Universal, the U in blume¶
** Update: **
If you are for the universe, the U in blume is still very much alive, as started a new project, The Geometry of the Universe<https:gotu.readthedocs.org>
blume will focus on the core interaction with matplotlib.
The gotu project, requires blume.
** End Update **
Giant black holes to galactic dust and the tides of the cosmos.
Gamma ray bursts, new arrivals in our visible universe.
Gravitational waves too perhaps?
Black hole mergers, modelled with a new paradigm.
Einstein with a twist¶
Many years ago, early 1980’s I was fortunate enough to study mathematics at Warwick University.
Christopher Zeeman had put together a wonderful department, including Colin Rourke.
He gave lectures on Real Analysis, occasionally in wellington boots having come from the farm.
Real analysis? Calculus, but done differently. With nested sets, that Colin had introduced through his work at the Open University.
I will confess, I was more interested in algebra, group theory, Galois and Fermat.
Colin’s main interests were in the land of topology.
I left Warwick, years passed. Then I heard someone had a proof of the Poincare Conjecture. It was Colin, but alas there was an error.
A few years passed another proof and this time Colin found the hole.
In 2006 Gregori Perelman, finally completed the proof.
By this time Colin had an increasing interest in cosmology, a natural interest for a topologist.
By the wonders of modern communication I heard from Professor Ian Stewart (paraphrased):
Colin Rourke has just published a book outlining a whole new
paradigm on the universe.
A theory that does not require dark matter.
The book was A new paradigm for the universe published in 2017. [0]
The book also focusses on galactic rotation curves, how the velocity of stars varies with distance from the centre of their galaxy.
Typical curves show a straight line through the origin, which transitions to a flat asymptote with a constant velocity of around 300km/s.
Unfortunately, such curves cannot be produce by conventional physics. Vera Rubin [2] uncovered this problem and introduced the idea of dark matter as a potential solution.
Colin takes a different approach. He modifies Einstein’s General Relativity by assuming that a rotating body drags inertial frames in the direction of rotation, with the effect proportional to the mass and angular velocity and inversely proportional to the distance from the body.
There are a number of compelling reasons to support this assumption:
galactic rotation curves now match the observations
it provides a mechanism for distant matter to define inertial frames
it provides a mechanism that slowly redshifts light as it passes across the cosmos, due to drag from giant galactic black holes.
it does not require dark matter.
it may throw new insights on motions of binary star systems.
it helps explain the thermal nature of the cosmic microwave background.
shows the universe may be very much larger than conventional estimates, both in time and space.
Returning to topology, the book uses de Sitter space as a model for the universe:
In essence, what is provided here is a totally new paradigm for the
universe. In this paradigm, there is no big bang, and the universe
is many orders of magnitude older than current estimates for its
age. Indeed there is no natural limit for its age. The new model
for the underlying space-time of the universe is based on a
relativistic analogue of the sphere, known as *de Sitter space*.
This is a highly symmetrical space which makes the model fully
Copernican in both space and time. By contrast the current standard
model of mainstream cosmology is Copernican only in space and not in
time. This means that the view of the universe expounded here is
similar to the steady state theory proposed and defended by Fred
Hoyle (and others) in the last century, but it is not the same as
their theory, which proposed an unnatural continuous creation
hypothesis; like the big bang, this hypothesis breaks commonly
accepted conservation laws.
Tired light¶
The further light travels through space, the more it is red-shifted, hence light from more distant galaxies appears more red-shifted giving the illusion that galaxies are receding faster and faster the more distance they are.
In [1] Edward Wright argues that simply stretching light from distant galaxies would not give the thermal energy distribution that we observe for the cosmic microwave background (CMB), so dismisses this theory.
Cosmic microwave background¶
As noted the energy distribution of the cosmic microwave is very close to thermal with a temperature of ~2.73K.
According to the new paradigm (NP) the CMB originates in the form of light from very distant galaxies.
Over 95% of that energy coming from galaxies that have never yet been in our visible universe, beyond the Hubble distance.
So how does this light, in the form of microwaves make its way to us? Surely, light from beyond the Hubble distance can never reach us since it will be infinitely red shifted by the intervening space.
The answer may be cosmic dust. Intergalactic space dust. All at a temperature of 2.73K.
Once light from distant galaxies has been redshifted by z = 1000 it enters the microwave range.
Now there are so many distant galaxies contributing to the energy at a point in space that it is able to maintain a temperature of 2.73K.
Sooner or later a photon will encounter some dust and be absorbed and then re-emitted.
This is the perfect scenario for producing thermal radiation.
So whilst there is a tendency for light to be red shifted as it travels across the cosmos, once it reaches the microwave level, then we reach a point of thermal equilibrium.
Light from distant galaxies can travel arbitrarily long distances through this thermalisation process.
Harmonics¶
Spherical harmonic analysis of the cosmic microwave data reveals intriguing harmonics within the data, with wavelengths of the order of 500 million light years.
Since interstellar cosmic dust is a key part of the thermalisation process it is reasonable to assume that what the harmonics reflect harmonics in the movements of cosmic dust.
Galaxies driving tides in the inter stellar dust.
New Arrivals¶
The book also provides an explanation for gamma ray bursts. Conventional cosmology assumes these are caused by very distant, extremely powerful emitters.
The explanation in the book comes from considering geodesics in de Sitter Space. Specifically, considering how light travels between a distant emitter and an observer.
Due to symmetries in de Sitter Space all such geodesics follow essentially the same pattern
When a new emitter is first seen by an observer, the observer sees its entire history in a very brief period of time. Hence the intense, gamma-ray radiation:
We propose, however, that many gamma-ray bursts may be optical
illusions. If space-time is geodesically complete but an emitting
object does not illuminate the whole of space-time, then on our
entry into the illuminated region we see the emitter infinitely
blue-shifted and infinitely intense. Both the blue-shift and
intensity fall off with receiver time. This produces an effect
qualitatively similar to the observations of gamma-ray bursts.
If this theory is correct then, intriguingly, it might offer an alternative explanation for the source of gravitational waves.
Black Hole Mergers¶
When a potential signal is detected it is compared to a catalogue of waveforms for black hole mergers.
Once a good match has been located it is possible to calculate the distance of the source based on how the amplitude of the wave we receive compared to what it must have been at source.
Detectors also report the time and phase of the wave.
With three detectors this can narrow the source to an arc across the sky of a few hundred degrees for the 90% confidence region.
In general, tends to be very elongated across the sky. Earth based detectors only have a limited baseline and so even with multiple detectors the 90% confidence intervals tend to be large.
It does however provide a guide of which regions to turn telescopes to in order to detect any radiation beyond the gravitational wave, so called multi-messenger astronomy.
There is a system of alerts that puts out lists of potential candidate galaxies where the wave might have originated.
One of the aims of this project is to try to explore mergers of binary systems using the mathematics of the new paradigm and to investigate whether the inertial drag affects the way binary systems merge.
It seems likely there will be significant differences and so in turn, given a sample of gravitational wave detections we would get a different population of binary collisions.
This in turn could affect sky localisation, in particular, the distance part of that calculation.
Sky localisation¶
Sky localisation data can be obtained from the ligo database: https://gracedb.ligo.org
The data comes in the form of .fitz which use the healpix format. This gives a full sky map with each pixel representing an equal area.
These work with phase, time and amplitude from the detectors which detected the signal.
The amplitude is based on templates for various size black hole collisions and assumes that Einstein’s General Relativity is a good enough approximation.
One goal here is to see how different gravitational waves from a black hole merger would be under the new paradigm.
If there are significant differences then with enough observations this should help determine which model is correct.
If EGR is correct then we should over time find that the localisations making sense, successfully locate host galaxies for an event and improve the chances of observing coincident radiation.
Likewise if the new paradigm is correct, we should have more success finding host galaxies using that model.
There is another intriguing possibility. This is that with the physics of the new paradigm, binary system mergers are less violent events that do not in fact create significant gravitational waves.
[0] http://msp.warwick.ac.uk/~cpr/paradigm A new Paradigm for the Universe, Colin Rourke.
[1] Can the CMBR be redshifted starlight? NO! http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/stars_vs_cmb.html
[2] Vera Rubin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin