I've suggested (& published in 21 journal papers) a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that assumes that inertia is caused by horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation & lab thrusts without any dark stuff or adjustment. My University webpage is here, I've written a book called Physics from the Edge and I'm on twitter as @memcculloch. Most of my content is at patreon now: here

Monday 24 November 2014

Large scales, new rules.

The discovery by Hutsemekers et al. (2014) that quasars (spinning galaxies with jets firing out along their spin axes) are aligned with their neighbours and with the large scale tendrils of visible matter in the cosmos, is a great result. I call papers like this 'signpost' papers in that they indicate experimentally which way to go. The crucial point is that a cosmic scale alignment of spins cannot be explained by dark matter, but it can be explained by MiHsC which predicts that mutual accelerations (including mutual spins) become more important for dynamics on large scales (low accelerations).

For a start, galactic jets are predicted by MiHsC. I wrote a paper in 2008 using MiHsC to explain the flyby anomalies, which are unexplained increases in speed of a few mm/s in spacecraft that approach the Earth at the equator and leave at the pole. MiHsC can model this as follows: when a spacecraft approaches the Earth at the equator, it sees all the pieces of matter in the spinning Earth accelerating towards and away from it and the mutual matter-spacecraft accelerations are large (one can show this mathematically) but when the spacecraft leaves at the pole, along the spin axis, the mutual accelerations between the craft and the matter in the Earth is less, so MiHsC predicts that the leaving craft looses inertial mass and because of the conservation of momentum, it speeds up. This predicts the flybys quite well, though I haven't yet considered all the accelerations involved (McCulloch, 2008). The MiHsC formula for this polar speed-up, which gives a few extra mm/s of speed near the Earth's spin axis, predicts a much larger effect for a bigger object like a galaxy: It predicts that large galaxies should have jets streaming away in both directions along their spin axes (I mentioned this in my book) and this looks very much like a quasar and may also explain the two lobes recently found along the Milky Way's spin axis by the NASA-Fermi team (Finkbeiner et al., 2010).

So, coming back to the new quasar results, from MiHsC you would expect to see quasar-like-objects with jets and long tendrils of visible matter (with lower inertial mass) along the direction of their spin axes giving rise to a filamental large scale structure. Also, with the tiny accelerations found in deep space, you would expect spinning objects to start to align in unexpected ways since MiHsC dominates in that regime and mutual acceleration (spins) become crucial. For an explanation of why two objects might tend to spookily co-rotate because of MiHsC, see McCulloch (2011).

PS: Another intriguing spin alignment was recently discovered in deep space: that between the satellite galaxies of Andromeda and the Milky Way (Ibata et al., 2012).

References

Finkbeiner et al., (2010) http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/new-structure.html

Hutsemekers et al., 2014. ESO website. http://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdom/news/eso1438/

Ibata et al. (2012). Nature, 493, 62–65
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/half-of-andromedas-satellite-galaxies-orbit-in-a-mysterious-disk/

McCulloch, M.E., 2008. MNRAS, 389, 1, L57. http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/389/1/L57.full

McCulloch, M.E., 2011. EPL, 95, 39002. Preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.3266

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