Sep 6, 2021 11:27 PM
Astrophysicists suggest new place where Planet Nine could be hiding
https://gizmodo.com/astrophysicists-sugg...1847599786
INTRO: Five years ago, a couple of astronomers declared they had found evidence for another planet in our solar system, a so-called “Planet X.” Though now commonly referred to as Planet Nine, the cosmic object—much bigger than Earth and lurking somewhere in the solar system’s outer reaches—is still very much theoretical, though the same pair has now fine-tuned the likely orbit such a planet would take.
The new research comes from Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology. Brown is “the guy who killed Pluto and is proud of it,” as Gizmodo described him in 2016. Currently hosted on the pre-print server arXiv and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, the research states that, should Planet Nine exist, it is closer and brighter than previously thought.
Scientists suspected the existence of an unknown planet based on the close clustering of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a wide band of icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit. If there were an unobserved planet lurking beyond the belt, it would be the most distant orbit of any planet around the Sun, taking thousands of years to make one revolution (compared Neptune’s 164-year orbit, the longest of the known planets).
Just as Neptune was discovered in the 1840s when astronomers realized Uranus was being dragged by some unseen object, a handful of Kuiper Belt objects appear to be clustered in the same orientation in space—something that could be a random event but that some astronomers believe is due to an undiscovered planet... (MORE)
New evidence against the Standard Model of Cosmology
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/09...el-of.html
EXCERPT: . . . . Today I want to tell you about another problem with the cosmological principle. As I said, one can calculate the scale from which on it should be valid from the standard model of cosmology. Beyond that scale, the universe should look pretty much the same everywhere. This means in particular there shouldn’t be any clumps of matter on scales larger than about a billion light years. But. Astrophysicists keep on finding those.
Already in nineteen-ninety-one they found the Clowes-Campusano-Quasar group, which is a collection of thirty-four Quasars, about nine point five billion light years away from us and it extends over two billion Light-years, clearly too large to be compatible with the prediction from the concordance model.
Since 2003 astrophysicists know the „great wall“ a collection of galaxies about a billion light years away from us that extends over 1.5 billion light years. That too, is larger than it should be.
Then there’s the “Huge quasar group” which is… huge. It spans a whopping four Billion light-years. And just in July Alexia Lopez discovered the “Giant Arc” a collection of galaxies, galaxy clusters, gas and dust that spans 3 billion light years.
Theoretically, these structures shouldn’t exist. It can happen that such clumps appear coincidentally in the concordance model. That’s because this model uses an initial distribution of matter in the early universe with random fluctuations. So it could happen you end up with a big clump somewhere just by chance. But you can calculate the probability for that to happen. The Giant Arc alone has a probability of less than one in a hundred-thousand to have come about by chance. And that doesn’t factor in all the other big structures.
What does it mean? It means the evidence is mounting that the cosmological principle is a bad assumption to develop a model for the entire universe and it probably has to go. It increasingly looks like we live in a region in the universe that happens to have a significantly lower density than the average in the visible universe. This area of underdensity which we live in has been called the “local hole”, and it has a diameter of at least 600 million light years. This is the finding of a recent paper by a group of astrophysicists from Durham in the UK... (MORE - missing details)
New Evidence against the Standard Model of Cosmology
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JETGS64kTys
https://gizmodo.com/astrophysicists-sugg...1847599786
INTRO: Five years ago, a couple of astronomers declared they had found evidence for another planet in our solar system, a so-called “Planet X.” Though now commonly referred to as Planet Nine, the cosmic object—much bigger than Earth and lurking somewhere in the solar system’s outer reaches—is still very much theoretical, though the same pair has now fine-tuned the likely orbit such a planet would take.
The new research comes from Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology. Brown is “the guy who killed Pluto and is proud of it,” as Gizmodo described him in 2016. Currently hosted on the pre-print server arXiv and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, the research states that, should Planet Nine exist, it is closer and brighter than previously thought.
Scientists suspected the existence of an unknown planet based on the close clustering of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a wide band of icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit. If there were an unobserved planet lurking beyond the belt, it would be the most distant orbit of any planet around the Sun, taking thousands of years to make one revolution (compared Neptune’s 164-year orbit, the longest of the known planets).
Just as Neptune was discovered in the 1840s when astronomers realized Uranus was being dragged by some unseen object, a handful of Kuiper Belt objects appear to be clustered in the same orientation in space—something that could be a random event but that some astronomers believe is due to an undiscovered planet... (MORE)
New evidence against the Standard Model of Cosmology
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/09...el-of.html
EXCERPT: . . . . Today I want to tell you about another problem with the cosmological principle. As I said, one can calculate the scale from which on it should be valid from the standard model of cosmology. Beyond that scale, the universe should look pretty much the same everywhere. This means in particular there shouldn’t be any clumps of matter on scales larger than about a billion light years. But. Astrophysicists keep on finding those.
Already in nineteen-ninety-one they found the Clowes-Campusano-Quasar group, which is a collection of thirty-four Quasars, about nine point five billion light years away from us and it extends over two billion Light-years, clearly too large to be compatible with the prediction from the concordance model.
Since 2003 astrophysicists know the „great wall“ a collection of galaxies about a billion light years away from us that extends over 1.5 billion light years. That too, is larger than it should be.
Then there’s the “Huge quasar group” which is… huge. It spans a whopping four Billion light-years. And just in July Alexia Lopez discovered the “Giant Arc” a collection of galaxies, galaxy clusters, gas and dust that spans 3 billion light years.
Theoretically, these structures shouldn’t exist. It can happen that such clumps appear coincidentally in the concordance model. That’s because this model uses an initial distribution of matter in the early universe with random fluctuations. So it could happen you end up with a big clump somewhere just by chance. But you can calculate the probability for that to happen. The Giant Arc alone has a probability of less than one in a hundred-thousand to have come about by chance. And that doesn’t factor in all the other big structures.
What does it mean? It means the evidence is mounting that the cosmological principle is a bad assumption to develop a model for the entire universe and it probably has to go. It increasingly looks like we live in a region in the universe that happens to have a significantly lower density than the average in the visible universe. This area of underdensity which we live in has been called the “local hole”, and it has a diameter of at least 600 million light years. This is the finding of a recent paper by a group of astrophysicists from Durham in the UK... (MORE - missing details)
New Evidence against the Standard Model of Cosmology
