Event

Date: 2009-11-28 Time: 07:00 - 09:00 US/Pacific (1 decade 5 years ago)
America/Los Angeles: 2009-11-28 07:00 (DST)
America/New York: 2009-11-28 10:00 (DST)
America/Sao Paulo: 2009-11-28 11:00
Europe/London: 2009-11-28 14:00
Asia/Colombo: 2009-11-28 19:30
Australia/Sydney: 2009-11-29 01:00 (DST)

Where: Online Video Conference

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Description

Despite the idea of an expanding universe having been around for nearly one hundred years there is still no conclusive, direct evidence for expansion. This paper examines the Lyman Alpha forest in order to determine the average temperature and the average separation of Hydrogen clouds over the aging of the universe. A review of the literature shows that the clouds did once become further and further apart (showing expansion?) but are now evenly spaced (an indication of a static universe?). Doppler parameters give an indication of the temperature and/or the degree of disturbance of the clouds and the evidence is that the temperature or degree of disturbance is increasing rather than decreasing as required by an expanding universe. Whilst these results do not support any cosmology individually, they do support one where the universe expanded in the past but that expansion has now been arrested and the universe is now static. A separate mechanism for redshift would be required to explain why, in this scenario, the Hydrogen Clouds are evenly spaced in the local universe - but have differing redshifts.

High z hydrogen cloud separation can be used to give an independent estimate on the lower limit of the age of the universe in an expanding model and it is found that the age must be far greater than the presently accepted value of 13.8 billion years - if the H1 clouds are to achieve their present separations without some mechanism other than inflation being involved.