by Doug Mason 15 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
From the online news at Yahoo for 29 October 2009:
Scientists have observed the most distant object in the universe, thought to come from a star that exploded more than 13 billion years ago. The research team, published their findings in the journal "Nature". The light from the explosion has been travelling for almost 13 billion years.
:The light from the explosion has been travelling for almost 13 billion years.
Wow, Doug! That's almost as long as the Watchtower has been making false prophecies.
Farkel, Doug CLASS
Sh*t! That's 130,000,000 GENERATIONS!!!!
Or, according to the WTBS, the single generation Jesus was referring to. LMAO
prov1320,
:Or, according to the WTBS, the single generation Jesus was referring to. LMAO
That is probably not quite enough wiggle room for WTS doctrine. It will only buy them time to come up with some "new light" when 130,000,000 generations pass before they get their prophecies to somehow "work" to actually fit events that they predict.
Farkel, Deuteronomy 18:20-22 CLASS
Doug do you have a link to that?
Yup that is the furtherist into the past we can see. 13 billion years.
How do scientists measure time? I've always wondered how they can say a dinosaur lived 'this' long ago or that planet is 'that old' etc.
Wantstoleave, I can't be sure of all the details but basically we know how fast light travels. We measure the distance of an object from Earth (don't as me how) and then we can work out how long it would take light to travel that distance.. Voila!
That god guy sure was clever in stretching out those light rays that far to trick us into thinking the universe is that old.
By the time I went back to Yahoo, it had gone. But you can find the story at our public broadcaster:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/news/audio/twt/200910/20091029-twt-10-dark-stars.mp3
Here is the transcript of that broadcast:
ELEANOR HALL: Astronomers are calling it their best glimpse yet of the cosmic dark ages. They've confirmed that a blast of gamma radiation spotted earlier this year was the death throes of a star more than 13 billion light years away from the Earth.
It's the most distant object in space ever to be detected and the research has just been published in the journal Nature.
Barbara Miller spoke to professor Nial Tanvir who led the international team that studied the ancient explosion's fallout.
NIAL TANVIR: The thing that we detected is something called a gamma ray burst. It's a kind of exploding star and these explosions are so bright, so incredibly bright, they're brighter than anything else we know of in the universe and you can see them very far away.
And in this particular case this one has sort of broken a record for the most distant object that anyone has ever seen.
It's actually a complicated procedure to see the thing where you detect them initially with a satellite which picks up the gamma ray radiation from this explosion which is happening far across the universe. And then we have to use telescopes on the earth which are the sort of state of the art, the biggest, most powerful telescopes that we have on the earth to make observations of the burst as it sort of fades away.
BARBARA MILLER: When did it happen, this explosion?
NIAL TANVIR: The interesting thing in cosmology is that when we look out across the universe at great distances, the light that we're seeing has taken in some cases billions of years to reach us travelling across the universe.
So we're actually looking backwards in time. And what in this particular case the era that we're reaching to is about 600 million years after the start of the universe itself and the big bang. It's about 13.1 billion years.
BARBARA MILLER: How can you be sure that you're seeing what you think you're seeing?
NIAL TANVIR: Really the measurement that we use to tell us the distance is something called the red shift. It's a sort of change in the character of the light as it takes place because the light has come so far across the universe to us.
And by measuring the red shift you can turn that round and you can infer a distance or a time.
BARBARA MILLER: If you're right then you've said that this opens a window into the cosmic dark ages. What's meant by that?
NIAL TANVIR: So you can imagine as we look far away across the universe, we're looking backwards in time and there comes a point where you couldn't see any further. And the reason is not because of the technology just not being up to it but because basically you look all the way back in time to the big bang itself. And so that's an era we can never see.
But the first galaxies which formed after the big bang, the first stars, they formed maybe 100, 200 million years or so after the big bang. And for several hundred million years we think those first galaxies started very slowly, the first stars within the galaxies, to what we call, re-ionise the universe to sort of in fact turn the gas between the galaxies from a cold neutral gas into an ionised plasma.
And so that whole process we refer to the kind of dark era before there really were any stars at all, through to these first stars which changed the state of the gas in the universe; we refer to that as the dark ages of the universe.
And of course what's really interesting is that really this is the last part of the universe that we have yet to observe.
Now because our telescopes are so powerful we've been able to map out the whole reach of the universe up to that point and then the final kind of area in our map of the universe that we have still to fill in is this dark age region when the first stars were turning on.
So I think that's why we're particularly excited about this breakthrough. It's not just a matter of breaking a record but it's pushing us finally into this era when all this early activity was taking place.
ELEANOR HALL: British astronomer Nial Tanvir speaking to Barbara Miller about those cosmic dark ages.
Or go to: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2009/s2727508.htm
You could also Google for "Nial Tanvir".
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/29/2728032.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/29/2727417.htm
http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/flashfromearlyuniverse/
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature08459.html (article in "Nature" at a cost)
