https://theconversation.com/one-of-the- ... yet-194062
There’s an awkward, irksome problem with our understanding of nature’s laws which physicists have been trying to explain for decades. It’s about electromagnetism, the law of how atoms and light interact, which explains everything from why you don’t fall through the floor to why the sky is blue.
Our theory of electromagnetism is arguably the best physical theory humans have ever made – but it has no answer for why electromagnetism is as strong as it is. Only experiments can tell you electromagnetism’s strength, which is measured by a number called α (aka alpha, or the fine-structure constant).
The American physicist Richard Feynman, who helped come up with the theory, called this “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics” and urged physicists to “put this number up on their wall and worry about it”.
In research just published in Science, we decided to test whether α is the same in different places within our galaxy by studying stars that are almost identical twins of our Sun. If α is different in different places, it might help us find the ultimate theory, not just of electromagnetism, but of all nature’s laws together – the “theory of everything”.
We want to break our favourite theory
Wait! Stop right there. Electromagnetism is NOT he mainstream's favorite theory. It’s the Big Bang … dark matter … dark energy … black holes … etc. etc. etc. That should be clear to everyone because the mainstream has invested a pittance in understanding electromagnetism in comparison to those gnomes. Things might be very different if they'd done just the opposite. Nevertheless ...
We decided to look beyond Earth, beyond our Solar System, to see if stars which are nearly identical twins of our Sun produce the same rainbow of colours. Atoms in the atmospheres of stars absorb some of the light struggling outwards from the nuclear furnaces in their cores.
Only certain colours are absorbed, leaving dark lines in the rainbow. Those absorbed colours are determined by α – so measuring the dark lines very carefully also lets us measure α.
The problem is, the atmospheres of stars are moving – boiling, spinning, looping, burping – and this shifts the lines. The shifts spoil any comparison with the same lines in laboratories on Earth, and hence any chance of measuring α. Stars, it seems, are terrible places to test electromagnetism.
That should make you Electric Universe folks chuckle.
But we wondered: if you find stars that are very similar – twins of each other – maybe their dark, absorbed colours are similar as well. So instead of comparing stars to laboratories on Earth, we compared twins of our Sun to each other.
A new test with solar twins
Our team of student, postdoctoral and senior researchers, at Swinburne University of Technology and the University of New South Wales, measured the spacing between pairs of absorption lines in our Sun and 16 “solar twins” – stars almost indistinguishable from our Sun.
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From these exquisite spectra, we have shown that α was the same in the 17 solar twins to an astonishing precision: just 50 parts per billion. That’s like comparing your height to the circumference of Earth. It’s the most precise astronomical test of α ever performed.
Unfortunately, our new measurements didn’t break our favourite theory. But the stars we’ve studied are all relatively nearby, only up to 160 light years away.
One of the principle beliefs of EU and plasmacosmology advocates is that the laws of physics are the same as far as the eye can see. So this result doesn’t surprise me one bit. But mainstream astrophysicists seem to believe just the opposite. So they’ll keep one trying with farther and farther stars.
We’ve recently identified new solar twins much further away, about half way to the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.
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If we can observe these much more distant suns with the largest optical telescopes, maybe we’ll find the keys to the universe.
Stay tuned!