be correlated with local events would be lost in this presumptive data averaging: The theory assumes the cmb does not change, so the signal is weighted in a way that minimizes evidence of change, which according to the theory, must be artifact.

These quotes are from the WMAP papar Neried Posted:
Did the COBE analysis use the Haslam correlation? I don't know, but if it did, this indictment of the method certainly would reduce the expected accuracy of the COBE analysis.

Again, page 17 of the WMAP paper:
If the synchrotron and dust spectra are poorly known, how can they be modeled and subtracted without make assumptions about what the spectrum should look like - the model residuals - after the subtractions are complete?

Again, from the WMAP analysis:
Here again, they are templating to remove gross 'contamination' of the CMB, and testing the success of the method by examining the residuals for evidence of non-gaussinity: Assuming the background has the spectrum that they expect to see - Look again at my argument: If there is solar contamination, this should be less than Gaussian, but if the templates are optimized by achieving gaussian residuals, the baby is out with the bathwater.

Finally:
Assuming how much should be considered foreground is just another way of saying 'how much do we think is true background, and how much should be discard as meaningless'. I can't do this with my data.
It is not a claim, it is a hypothesis, and yes, if it doesn't hold up under scrutiny or is not testable, it is quite useless. I've been wrong before.

This is a curious statement: How are solar flare observed when looking away from the sun, if not by reflection and/or interaction? Any reflection also requires a budget for radiation transfer. I am assuming, because I do not know, that the reflections observed by COBE (that were caused by solar flares) are dust reflections, with a different signature from that of the 'CMB'.

I am arguing that the local source of microwaves that appear to be background photons, would have to be due to the interaction of solar wind particles and/or photons with cosmic rays, not dust. The 'depth of field' of this interaction zone is light-days, or even weeks long. This should have a natural smoothing effect on solar events, returning a time-weighted average. It would be interesting to know the exact profile these COBE solar flare observations, and how the pixels are treated in the data reduction process.

I don't understand the issue: I'm not saying that there is a local fence that blocks out cosmic sources of microwaves, only that there appears to be a local phenomenon that creates microwaves. The 'axis of evil' seems to indicate that a very local source is contaminating the microwave pool.
This is not an issue to me. Of course there are cosmic sources of microwaves! This is a radio-free universe. How many other clusters are there out there contributing microwave photons that are included in the CMB? It's a mess.

As an asside, I am not attacking Tim's friends, I am attacking the basic theory, and the way the theory allows them to reduce the data. It is the theory and the data reduction techniques that I am challenging, not the integrety, motivation, or sincerity of the persons involve in the research, and I apologies for my complete lack of tact.

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jwj

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

Jerry’s idea sounds both plausible and incredulous at the same time. On the one hand, if there’s even the slightest microwave back-scatter at the heliopause, you quickly run into an Olbers’ paradox-type situation where there is just a uniform fog of microwaves, because the sources are not points, but huge, distended, poorly-defined spheres. On the other hand, it seems incredulous that the researchers have not done the data-reduction correctly, and have removed the very signal that would reveal its true nature!

Nonetheless, the issue rests within the context of anti-BBT ATMs, in particular, How well does (fill in the blank) ATM account for the CMB? I’m sorry Jerry, I haven’t studied the CMB enough, and in particular the data reduction, to really weigh in on one side or the other. But I have read of other theories for the CMB, and it seems if we put half a dozen of them in a police line-up, it would be difficult to pick out The Real explanation. The CMB is an extremely weak, extremely uniform, background hiss, and all the candidate theories have a look of guilt…I mean, plausibility.

So IMHO, we can’t hang too much on the CMB. The CMB is consistent with the BBT, but it does not add a lot of weight to the theory. And if a particular anti-BB theory does not produce a CMB, that does not weigh much against it, because the CMB may not be cosmic after all.

This is not so bad as you might presume. Whether or not the assumption of consistency is "valid" may be open to question, but it is certainly reasonable. The question, Why should the CMBR be time variable?" is valid, so you will have to do a better job explaining why it should be, and on time scales short enough to be variable as viewed by FIRAS.

But you have large hurdles to overcome. Since we have dispensed with the silly notion that the thermal spectrum of the CMBR is the result of some a-prori assumption, we have to deal with the fact that the observed spectral energy density (SED) of the CMBR is indeed thermal (i.e., a Planck Law spectrum), and that the variability over the whole sky is on the order of 10 mK (2.726 +/- 0.010 K, Mather, et al., 1994; 2.728 +/- 0.004 K, Fixsen, et al., 1996).

It is also necessary to explain the presence of a clean dipole signature, which implies a velocity relative to the sun of 371 +/- 1 km/sec (Fixsen, et al., 1996). If the CMBR is a result of a "reflection" from the heliosphere, then why should there by any relative velocity between it and the sun, let alone a relative velocity that is so consistent over the whole sky?

Furthermore, the assumption of consistency does not quite hide variability to the extent you think. Look again at your own quoted source, Destriping of FIRAS Data. I will repeat the quote I made before, but with altered emphasis, again of my own making:
We see that the assumption is not explicitly made for the sky spectra, but rather for the correction spectra. To what extent this will force the reported sky spectra to be invariant I do not know (yet), but let us assume that is does. The process of producing these spectra is described in detail in other chapters of the FIRAS Explanatory Supplement, and in Fixsen, et al., 1994b. It certainly appears that at worst, the variability between individual spectra is folded into the reported variance, which in turn is the statistical part of the 0.004 K uncertainty in the 1996 recalculated CMBR temperture quoted above. So even if there is a real variability of the CMBR on the sky, it is hardly much greater than 0.004 K, and may simply be too small for FIRAS to reliably detect.

Now, those are simply aspects of the data which any assumption of locality has to deal with. But there are also serious physical problems that the assumption of locality has to overcome. Just for starters, a clear explanation of what is being "reflected", and what it is getting "reflected" off of would be a great help. Is it the solar microwave emission that is getting reflected? Why would the 6000K sun's reflected spectrum be still thermal, but reduced to a mere 2.728 K? And I should note that the objection that optically thin media do not normally produce thermal spectra is valid, and needs to be addressed at a higher level of reasoning than "I don't think so".

I think that, once again, we are being distracted. There is a lot to discuss with the COBE data, though I find Jerry's criticism's to be weak at best. But I also think that they are fodder for either (a) later on in this discussion, or (b) a completely separate discussion. We are avoiding the one principle question which must be answered first & foremost: Why should anyone think that any part of the CMBR is of "local" origin?" Personally, my answer would be something on the order of "Beats the heck out of me". But I surely would like to see a more complete answer than that, from the principle proponent of the idea.

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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

There is no room in the discrepancy between multiple observations of each sky pixel to support your "variability within the CMB" hypothesis. The rms scatter between multiple observations of the same pixel agrees with that expected from the intrinsic detector noise to within ~5%. Measurement of the cosmic microwave background spectrum by the COBE FIRAS instrument, The Astrophysical Journal, Part 1 (ISSN 0004-637X), vol. 420, no. 2, p. 439-444.

Not solid, but the source must be opaque for a blackbody SED. The heliopause region is not anywhere near opaque and thus can not produce a spectrum resembling even the raw CMB.

Considering the SED it has, no way we can agree on that.

The upper limit on the Compton y-parameter is very strict from FIRAS. There's no evidence of it in the CMB.

Tim Thompson wrote, “It is also necessary to explain the presence of a clean dipole signature, which implies a velocity relative to the sun of 371 +/- 1 km/sec (Fixsen et al, 1996). If the CMBR is a result of a "reflection" from the heliosphere, then why should there by any relative velocity between it and the sun, let alone a relative velocity that is so consistent over the whole sky?”

The sun is rotating and at a radius of 96 million miles this rotation is the equivalent of ~440 km/sec. Would there not be a circumferential velocity observed in light emitted from the rotating sun? Is there not a circumferential component to light emitted from a rotating source?

“Just for starters, a clear explanation of what is being "reflected", and what it is getting "reflected" off of would be a great help. Is it the solar microwave emission that is getting reflected? Why would the 6000K sun's reflected spectrum be still thermal, but reduced to a mere 2.728 K? And I should note that the objection that optically thin media do not normally produce thermal spectra is valid, and needs to be addressed at a higher level of reasoning than "I don't think so".

“I think that, once again, we are being distracted. There is a lot to discuss with the COBE data, though I find Jerry's criticism's to be weak at best. But I also think that they are fodder for either (a) later on in this discussion, or (b) a completely separate discussion. We are avoiding the one principle question which must be answered first & foremost: Why should anyone think that any part of the CMBR is of "local" origin?" Personally, my answer would be something on the order of "Beats the heck out of me". But I surely would like to see a more complete answer than that, from the principle proponent of the idea.”

I would like to know whether the nearby Earth has been taken into account in the COBE data. I asked this once before and the answer was that the instrument is pointed away from Earth (as I understand it, always pointing at approximately the region between daylight and nightlight). However is it not possible for radiation from a source to be absorbed even when the instrument is pointing away from it?

My question would be why a large blackbody radiator such as Earth, absorbing and emitting light from the Sun, would not be considered as a source of blackbody radiation for a satellite orbiting 500 miles above its surface?

I get about 2.1 km/sec at the solar surface, which is the number we should see, since the light does not gain any rotational speed once it leaves the sun. Furthermore, the effect you are talking about is a transverse Doppler shift, which is a very weak, 2nd order effect from special relativity, and should not be visible at all in this data set. The dipole I am refering to is indicative of a classic, radial doppler shift, which would require a relative velocity between the sun and its heliosphere.

The only way for terrestrial radiation to get into the data should be through the side lobes of the receiver antennae. Side lobe contamination is removed in the data processing, so there should be no terrestrial signal in the data. Of course, you could argue that terrestrial radiation will "reflect" into the receiver, but then you have the same problem of figuring out how to do that.

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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

I missed this before. I don't see how this is even possible. Inverse Compton scattering is the transfer of energy to a photon by a higher energy electron, a "blueshifting" of the photon. But we are looking at microwave photons, which are already pretty low energy. What photons were blueshifted into the microwave? Furthermore, the solar photons have to come back to Earth, which means that the photon has to be essentially knocked straight backwards. I just don't see how that can be probable enough to generate an observable signal.

Are you prepared to propose specific interactions? All interactions involving solar photons seem highly unlikley, based on the argument I gave above: How do you get the photons to reverse course, and in sufficient numbers? Particle interactions seem even less likely. Most won't produce photons, and those that do should produce an isotropic distribution. And no interactions that I can think of will produce thermal spectra.

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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

These are all excellent, articulate posts. Please read Peter Wilson’s philosophical prospective, because it is nearly identical to my own. However, I have posted an alternative cosmology which requires an explanation for the CMB, even if the CMB is not a keystone in this cosmology, and I must provide a plausible, hopefully testable, blackbody synthesis.
I’m not sure I understand this: I will concede that if the CMB was primarily a function of the solar wind, the variation in the strength of the solar wind should produce a variable signature in the CMB. Are you saying that FIRAS was able to detect these solar variations and correct for them, or that no correlation was found and therefore the solar wind is not a significant player in the microwave background? (I haven't studied your most recent post, but I have never considered side-lobe contamination to be an untreated issue.)
Agreed. I have to return to the roots of my alternative for an answer:
I have hypothesized that gravity exists as a field that must be negotiated by all radiation and matter traversing through it, that the absolute speed of light is greater in a true vacuum than near any matter; and that this texture in space causes not only the observations now attributed to general and special relativity, but predicts drastically different masses for the planets and their moons than Newtonian mechanics.
I arrived at this hypothesis when I was trying to model the gamma rays that are now known to be associated with supernova and other catastrophic events. In order for gamma rays to be at such unreal energy levels, I speculated that when an object about the size of the sun collapses, as the gravity field collapses, the mass blasted away from the core explosion increases in velocity as the gravitational field collapses inward. (Recovering energy forfeited to the same field as the particle entered the system.)

This would explain both the tremendous energy budget, and the ‘knee’ in the energy spectrum, because the acceleration increases as the gravity field size decreases. (I am hypothesizing a nearly identical causality for the rapid acceleration of the solar wind within a few solar radii of the sun.)

Likewise, cosmic rays – particles with atomic masses moving at relativistic velocities are likely to originate and accelerate during the gravitational field collapses of nova-like events. There are two interesting problems in cosmic ray phyisics: How are these particle accelerated to such velocities, and how do they traverse space for cosmic distances? (For decades it was argued that cosmic rays must be of local origin, because these high energy particles should be attenuated by inverse Compton Scattering induced by cosmic microwave background photons.)

If I argue that most of the microwave background photons are not local, I can explain how cosmic rays travel such great distances without being broken down by the cosmic microwave background. Check out:

http://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/recent.pl

Voyager I is now recording an amazing 25 cosmic ray hits a second, and the count is increasing. This means the local cosmic ray count, in the helo sheath, is much greater than anybody anticipated. If this trend continues, the inverse Compton scattering from solar photons along could explain the CMB! This bolometric distribution is only a half an eraser away from a black body in-and-of itself, and since cosmic ray flux is almost completely random, the resulting SED would be a nearly perfect black body.
http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/0...ontier_of.html
Why are new radio waves observed? Where are they coming from, and what is their SED? We need to understand these things before any theory can be discounted.
I mentioned before that this dipole was a mild surprise and certainly not necessary in a BB scenario, but not too difficult in the one I have postulated about in this thread: Cosmic rays don’t follow straight paths, they are bent and twisted by every magnetic pole they experience. In near space, this path is not homogenious, so there should be a correlation, or more likely an anti-correlation in the path of cosmic rays into our solar environment with galactic structure. That the sun’s system should have a peculiar velocity with respect to the local cosmic ray flow is not a theory buster.
Yes, you are correct, and it is difficult to imagine why this signal is so uniform.
No, not reflected, this is the right magnitude for a microwave emitted as part of a radiation transfer function between a cosmic ray and an out-bound photon – my reference for this is Chandrasakhar’s classic book on radiation transfer, and Weidner’s Elementary Modern Physics. Any time a photon is absorbed and re-emitted, anytime there is a change in the path through space, there is an energy budget associated with that change: Any interaction always converts a portion of the spectral energy or kinetic energy associated with the particle to heat energy-the law if entropy does not allow perfectly elastic collisons. All I need is a higher density of cosmic rays near the solar system than current theories estimates to elevate the temperature, and ‘Voyager I’ seems to be finding them.
I think the argument: We see cosmic rays that should not make it here from distant space; is the best argument that a significant number of the photons found in the CMB must be local. This has been known for decades, but I have yet to read any mainstream explanation for why inverse Compton effects caused by thermal energy do not destroy rays of cosmic origin long before we see them. We see them because the cosmic medium is too thin and too cold.

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jwj

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

If 25 cosmic rays are hitting Voyager 1 in the solar sheath every second, but only 1 ray per second penetrates to the depth of Voyager 2, what is happening to the cosmic rays? Are they colliding with solar wind particles, slowed by interactions with solar photons? What is the average temperature of all these collisions as observed from the inner solar system? Could it be 2.73degK? If not, what?

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jwj

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

Your link is not working, but if you refer to Voyager-1 LA1 rate (>0.5 MeV/nuc), it is mainly a measure of low-energy phenomena in interplanetary space (eg. co-rotating interaction regions arising from interactions between fast and slow streams of solar wind) and not (galactic) cosmic rays. The LA1 rate reached as high as 48 hits/sec in Nov 05 shorty after Voyager-1 reached the heliosheath and has been declining since. The PGH rate (>70 MeV/nuc) is sensitive to galactic cosmic rays, but has been pretty stable for both Voyagers over many years at about 1 hit/sec.

http://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/heliopa...ecenthist.html

Remember, Voyager I is outside the termination shock, while Voyager II is inside same. The two spacecraft should, therefore, be sampling remarkably different populations of cosmic rays. Or, in other words, the answer to your question (What is happening ...) is that the cosmic rays that don't get to Voyager II are being stopped at the termination shock.

You are talking about the GZK effect, but it is applicable only to ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHCER), with energies in excess of about 5x10¹⁹ ev, far beyond the energies we are talking about. The cosmic rays encountered by the Voyagers can easily span the universe.

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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

Sorry: http://voycrs.gsfc.nasa.gov/

You are correct, it is slowly declining, the .5MeV rate is still about a factor of five greater than it was inside the helosheath, but I don't think that is enough. There might not be enough energy here...(more later)

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jwj

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

Your job is hopeless. You have a couple dozen low energy protons in the KeV and a few MeV range per second at Voyager detectors in an optically thin medium to work with and you somehow need to produce an isotropic blackbody SED in the microwaves. Do you predict that the PGH rate is going to shoot way up in the future?

I'm not sure where you got this information. The cosmic ray count is in fact much lower than predicted as almost all of the so called anomalous cosmic rays (ionized carbon, oxygen, argon etc.) are missing in the region where Voyager-1 crossed the termination shock.

Are you aware that inverse Compton scattering does not produce a blackbody spectrum, but produces a specific distortion signature that is described by the y-parameter?