“Expanding Space” by hmn at DeviantArt
Jul 15, 2016
Is the Universe expanding?
Edwin Hubble first identified what he thought was the Doppler effect in faint galaxy images. The observation is known today as “redshift”. However, rather than the result of acceleration and distance, it may be that it is an intrinsic property of matter. Astronomer Halton Arp proposed that idea many years ago, and it deserves further investigation, especially when anomalous observations are considered.
In 1997, Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter observed Type 1a supernovae, using their rise in luminosity and subsequent dimming to determine “absolute magnitude“. By calculating redshift, they plotted their distances. The two astronomers were shocked to find that the most remote Type 1a supernovae are accelerating. Not only that, the farther away they are, the faster they seem to speed up. The “mysterious” effect was called “dark energy”, because there was nothing to see that could provide the forces needed for the increase.
The Dark Energy Survey project was created to find out what dark energy is. More than 120 astronomers and other scientists continue to analyze observations from over 300 million galaxies, since astronomers believe that the Universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate. Contemporary theories suggest that galaxies are receding because they started out that way due to an inflationary event imparted by the Big Bang. Current estimates for the recession indicate about 71 kilometers per second for every 3.3 million light-years. This supposed dilation of space-time is called the Hubble constant.
Studies conducted in the 1960s seemed to show a large-scale motion superposed on the Hubble constant. The Local Group of galaxies containing the Milky Way, the Virgo supercluster, the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, and other galactic superclusters appear to be moving close to 600 kilometers per second toward the constellation Centaurus. It is like “a great river of galaxies” flowing into some gigantic gravitational source over 150 million light-years away. The putative structure is known as the Great Attractor.
The Great Attractor’s origin is thought to be a group of objects called the Great Wall (or the Centaurus Wall), in which it is embedded. However, the Great Wall does not possess enough mass density to influence structures like superclusters. Another force, only this time orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity from the Great Wall and its Great Attractor scion, is thought to exist outside the range of modern telescopes. The unseen force is called, “dark flow”.
Many years ago, redshift analysis found that the Andromeda galaxy is moving toward the Milky Way at over 320,000 kilometers per hour. Consensus opinion states that only gravity can provide the necessary energy to account for Andromeda’s speed. One flaw in the argument is that there is insufficient luminous matter between the two galaxies. It is thought that a mass of ten Milky Ways would be required to accelerate Andromeda, but that mass remains unseen.
Redshift measurements of galaxies in the Local Group showed them flying toward the center of the Virgo cluster at nearly two million kilometers per hour. The Virgo cluster is 50 million light years away and contains two giant elliptical galaxies, M84 and M86, but whatever is tugging on that mass also remains invisible.
The commonly accepted age of the Universe is 13.7 billion years, based on data from telescopes that are supposed to be capable of seeing galaxies at that distance. As mentioned, distance and time are thought to be related to each other because of redshift, so the farther away an object is determines how old it is perceived to be. In other words, the diameter of the observable Universe should be approximately 27.4 billion light-years.
There is a conundrum, however. According to published papers, the Universe is 156 billion light-years in diameter and not 27.4 billion! How can this be? The answer, according to theoretical physicists, is inflation.
If it requires a certain amount of time for a galaxy to form and the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, then galaxies should not exist at times that are assumed to be too early. When such formations were seen, accounting for them meant that some other explanation had to be added to the Big Bang theory.
So, as dark flow theory suggests, objects that are redshifted to extreme distances might not be so old, they are moving along with the expansion of space; they are “farther away.” The dichotomy demands that the early Universe was expanding faster than the speed of light, since its “size” is more than 11 times greater than its age.
Galaxies that experience dark flow can be over “the universal horizon”, also called the Hubble radius. It is the point beyond which instruments cannot see, since light from over that horizon can never catch up to the greater-than-light-speed-expansion of space.
In an Electric Universe, if galaxies within a cluster are oppositely charged from the cluster core, the core will pull them in toward the region of greatest charge density: they will experience “anomalous velocity.” If there are regions of charge separation within a galaxy, then the material that is the same polarity as the cluster core will be blown back and away, again much like the coma and tail of a comet in the Solar System.
Electrical connections exist throughout the Universe. From the smallest scale atomic interactions to the largest scale cosmic conglomerations, electricity provides the power and demonstrates its activity in plain sight.
As Arp wrote in his book, Seeing Red, “The greatest mistake in my opinion, and the one we continually make, is to let the theory guide the model. After a ridiculously long time it has finally dawned on me that establishment scientists actually proceed on the belief that theories tell you what is true and not true!”
Stephen Smith
