whenever you see "Solves Cosmic Mystery" in title...

[viscount aero]

...it typically means they are reaching for an answer based upon theoretical and untested foundational evidence.

Hence, from:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Close ... y_999.html

My rebuttals are in RED:

Title of article:
Closest Type Ia Supernova in Decades Solves Cosmic Mystery
Titles such as this typically denote that the institution of origin does not really have a very firm grasp on what they are observing. Subsequently, use of the phrase "Solves Cosmic Mystery" is a semantic anchoring device wielded to persuade the subconscious mind of the reader to accept the press release as an authority. The only mystery that is solved is perceived in the reader's mind only. An actual event or phenomenon in the cosmos does not necessarily need to be described. The greater point is to persuade the reader, not in relaying necessarily factual information.

by Staff Writers
Berkeley CA (SPX) Dec 23, 2011

The Palomar Transient Factory caught SN 2011fe in the Pinwheel Galaxy in the vicinity of the Big Dipper on 24 August, 2011. Found just hours after it exploded and only 21 million light years away, the discovery triggered the closest-ever look at a young Type Ia supernova. (Image by B. J. Fulton, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network)
According to the theory based on redshift, the star, then exploded 21 million years ago. Not hours ago. Moreover, the actual distance from Earth, and time ago it exploded, is unknown.

Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia's) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar "standard candles" astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy - and 13 years later to a Nobel Prize, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe."
The discovery of dark energy as a viable phenomenon is a foregone conclusion and reinforced to the reader here. It is not questioned one iota. "Dark energy" is mentioned as a foundational premise, of many, used to revalidate it along with the rest of the article's findings. This sleight of hand sets up the authoritative basis as well as perpetuates the general mythology foisted upon the reader as fact.

The light from thousands of SN Ia's has been studied, but until now their physics - how they detonate and what the star systems that produce them actually look like before they explode - has been educated guesswork.
This is both an admission of fault and a buildup of present validation. To further question or explore that this, too, is "educated guesswork" is not to be entertained. They are now on a solid foundation of fact-finding and mystery solving. The mystery is solved here. This is reinforced by this paragraph.

Peter Nugent of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) heads the Computational Cosmology Center in the Lab's Computational Research Division and also leads the Lab's collaboration in the multi-institutional Palomar Transient Factory (PTF).
This is the appeal to authority part of the press release. With this cred, you, the reader, cannot possibly question the validity of the findings.

On August 24 of this year, searching data as it poured into DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) from an automated telescope on Palomar Mountain in California, Nugent spotted a remarkable object. It was shortly confirmed as a Type Ia supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy, some 21 million light-years distant. That's unusually close by cosmic standards, and the nearest SN Ia since 1986; it was subsequently given the official name SN 2011fe.

Nugent says, "We caught the supernova just 11 hours after it exploded, so soon that we were later able to calculate the actual moment of the explosion to within 20 minutes. Our early observations confirmed some assumptions about the physics of Type Ia supernovae, and we ruled out a number of possible models. But with this close-up look, we also found things nobody had dreamed of."
Certainly the event is relevant, being observed so soon after the supernova event. So the fanfare is noteworthy and should be celebrated. But this emotional relevancy is a guard-removing lead-in to the subsequent information that is not necessarily factual. But the reader is softened up to receiving the subsequent information, in celebration with the scientists. Here, we live the excitement vicariously through the astronomers.

"When we saw SN2011fe, I fell off my chair," says PTF team member Mansi Kasliwal of the Carnegie Institution for Science and the California Institute of Technology. "Its brightness was too faint to be a supernova and too bright to be nova. Only follow-up observations in the next few hours revealed that this was actually an exceptionally young Type Ia supernova."

Because they could closely study the supernova during its first few days, the team was able to gather the first direct evidence for what at least one SN Ia looked like before it exploded, and what happened next. Their results are reported in the 15 December 2011 issue of the journal Nature.
A detailed report is here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/111 ... 0966v1.pdf

Confirming a Carbon-Oxygen White Dwarf
Scientists long ago developed models of Type Ia supernovae based on their evolving brightness and spectra. The models assume the progenitor is a binary system - about half of all stars are in binary systems - in which a very dense, very small white-dwarf star made of carbon and oxygen orbits a companion, from which it sweeps up additional matter.
We see another admission that begets the reader to accept the subsequent information: that the supernova is from a binary system --even as the companion is never revealed to actually exist, and is not observed. It is inferred only, based upon an X-ray source.

There's a specific limit to how massive the white dwarf can grow, equal to about 1.4 times the mass of our Sun, before it can no longer support itself against gravitational collapse.

"As it approaches the limit, conditions are met in the center so that the white dwarf detonates in a colossal thermonuclear explosion, which converts the carbon and oxygen to heavier elements including nickel," says Nugent.
This is the linchpin theory that is being expounded upon in the article. A supernova occurs due to gravitational collapse and then to subsequent rebounding, in an explosion. Simply, the "conditions are met in the center."

"A shock wave rips through it and ejects the material in a bright expanding photosphere. Much of the brightness comes from the heat of the radioactive nickel as it decays to cobalt. Light also comes from ejecta being heated by the shock wave, and if this runs into the companion star it can be reheated, adding to the luminosity."
A shock wave rips through what? The star has already collapsed in upon its "core." There is no more star above this surface to "rip through." It has compacted to a point or upon a relatively tiny core --at least that is what is to be assumed-- and then expands outward, bouncing off the core (?)

By examining how SN 2011fe's brightness evolved - its so-called early-time light curve - and the features of its early-time spectra, members of the PTF team were able to constrain how big the exploding star was, when it exploded, what might have happened during the explosion, and what kind of binary star system was involved.
Again, they are already assuming it is a binary when that is not ascertained, known, observed, or seen. If this premise is so assumed, then what other things are they assuming?

The first observations of SN 2011fe were carried out at the Liverpool Telescope at La Palma in the Canary Islands, followed within hours by the Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory in California and the Keck I Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These were shortly followed by NASA's orbiting Swift Observatory.

Says Nugent, "We made an absurdly conservative assumption that the earliest luminosity was due entirely to the explosion itself and would increase over time in proportion to the size of the expanding fireball, which set an upper limit on the radius of the progenitor."

Daniel Kasen, an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at UC Berkeley and a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division, explains that "it only takes a few seconds for the shock wave to tear apart the star, but the debris heated in the explosion will continue to glow for several hours.

The bigger the star, the brighter this afterglow. Because we caught this supernova so early, and with such sensitive observations, we were able to directly constrain the size of the progenitor."

"Sure enough, it could only have been a white dwarf," says Nugent. "The spectra gave us the carbon and oxygen, so we knew we had the first direct evidence that a Type Ia supernova does indeed start with a carbon-oxygen white dwarf."
Luminosity and distance are used to hypothesize stellar size. If the star is not at the assumed distance then it may not be a white dwarf. Its luminosity may therefore not foretell its size based upon its assumed distance.

The Expected and the Unexpected
"The early-time light curve also constrained the radius of the binary system," says Nugent, "so we got rid of a whole bunch of models," ranging from old red giant stars to other white dwarfs in a so-called "double-degenerate" system.

Kasen explains that "if there was a giant companion star orbiting nearby, we should have seen some fireworks when the debris from the supernova crashed into it." A red giant would have made the supernova brighter by several orders of magnitude early on. "Because we didn't observe any bright flashes like that, we determined that the companion star could not have been much bigger than our Sun."
With no obvious and clear "giant' neighbor that caught debris --what if there isn't a companion? That goes unmentioned.

Nor was there much chance the companion was another white dwarf in a double-degenerate system, unless it had somehow avoided being torn apart and littering the surroundings with debris. A shock wave plowing through that kind of rubble would have produced a burst of early light the observers couldn't have missed.
And per their idea, a smaller star companion is ruled out --what if there isn't a companion? That goes unmentioned.

So unless the companion was positioned almost exactly between the exploding star and the observers on Earth, closer to it than a 10th the diameter of our Sun - an unlikely set of circumstances - the white dwarf's companion had to be a main-sequence star.
Why does it have to be a main sequence star? A giant star -and another white dwarf- would not have possibly caught any exploding debris, created another "event?" But a "main sequence" star would fit the bill? Oh?
But what if there isn't a companion? That goes unmentioned. But the reader is lead to just accept this erroneous reporting.

While these observations pointed to a "normal" SN Ia, the way the white dwarf exploded held surprises.

Typical of what would be expected, early spectra obtained by the Lick three-meter telescope showed many intermediate-mass elements spewing out of the expanding fireball, including ionized oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, and iron, traveling 16,000 kilometers a second - more than five percent of the speed of light.
They employ here sensational semantics to "upsell" the amazing findings --the very things that reveal the mystery for the reader. "5% the speed of light" is nowhere near the speed of light.

Yet some oxygen was traveling much faster, at over 20,000 kilometers a second.

"The high-velocity oxygen shows that the oxygen wasn't evenly distributed when the white dwarf blew up," Nugent says, "indicating unusual clumpiness in the way it was dispersed.

But more interesting, he says, is that "whatever the mechanism of the explosion, it showed a tremendous amount of mixing, with some radioactive nickel mixed all the way to the photosphere. So the brightness followed the expanding surface almost exactly. This is not something any of us would have expected."

PTF team member Mark Sullivan of Oxford University says, "Understanding how these giant explosions create and mix materials is important because supernovae are where we get most of the elements that make up the Earth and even our own bodies - for instance, these supernovae are a major source of iron in the universe. So we are all made of bits of exploding stars."
This shifts the article into another gear of speculation, a more reaching premise is hereby established with these sentences. Even if the premise of an "unexpected clumsiness" is correct, due to the acceleration differentials of the materials upon the explosion, they do not explain nor understand how "these giant explosions create and mix materials." That is never explained.

The bit about we are all made of starstuff, a nod to Sagan, may be true. However this alludes to the core-accretion/proto-solar nebula theory of solar system creation --which is highly doubtful a viable theory at the core-accretion level --cold matter does not tend to clump and then accrete into anything.

"It is rare that you have eureka moments in science, but it happened four times on this supernova," says Andy Howell, coleader of PTF's SN Ia team: "The super-early discovery; the crazy first spectrum; when we figured out it had to be a white dwarf; and then, the Holy Grail, when we figured out details of the second star."
Wow the Holy Grail! Amen! The clergy revisit how they detected the second star!

Howell, a staff scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and adjunct faculty member at the University of California at Santa Barbara, adds, "We're like Captain Ahab...except our white whale is a white dwarf. We're obsessed with proving they cause supernovae, but the evidence has been eluding us for decades." This time, he says, "We got our whale...and we lived."
Wow! They got their whale! We can move along now and not question any of the above assertions that they made in their article! The layperson is successfully schooled! Bottoms up, everyone!

"This first close SN Ia in the era of modern instrumentation will undoubtedly become the best-studied thermonuclear supernova in history," the PTF team notes in their Nature paper, and "will form the new foundation upon which our knowledge of more distant Type Ia supernovae is built."
They must reiterate the word "thermonuclear" to drive home the present stellar model theory. The recent SN Ia findings will only strengthen their adherence to this theory.


Two decades after the Berkeley-Lab-based Supernova Cosmology Project, led by 2011 Nobel Prize-winner in Physics Saul Perlmutter, proved that Type Ia supernovae could be used to measure the expansion history of the universe, Berkeley Lab astrophysicists and computer scientists have finally gotten a close-up look at what these remarkable cosmic mileposts really look like.
Big Bang theory is reinforced here, taking the reader out of the article educated, informed, and schooled in the great mystery that has been solved!

[StevenJay]

I'm convinced that these press releases are filtered through the same mechanism as any typical political speech or religious sermon. What emerges is a lot of authoritative-sounding blather that dazles, obfuscates and indoctrinates the vulnerable mind to whatever agenda is being fomented.

On the other hand, the upside is that it also has the effect of prompting less vulnerable minds to seek a higher state of awareness.

So ultimately, it's all good!

[MrAmsterdam]

All of you are wrong (that would include me).

http://www.kek.jp/intra-e/press/2011/122209/

The mechanism that explains why our universe was born with 3 dimensions:
a 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved by supercomputer

A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory*1 in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction.
This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer.
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A group of 3 researchers, Jun Nishimura (associate professor at KEK), Asato Tsuchiya (associate professor at Shizuoka University) and Sang-Woo Kim (project researcher at Osaka University) has succeeded in simulating the birth of the universe, using a supercomputer for calculations based on superstring theory. This showed that the universe had 9 spatial dimensions at the beginning, but only 3 of these underwent expansion at some point in time.

This work will be published soon in Physical Review Letters.

[The content of the research]
In this study, the team established a method for calculating large matrices (in the IKKT matrix model*4), which represent the interactions of strings, and calculated how the 9-dimensional space changes with time. In the figure, the spatial extents in 9 directions are plotted against time.
If one goes far enough back in time, space is indeed extended in 9 directions, but then at some point only 3 of those directions start to expand rapidly. This result demonstrates, for the first time, that the 3-dimensional space that we are living in indeed emerges from the 9-dimensional space that superstring theory predicts.
This calculation was carried out on the supercomputer Hitachi SR16000 (theoretical performance: 90.3 TFLOPS) at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics of Kyoto University.

[The significance of the research]
It is almost 40 years since superstring theory was proposed as the theory of everything, extending the general theory of relativity to the scale of elementary particles. However, its validity and its usefulness remained unclear due to the difficulty of performing actual calculations.
The newly obtained solution to the space-time dimensionality puzzle strongly supports the validity of the theory.
Furthermore, the establishment of a new method to analyze superstring theory using computers opens up the possibility of applying this theory to various problems. For instance, it should now be possible to provide a theoretical understanding of the inflation*5 that is believed to have taken place in the early universe, and also the accelerating expansion of the universe*6, whose discovery earned the Nobel Prize in Physics this year. It is expected that superstring theory will develop further and play an important role in solving such puzzles in particle physics as the existence of the dark matter that is suggested by cosmological observations, and the Higgs particle, which is expected to be discovered by LHC experiments*7.

Some one deserves a price for proofing things/strings in super computer simulations.

Empiricism is dead, long live the computer simulation!

[viscount aero]

Yes I saw that recently, too, the model the proves how the universe got "3 dimensions." It's particularly laughable in that quite a many cosmologists/mathematicians don't even believe in String theory. That article would be another one to have fun with and make RED remarks upon. Perhaps I will

Maybe modern science would benefit from remembering this quote from their alleged Messiah (one which they often misquote, misunderstand, misrepresent):

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." --Albert Einstein

[JeffreyW]

Excellent post. I must resurrect.