Hubble Uncovers Star Cluster Mystery. Stars Are Too Red?

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MGmirkin
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Hubble Uncovers Star Cluster Mystery. Stars Are Too Red?

Unread post by MGmirkin » Thu Jul 10, 2008 9:01 am

(Lucky Hubble find raises star cluster mystery)
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14283
New Scientist wrote:While observing stars in our own Milky Way galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers stumbled upon a rare find: a distant galaxy teeming with clusters of stars too dim for most telescopes to see. Curiously, the light from some of these clusters is redder than expected, an observation astronomers are still struggling to explain.

[...]

Astronomers expect clusters to be bluer the farther back in time they look. That's because younger clusters should contain more blue stars, which tend to be hotter and more massive. As clusters age, these stars are the first to exhaust their fuel, leaving behind longer-lived, reddish stars.

But the team found the opposite trend: some of the brightest clusters seemed to be 20% redder than stellar models predict.

This is odd, because astronomers don't expect to see a huge difference in the stars' appearance over the last billion years or so.

[...]

The team can't account for this unusual redness, but say it may have to do with the stars' chemical makeup. "It could just be that this is one of a strange population of globular clusters that's much more metal-rich than what we would have expected," Kalirai told New Scientist. "But it could also be that the stellar models are incorrect."

[...]

"It's possible there's something about stellar evolution we don't understand," says Zepf. But he adds there may be a simpler explanation for the ultra-red clusters.

Intervening material can absorb blue light, making objects appear redder than they are. Zepf notes the team might have underestimated this effect: "The authors make the best correction possible, but it's still an uncertainty. It's the explanation that requires the least amount of changes."
(Emphases added)

At least they admit their stellar evolution models could be wrong... As previously evidenced by a pulsar in the wrong kind of orbit around the wrong kind of star, and another young stellar binary whose constituents aren't as homogeneous as they should be...

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin
"The purpose of science is to investigate the unexplained, not to explain the uninvestigated." ~Dr. Stephen Rorke
"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD." ~Gibson's law

bdw000
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Re: Hubble Uncovers Star Cluster Mystery. Stars Are Too Red?

Unread post by bdw000 » Thu Jul 10, 2008 11:35 am

Intervening material can absorb blue light, making objects appear redder than they are.
Do they mean to say that the cosmological redshift could possibly, just possibly, be caused by "intervening material" ? :)

Hey, the greater the distance between objects, the more "intervening material" that will be there, to cause a greater "redshift."

Any of you experts know why this reasoning is rejected when discussing redshift?

Drethon
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Re: Hubble Uncovers Star Cluster Mystery. Stars Are Too Red?

Unread post by Drethon » Thu Jul 10, 2008 12:07 pm

Correct me if I'm wrong but intervening gas would block certain spectrums, the result would not be a redshift as a redshift is frequencies being shifted towards the red end. I believe the difference between filter vs shift and be detected... or maybe its another assumption being used to misunderstand the universe.

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Re: Hubble Uncovers Star Cluster Mystery. Stars Are Too Red?

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Thu Jul 10, 2008 12:11 pm

bdw000 wrote:
Any of you experts know why this reasoning is rejected when discussing redshift?
Because it's not been peer-reviewed?
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
Tao Te Ching, 53.

bdw000
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Re: Hubble Uncovers Star Cluster Mystery. Stars Are Too Red?

Unread post by bdw000 » Thu Jul 10, 2008 6:18 pm

Drethon wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong but intervening gas would block certain spectrums, the result would not be a redshift as a redshift is frequencies being shifted towards the red end. I believe the difference between filter vs shift and be detected... or maybe its another assumption being used to misunderstand the universe.
Thanks Drethon, that sounds technically correct.

Still . . . makes me wonder.

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Re: Hubble Uncovers Star Cluster Mystery. Stars Are Too Red?

Unread post by MGmirkin » Thu Jul 10, 2008 10:25 pm

To be clear, what they're talking about is NOT redshift, or else they'd say the further back in time you go, the more shifted toward the red we'd expect the SPECTRUM of stars to be.

What they're saying is that they're simply seeing more actually RED stars (red giants, etc.) than expected in the star clusters. The current model expects red stars to be the "end" of the stellar life cycle, but since they're looking at what they think are things way back in time (heck, they may BE redshifted to some extent), it would seem there hasn't been enough time to develop as many red stars as are actually found. So, either their models are wrong, or perhaps the clusters aren't as far away and as "far back in time" as they think?

Anyway...
~Michael
"The purpose of science is to investigate the unexplained, not to explain the uninvestigated." ~Dr. Stephen Rorke
"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD." ~Gibson's law

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