Three 'facts' which challenge the narrative, First : black hole leaving train of new stars, Second Star older than universe (!!) and no applause
We are right now in the mists of contrarian times, when events challenge our assumptions and the 'narrative' built up'
A,. "A huge black hole is tearing through space, leaving behind a 200,000-light-year-long trail of newborn stars, space scientists say.
The supermassive monster -- likely born of a bizarre game of intergalactic billiards -- is rampaging through the?blackness?and plowing into gas clouds in its path.
The incredible forces at play mean this gas is being forged into a contrail of new stars, which have been captured on camera by?NASA's powerful Hubble Space Telescope."-
Oops supposedly impossible but there it is, It is observationally confirmed
B. Now for what people thought is impossible
"The oldest star in the universe is HD140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known. This Digitized Sky Survey image shows Methuselah star, located 190.1 light-years away. Astronomers refined the star's age to about 14.3 billion years (which is older than the universe), plus or minus 800 million years. Image released March 7, 2013.?(Image credit: Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO)"
Cause ? I.e,. the Hubble expansion parameter weirdness,. I,.e lower this Hubble parameter is, the older the Universe IS, defacto
C, And now for an Earthly slam dunk as far as under whelming performance art
"The moment, shared online by his critics, occurred on Wednesday at the Grand Kremlin Palace during a ceremony to present diplomatic credentials to 17 newly-appointed foreign ambassadors.
"In his speech, Putin singled out the new United States and European Union ambassadors, and said they were responsible for a breakdown in relations with Russia following his decision to invade Ukraine last February," Newsweek's report stated. "Addressing new U.S. ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy, Putin indicated that U.S. support for a Ukraine revolution in 2014 'ultimately led to today's Ukrainian crisis.'"
At the end of the speech, Putin's eyes scanned the room, seemingly waiting for applause which never came."
IMO 10 years ago for this faux Pax, the ambassadors might have been expelled. Right now ?
Crickets
In all three situations tomes have been written as to the impossibility of all three occurrances
Crickets,
We certainly DO live in interesting times
All three events challenge the narrative,
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Runaway black hole creating trail of new stars: scientists
April 08, 2023
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In this illustration released by NASA on April 7, 2023, an artist's impression depicts a runaway supermassive black hole that was ejected from its host galaxy as a result of a tussle between it and two other black holes.?? NASA/ESA, AFP
A huge black hole is tearing through space, leaving behind a 200,000-light-year-long trail of newborn stars, space scientists say.
The supermassive monster -- likely born of a bizarre game of intergalactic billiards -- is rampaging through the?blackness?and plowing into gas clouds in its path.
The incredible forces at play mean this gas is being forged into a contrail of new stars, which have been captured on camera by?NASA's powerful Hubble Space Telescope.
"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University.
"What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship, we're seeing the wake behind the black hole."
Researchers believe gas is probably being blasted and warmed by the motion of the black hole.
"Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas," said van Dokkum.
The black hole weighs about the same as 20 million of our Suns.
Scientists?believe it began its rampage after being ejected from a celestial menage-a-trois.
The working theory is that two galaxies probably merged about 50 million years earlier, bringing together two supermassive black holes, which whirled around each other harmoniously.
But a third galaxy butted in with its own black hole, creating an unstable and chaotic scene that eventually saw one of them ejected at high speed -- fast enough to travel between the Earth and the Moon in just 14 minutes.
Stargazers say there is no cause for earthly concern because this is all very far away.
It's also a long time ago -- back when the universe was half of its current age. We are seeing it now because of the time it has taken for light to arrive here.
The runaway black hole, which has never been seen before, was discovered by accident, says van Dokkum.
"I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak.
"It didn't look like anything we've seen before," he said, adding the star trail is "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual."
While this is the first tearaway black hole ever spotted, it might not be the only one, says NASA.
Their Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is expected to launch some time this decade, should give astronomers a much wider view of the universe -- and could lead to the discovery of more of these star-forming runaways.
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also
https://www.space.com/how-can-a-star-be-older-than-the-universe.html
Methuselah: The oldest star in the universe
By?David Crookes?published?March 07, 2022
How can a star be older than the universe?
The oldest star in the universe is HD140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known. This Digitized Sky Survey image shows Methuselah star, located 190.1 light-years away. Astronomers refined the star's age to about 14.3 billion years (which is older than the universe), plus or minus 800 million years. Image released March 7, 2013.?(Image credit: Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO)
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In 2000, scientists looked to date what they thought was the oldest star in the universe. They made observations via the?European Space Agency's (ESA)
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?Hipparcos satellite and estimated that HD140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — was a staggering 16 billion years old.
Such a figure was rather baffling. After all, the age of the universe — determined from observations of the?cosmic microwave background?— is 13.8 billion years old, so how can a star be older than the universe?
"It was a serious discrepancy," says astronomer Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University. So with that in mind, Bond and his colleagues set out to discover the truth and test the accuracy of the figure. Their conclusions were just as mind-blowing.
?Astronomers began observing?Methuselah?— named in reference to a biblical patriarch who is said to have died aged 969, making him the longest-lived of all the figures in the Bible — more than 100 years ago. The curious star is located some 190?light-years?away from?Earth?in the constellation?Libra?and it rapidly journeys across the sky at 800,000 mph (1.3 million kilometers per hour).?
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FAST FACTS:
– Methuselah covers the width of the moon in the night sky every 1,500 years.
– You can't see Methuselah with the naked eye. It can only be seen using a telescope?
– It contains just 1/250th of the iron content of our sun?
It was clear that the star was old. The metal-poor subgiant is predominantly made of hydrogen and helium and contains very little iron. Such composition meant the star must have come into being when helium and hydrogen dominated the universe and before iron became commonplace (the heavier elements only appeared when massive stars created them in their cores)?
But could Methuselah really be more than two billion years older than its environment? Surely that is just not possible. Either the star was older than the universe or the universe was not as "young" as scientists thought it to be. Or maybe the dating was simply all wrong. What was it to be?
INVESTIGATING THE AGE OF METHUSELAH
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?A mystery of this magnitude could not be ignored so Bond and his colleagues attempted to unearth the truth by pouring over 11 sets of observations that had been recorded between 2003 and 2011.?
These observations had been made by the Fine Guidance Sensors of the?Hubble Space Telescope, which noted the positions, distances and energy output of stars. In acquiring parallax, spectroscopy and photometry measurements, the scientists could determine a better sense of age.
"One of the uncertainties with the age of HD 140283 was the precise distance of the star," Bond said. "It was important to get this right because we can better determine its luminosity and, from that, its age — the brighter the intrinsic luminosity, the younger the star.?
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"We were looking for the parallax effect, which meant we were viewing the star six months apart to look for the shift in its position due to the orbital motion of the Earth, which tells us the distance."
Bond adds that there were also uncertainties in the theoretical modeling of the?stars, such as the exact rates of nuclear reactions in the core and the importance of elements diffusing downwards in the outer layers. So they worked on the idea that leftover helium diffuses deeper into the core, leaving less hydrogen to burn via nuclear fusion. With fuel used faster, the age is lowered.
"Another factor that was important was, of all things, the amount of oxygen in the star," Bond said. HD 140283 had a higher than predicted oxygen-to-iron ratio and, since oxygen was not abundant in the universe for a few million years, it pointed again to a lower age for the star.?
As a result of all of this work, Bond and his collaborators estimated HD 140283's age to be 14.46 billion years. It was a significant reduction on the 16 billion previously claimed but it was still more than the age of the universe itself.
In that sense, it didn't clear up the mystery and, on the face of it, simply ensured Methuselah remained a curiosity. But the scientists posed a residual uncertainty of 800 million years, which Bond said made the star's age compatible with the?age of the universe. It was a major breakthrough.?
Related:?Test your knowledge in this star quiz?
"Like all measured estimates, it is subject to both random and systematic error," said physicist Robert Matthews of Aston University in Birmingham, UK, who was not involved in the study. "The overlap in the error bars gives some indication of the probability of a clash with cosmological age determinations"?
"In other words, the best-supported age of the star conflicts with that for the derived age of the universe [as determined by the?cosmic microwave background], and the conflict can only be resolved by pushing the error bars to their extreme limits."
Further refinements saw the age of HD 140283 fall a bit more. A 2014?follow-up study, for instance, updated the star's age to 14.27 billion years. "Again, if one includes all sources of uncertainty — both in the observational measurements and the theoretical modeling — the error is about 700 or 800 million years, so there is no conflict because 13.8 billion years lies within the star's error bar," Bond said.
What's more, in May 2021, another group of astronomers revised the?best estimates for the age and mass of Methuselah?and, having modeled how stars change over time, they found its age to be 12 billion years. It still makes HD 140283 extremely old (the sun, by comparison, is only a kid at 4.6 billion years old) but it puts the age of the star well and truly within the age of the universe. Or does it??
INVESTIGATING THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE
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On the one hand, Bond says the efforts to date Methuselah is "an amazing scientific achievement which provides very strong evidence for the?Big Bang?picture of the universe". By showing similarities between the age of the universe and that of this old nearby star, he says the problem with the age of the oldest stars is far less severe than it was in the 1990s when the stellar ages were approaching 18 billion years or, in one case, 20 billion years. "With the uncertainties of the determinations, the ages are now agreeing," Bond said.
Yet, on the other hand, Matthews believes the problem has not yet been resolved. Astronomers at an international conference of top cosmologists at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in July 2019 were puzzled over studies that suggested different ages for the universe. They were looking at measurements of galaxies that are relatively nearby which suggest the universe is younger by hundreds of millions of years compared to the age determined by the cosmic microwave background.
Far from being 13.8 billion years old, as estimated by the European Planck space telescope's detailed measurements of cosmic radiation in 2013, the universe may be as young as 11.4 billion years. If that is, indeed, the case, then Methuselah is one again older than the universe. The plot, indeed, thickens, but how accurate are these re-estimates proving to be?
Universe's Expansion Rate Called into Question
One of those behind the studies to date the universe is Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
The conclusions are based on the idea of an?expanding universe, as shown in 1929 by Edwin Hubble. This is fundamental to the Big Bang — the understanding that there was once a state of hot denseness that exploded out, stretching space. It indicates a starting point that should be measurable, but fresh findings are suggesting that the expansion rate is around 10% higher than the one suggested by Planck.
Indeed, the Planck team determined that the expansion rate was 67.4 km per second per megaparsec, but more recent measurements taken of the expansion rate of the universe point to values of 73 or 74.?
That means there is a difference between the measurement of how fast the universe is expanding today and the predictions of how fast it should be expanding based on the physics of the early universe, Riess said. It's leading to a reassessment of accepted theories while also showing there is still much to learn about?dark matter?and?dark energy, which are thought to be behind this conundrum.
A higher value for the Hubble Constant indicates a shorter age for the universe. A constant of 67.74 km per second per megaparsec would lead to an age of 13.8 billion years, whereas one of 73, or even as high as 77 as some studies have shown, would indicate a universe age no greater than 12.7 billion years.?
It's a mismatch that suggests, as stated, that HD 140283 could still be older than the universe. It has also since been superseded by a 2019 study published in the journal?Science?that proposed a Hubble Constant of 82.4 — suggesting that the universe's age is only 11.4 billion years. Astronomers are hoping the?James Webb Space Telescope?could shed light on this particular mystery.
Matthews believes the answers lie in greater cosmological refinement. "I suspect that the observational cosmologists have missed something that creates this paradox, rather than the stellar astrophysicists," he said, pointing to the measurements of the stars being perhaps more accurate.?
"That's not because the cosmologists are in any way sloppier, but because the age determination of the universe is subject to more and arguably trickier observational and theoretical uncertainties than that of stars."
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Watch: Putin caught in awkward moment as he waits for applause that never comes
April 07, 2023
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Russian President Vladimir Putin had an awkward moment when he finished a speech and was met by silence and no applause,?Newsweek reported.
The moment, shared online by his critics, occurred on Wednesday at the Grand Kremlin Palace during a ceremony to present diplomatic credentials to 17 newly-appointed foreign ambassadors.
"In his speech, Putin singled out the new United States and European Union ambassadors, and said they were responsible for a breakdown in relations with Russia following his decision to invade Ukraine last February," Newsweek's report stated. "Addressing new U.S. ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy, Putin indicated that U.S. support for a Ukraine revolution in 2014 'ultimately led to today's Ukrainian crisis.'"
At the end of the speech, Putin's eyes scanned the room, seemingly waiting for applause which never came.
"No one applauded Putin after he finished his speech at the ceremony of ambassadors presenting their credentials in the Kremlin," Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, wrote in a tweet that included the video. "Putin waited for applause as he finished talking but none came."
"This is a delicious moment. Putin clearly expected a polite applause, but he received none. The ambassadors—some having been scolded—expected at least a hand shake, and they got none," Swedish economist Anders ?slund wrote on?Twitter. "Just shows that no need to maintain any embassies or ambassadors in Moscow. Go home!"
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD