“First stars” suffer a disconfirmation death

 PSI Blog 20220314 “First stars” suffer a disconfirmation death

 

Thanks to James Nelson for this heads up:

 

Did astronomers see hints of first stars? Experiment casts doubt on bold claim

 

“The first major attempt to replicate striking evidence of the ‘cosmic dawn’ — the appearance of the Universe’s first stars 180 million years after the Big Bang — has muddled the picture.

 

Four years after radioastronomers reported finding a signature of the cosmic dawn, radioastronomer Ravi Subrahmanyan and his collaborators describe how they floated an antenna on a reservoir along the Sharavati river, in the Indian state of Karnataka, in search of that signal. “When we looked for it, we did not find it,” says Subrahmanyan, who led the effort at the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru, India. His team’s results appear today in Nature Astronomy.”

 

More details in Nature: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00577-7

 

[GB: The “cosmic dawn” debunked by this Indian team always was suspicious, what with elderly galaxies already having been seen at greater than 13 billion light-year distances. A couple points come to mind here:

1.   Science is “self-correcting.” Experiments, observations, and interpretations that don’t make logical sense eventually succumb to further research. The silly Big Bang Theory is no exception.

2.   The fact this debunking of a common claim of the Big Bang Theory occurred in India is particularly significant. It indicates that the paradigm propagandized by the US is not really swallowed wholesale by those outside the paradigm. Many of us expect China and other financial powerhouses will challenge the Big Bang Theory in the coming decades. Will the US become a straggler in finally accepting Infinite Universe Theory?]