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Published online 27 October 2009 | Nature 461, 1182-1183 (2009) | doi:10.1038/4611182a
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Dark energy rips cosmos and agencies
An international space mission to study an astronomical mystery is foundering.
A once-favoured space probe to study dark energy is struggling to get off the ground, as three agencies in the United States and Europe tussle over the details of a potential international mission.
The rise and fall this year of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) — a satellite meant to pin down the repulsive force that is accelerating the Universe's expansion — is partly due to strife between two US agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE), and a third potential partner, the European Space Agency (ESA).
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NSF and NASA, too, may now share this view, diplomatically expressed here by DOE: "It's not an uncontroversial situation." It would also be to the relief of the White House, following my letter: www.sittampalam.net/PresidentObama.pdf.
To squander public funds on a "fudge factor," with a "baffling" cause to boot, would be most unethical for DOE, ESA or any other agency. This is interpretative science running amok for the big money, no matter the ad hoc and patchwork theories it is based upon.
What’s even more baffling is that the dark energy proponents here seem to have conveniently overlooked recent observations that have brought these "precisely measured" distances to supernovae in far galaxies – seriously into question, to say the least. These exploding white dwarf stars are no longer acceptable as cosmological distance indicators, according to none other than the Editor’s summary to a startling report in Nature itself (please see details in above letter). It is through these stellar "standard candles" that the accelerating expansion of the Universe was inferred – and with it the implied existence of dark energy.
Let reason and common sense prevail in science; and when public funds are at stake, let accountability and transparency join in to reassure the taxpayer of decency and fair play.
Here’s to that integrity for the advancement of science, true, noble and free of vested interests! Cheers!
Dark energy is a systematic dimming error. Supernova Ia events occur within planetary nebulae when the central star accretes primordial planets and their Jovian successors at a sufficiently slow rate that the central carbon core of the star is not mixed, leading to a white dwarf approaching the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.44 solar mass. The rapidly spinning WD pumps plasma axially to evaporate large 10^13 m + atmospheres as observed by the HST space telescope in Helix PN etc. When the star explodes it appears to be dimmed if the line of sight to the earth is through the atmosphere of one or more of the planets, but not if the line of sight is between atmospheres, as observed. See sdcc3.ucsd.edu/~ir118. FORGET DARK ENERGY. The dark matter of galaxies is primordial planets in trillion-planet clumps. All stars were formed from these planets.