More Meteorites Burn Brightly--And Galaxies Puzzle Astronomers More And More

Elaine Meinel Supkis

It makes virtually no news these days but there was another large meteorite event this week right on the heels of the big event in Finland. Also, as more information comes in concerning galaxies, the more confused astronomers are. The information does not fit the 'rapidly expanding away from each other' picture painted by increasingly desperate astronomers based mostly on red shift data.

A big sonic boom and break up of meteorite startles people living around the Great Lakes.

BY STEVE KUCHERA
NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

The mysterious light seen over the Northland on Friday night was an especially bright meteor seen in at least two states and Canada.

"Anyone who saw it should count themselves as lucky -- they are probably not going to see another one like that in their lifetime," Scott Young said.

Young is an astronomer and manager of the planetarium and science gallery at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. The museum is collecting reports of sightings of Friday's fireball, which traveled from south to north over the Northland about 11:35 p.m. Friday.

If someone were lobbing bombs at us we would be on full alert. Since the entity doing this is celestial, we shrug our shoulders. Bush has had NASA cut many programs for watching the planet earth. One would imagine, watching out for our home planet would be the primary focus of NASA but nope. Even as millions of people believe in and watch for UFOs, there seems to be a certain lack of interest in the UFO community as well as our defense forces for looking at flying celestial objects called 'meteorites' or 'comets.' These objects can and will annihilate most life forms if a particularily large one hits. Even if we observe and track the ones in the nearer parts of the solar system we already know that even more dangerous ones lurk far away at the outer edges or beyond our solar system.

Staying alert for this is of highest importance. We still have no way of averting danger, this ought to be th primary focus of the space program, not going to Mars! Once we figure this out, we will have the luxury to explore other planets with escaping our solar system as a goal.

Here is an earlier story this spring about the near pass of a comet.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/24mar_73p.htm

In 1995, Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 did something unexpected: it fell apart. For no apparent reason, the comet's nucleus split into at least three "mini-comets" flying single file through space. Astronomers watched with interest, but the view was blurry even through large telescopes. "73P" was a hundred and fifty million miles away.

We're about to get a much closer look. In May 2006 the fragments are going to fly past Earth closer than any comet has come in more than twenty years.

Meanwhile, Astronomers discover new star cluster group that has been captured by our own Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers have discovered a long, slender stream of ancient stars racing across the northern sky. The stream is about 30,000 light-years from Earth and flowing high over the Milky Way at some 230 kilometers per second, or more than half a million miles per hour.

The discovery was made by Canadian astronomer Carl Grillmair and his colleague Odysseas Dionatos from the Astronomical Observatory of Rome. Grillmair presented the findings this week at the 208th American Astronomical Society meeting in his hometown of Calgary.

"What we can see of the stream is over 30,000 light years long," Grillmair said, "although it may actually be much longer than that since we are currently limited by the extent of the survey data. I would actually be somewhat surprised if the stream doesn't extend completely around the Galaxy."

The astronomers think the stars on this cosmic highway date back nearly to the beginning of the universe and are the fossil remains of a star cluster that, in its prime, contained between 10,000 and 100,000 stars.

Since this new data totally destroys much of what astronomers have to learn in order to get degrees in this field, there is tremendous resistence to the reality it screams at them: the universe has ceased 'flying apart' and far from flying apart faster and faster, star systems are falling INTO each other. According to the data, the stars in this cluster had been around billions of years, from the Big Bang. According to theology within astronomic temples, this cluster which was formed from the hot gases of the creation then set up at tremendous speed away from all other star systems. So, how did it end up circling our star system?

If it was moving away, how could it come here? Haha. Obviously, even after 12 billion or so years of frantically heading straight outwards, it was really sliding down our galaxy's gravitational pool. It isn't the only star cluster doing this! It seems our galaxy is made up of a lot of star clusters that kind of fell towards our central black hole. I would suggest even our dear sun is such a star. Far from being hatched here in the galactic nursery, perhaps our star which is pretty old, you know, was captured by the galaxy which is why we are still in one of the outer arms rather than sucked down the maw of the monster residing at the heart of this system.

And what astronomers see at the other end of the universe doesn't fit the present dogma, either!

Space.com: A ghostly blue blob amid a swarm of red dots in a new cosmic image is the superhot intergalactic gas permeating the space within the most distant cluster of galaxies found to date.

Located nearly 10 billion light-years away, Cluster XMMXCS 2215-1738 is being hailed by its discoverers as a tantalizing glimpse of what galaxy clusters were like at their earliest stages of formation.

Individual galaxies have been detected at greater distances. But the newly discovered cluster contains several hundred galaxies bound together by mutual gravitational attraction.

The finding was announced here this week at the 208th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

A light-year is the distance that light can travel in a year, so the light from this cluster took almost 10 billion years to reach us. Since the universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old, the record-setting cluster must have formed when the universe was relatively young.

"Yet this distant cluster appears to be full of old galaxies," discovery team member Adam Stanford noted with amazement.

I am happy to see he is 'amazed.' Maybe, just maybe, astronomers will realize we are looking at the opposite side of time rather than 'back' in time? All galaxies near us are falling into other galaxies. As of today, we can now see all galaxies at the other extreme of the universe are also falling into each other! Huh? What gives?

This seems increasingly like a collapsing universe rather than one that is flying apart. I am not an astronomer. I can't come up with elegant formulas to explain things. I am an artist, if not a great artist, but I look at the universe with an artist's eyes. And the images don't fit the dogma as expressed by modern astronomy. Shoehorning all this into a matrix that leaves out the idea that maybe space and time are NOT as we assume but is radically different will mean all discoveries will be a mish-mashed mess. As measurment systems and the ability to 'see' improves, the worse it is for the present cosmic system.

Some brave astronomer will come along and rearticulate all this into something new. And I am betting the 'falling apart until it disappears into the far reaches of nothingness' dogma will die. And good riddance. I couldn't stand that nihilist world view! Making creation a one time event. Gah.

This still doesn't answer the riddle, how did any of this come into being in the first place. Next time I see Pegasus, I'll ask (sound of laughter).

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Comments

[John Savage]

"...the opposite side of time rather than 'back' in time..."

interesting. care to elaborate?

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

If the universe is contracting, so to speak, we aren't looking "into the past" when we see severely red-shifted galaxies, we are seeing the opposite side of the previously expanded universe that is no longer moving away from us, I suspect.

This is why those galaxies aren't 'young'.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I am only guessing, of course. Explaining all this very 'at odds' data is a huge challenge for scientists. But first, they have to admit they can't figure this out. Previous assumptions are wrong since none of them take into account the fact that galaxies are all, everywhere, falling into each other's gravitational pools.

Starting from that fact, all other data has to explain itself.

[John Savage]

but the speed of light is constant, regardless of the motion of the observer...or the source.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Sort of, we are assuming this, of course.

The problem is, where is the light traveling? Straight lines? Or curved? And if space is warped and light follows the curvature of space, how does that affect our perception of light here on our own galaxy?

Something isn't right. The data coming in doesn't fit the model at all.

[John Savage]

so if i gaze at a galaxy 13 billion light-years away, and in that 13 billion years space has stopped expanding and that severely red-shifted galaxy is now actually moving towards me, why is it that i see a red-shifted galaxy moving away from me? where is the light that reveals that it is actually moving towards me?

[JSmith]

"where is the light that reveals that it is actually moving towards me?"

If it's heading toward you, it should be blue-shifted.

[JSmith]

And you can still have local collisions between gravitationally-attracted bodies while space continues to expand. Nothing contradictory about that at all.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Everywhere, the same 'local' collisions? Huh? What?

As far we we can tell, there is no place in space galaxies are NOT colliding or sucking in everything!

About redshift: if ALL OTHER DATA CONTRIDICTS IT, something is WRONG! Shoehorning everything into an old shoe won't fix it.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Indeed, one should expect the 'falling into each other' to be happening a lot long ago and almost never now but it isnt!

It is happening now....TO US! We are catching up with Andromeda, not flying away at right angles (if the expanding universe were a big balloon),

And poor Andromeda and us, we are falling towards the Great Attractor which got its name because of what it is doing to us. And that monster isn't all the 'local' at all: the 'Local Group' is local.

Or maybe everyone is loco. Heh.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I will buy a balloon tomorrow and take pictures illustrating how this all works. How the Great Attractor can be 'red shifting' even as we get closer and closer (IT IS MOVING TOO! But we are catching up over the next billions of years!).

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