Saturday, December 18, 2004

Cosmic Strings - Super String Theoreticians Become Desperate

Regarding the "cosmic string" Lubos meantioned. It merely shows how desperate super string theoriticians are in trying to find some observational evidence, any thing, that may remotely justify their stuff. When you have that kind of desperation, you tend to OVER-INTERPRET your data.

See this link from where I quoted Lubos:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2004/12/astronomers-prove-string-theory.html

Lubos said: "The team has observed a pair of galaxies 10 billion light years away and gravitational lensing is supposed to be the origin. The angular separation of the pair is roughly 2 arc-seconds."

Note the two key numbers, 10 billion (10^10) light years distance and 2 arcseconds (9.7x10^-6 radian angle) angular separation. At that distance and that angular separation, if these are two galaxies their center barely separated by 9.7x10^4 light years.

A typical galaxy like our galaxy, has a diameter of 2x10^5 light years. If what they observed are two images of a typical size galaxy, they barely separate half of their diameters.

i.e, what they observe is instead one concrete image from the two half of the same galaxy, but be mis-interpretted as two images. It's that simple!

The distance from the center of one half of the galaxy to the other half happen to be about 1x10^5 light years, which is the angular "separation" they reported.

How desperate they have become? They reported that with an area of the sky merely 16 square arc seconds (4 arcseconds x 4 arcseconds) they found 11 pairs of such identical galaxy images. That visual size is barely only the size of one galaxy at a distance of 10 billion light years. They must have counted each individual photons received as individual images :-)

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