Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Is yardstick for stars’ birth reliable?

Denyse O'Leary
August 19, 2017
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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From Shannon Hall at Nature:

The fact that scientists don’t fully understand these cosmological tools is embarrassing, says the latest study’s lead author, Griffin Hosseinzadeh, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “One of the greatest discoveries of the century is based on these things and we don’t even know what they are, really.”

It’s not for lack of trying: astronomers have put forth a range of hypotheses to explain how these stellar explosions arise. Scientists once thought that the supernovae were built uniformly, like fireworks in a cosmic assembly line. That changed in the 1990s, when astronomers noticed that some of the supernovae were dimmer than the others. More.

Relax. We weren’t asking you guys to be prophets anyway. Sneak a break and join us later.

See also: Is our current theory of Earth’s formation mistaken?

Comments
Because we talk about religion here, ID must be religion. Because we talk about science here, it must be off topic. LoLMung
August 20, 2017
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It seems to be difficult for rvb8 to understand that we talk about far more than ID here. You'd think by now he would have figured that out.William J Murray
August 20, 2017
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I think rvb8 was complaining because he couldn't find fault with the OP. Oh. Wait.Mung
August 20, 2017
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RVB8, First, scaling the cosmos is key to understanding it, and supernovae are as bright as a galaxy, so serve as one of the pivotal yardsticks. If brightness is more or less uniform, degree of dimness becomes a metric of distance, even as at an earlier stage delta cepheid variables were used to move beyond parallax etc. Such potentially tie to understanding cosmology, a major issue in science and potentially significant for signs of cosmological design such as fine tuning. Note:
The exploding stars known as type Ia supernovae are so consistently bright that astronomers refer to them as standard candles — beacons that are used to measure vast cosmological distances. But these cosmic mileposts may not be so uniform. A new study finds evidence that the supernovae can arise by two different processes, adding to lingering suspicions that standard candles aren't so standard after all.
Last News is pointing to the inherent provisionality of scientific thought, i/l/o induction. KFkairosfocus
August 20, 2017
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Can someone please explain to me what the hell this post has to do with, not just ID, but literaly, anything? "Relax. We weren't asking you guys to be prophets anyway. Sneak a break and join us later." Eh?rvb8
August 19, 2017
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