MazeHatter comments on Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I grew up thinking that the Big Bang was the beginning of it all. In 2013 and 2014 a good number of observations have thrown some of our basic assumptions about the theory into question. There were anomalies observed in the CMB, previously ignored, now confirmed by Planck:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck/Planck_reveals_an_almost_perfect_Universe
We are also getting a better look at galaxies at greater distances, thinking they would all be young galaxies, and finding they are not:
http://carnegiescience.edu/news/some_galaxies_early_universe_grew_quickly
B. D. Simmons et al. Galaxy Zoo: CANDELS Barred Disks and Bar Fractions. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2014 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu1817
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141030101241.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/spitzer/splash-project-dives-deep-for-galaxies/#.VBxS4o938jg
Although it seems we don't have to look so far away to find evidence that galaxy formation is inconsistent with the Big Bang timeline.
http://mq.edu.au/newsroom/2014/03/11/granny-galaxies-discovered-in-the-early-universe/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1799
Another observation is that lithium abundances are way too low for the theory in other places, not just here:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140910-space-lithium-m54-star-cluster-science/
It also seems there is larger scale structure continually being discovered larger than the Big Bang is thought to account for:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141119084506.htm
D. Hutsemékers, L. Braibant, V. Pelgrims, D. Sluse. Alignment of quasar polarizations with large-scale structures. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2014
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130111092539.htm
These observations have been made just recently. It seems that in the 1980's, when I was first introduced to the Big Bang as a child, the experts in the field knew then there were problems with it, and devised inflation as a solution. And today, the validity of that solution is being called into question by those same experts:
http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~steinh/0411036.pdf
What are the odds 2015 will be more like 2014 where we (again) found larger and older galaxies at greater distances, or will it be more like 1983?
I think you should post this as its own thread in Discussion.
If that sounds good, please, it'd be great if you could do it. I don't have the status.
The link for the dwarf galaxy article use wrong, it should be:
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/7528/20140611/galaxy-formation-theories-undermined-dwarf-galaxies.htm
Thanks.
Did somebody karma bomb your account? It looks like an awful lot of your posts have a single down-vote on them.
I assign a low probability to that. The user in question has just made a number of comments which are of low quality.
I've posted it here.