Search Results (12)

We develop a symmetry-based variational theory that shows the coarse-grained balance of work inflow to heat outflow in a driven, dissipative system relaxed to the golden ratio. Two order-2 Möbius transformations—a self-dual flip and a self-similar shift—generate a discrete non-abelian subgroup of $\mathrm{PGL}(2,\mathbb{Q}\left(\sqrt{5}\right))$. Requiring any smooth, strictly convex Lyapunov functional to be invariant under both maps enforces a single non-equilibrium fixed point: the golden mean. We confirm this result by (i) a gradient-flow partial-differential equation, (ii) a birth–death Markov chain whose continuum limit is Fokker–Planck, (iii) a Martin–Siggia–Rose field theory, and (iv) exact Ward identities that protect the fixed point against noise. Microscopic kinetics merely set the approach rate; three parameter-free invariants emerge: a $62\%:38\%$ split between entropy production and useful power, an RG-invariant diffusion coefficient linking relaxation time and correlation length ${\mathcal{D}}_{\alpha }={\xi }^z/\tau$, and a $\vartheta ={45}^{\circ }$ eigen-angle that maps to the golden logarithmic spiral. The same dual symmetry underlies scaling laws in rotating turbulence, plant phyllotaxis, cortical avalanches, quantum critical metals, and even de-Sitter cosmology, providing a falsifiable, unifying principle for pattern formation far from equilibrium. Full article

As an alternative gravitational theory to General Relativity (GR), Conformal Gravity (CG) can be verified through astronomical observations. Currently, Mannheim and Kazanas have provided vacuum solutions for cosmological and local gravitational systems, and these solutions may resolve the dark matter and dark energy issues encountered in GR, making them particularly valuable. For static, spherically symmetric systems, CG predicts an additional linear potential generated by luminous matter in addition to the conventional Newtonian potential. This extra potential is expected to account for the observations of galaxies and galaxy clusters without the need of dark matter. It is characterized by the parameter ${\gamma }^{*}$, which corresponds to the linear potential generated by the unit of the solar mass, and it is thus a universal constant. The value of ${\gamma }^{*}$ was determined by fitting the rotation curve data of spiral galaxies. These predictions of CG should also be verified by the observations of strong gravitational lensing. To date, in the existing literature, the observations of strong lensing employed to test CG have been limited to a few galaxy clusters. It has been found that the value of ${\gamma }^{*}$ estimated from strong lensing is several orders of magnitude greater than that obtained from fitting rotation curves. In this study, building upon the previous research, we tested CG via strong lensing statistics. We used a well-defined sample that consisted of both galaxies and galaxy clusters. This allowed us to test CG through statistical strong lensing in a way similar to the conventional approach in GR. As anticipated, our results were consistent with previous studies, namely that the fitted ${\gamma }^{*}$ is much larger than that from rotation curves. Intriguingly, we further discovered that, in order to fit the strong lensing data of another sample, the value of ${\gamma }^{*}$ cannot be a constant, as is required in CG. Instead, we derived a formula for ${\gamma }^{*}$ as a function of the stellar mass $M_{*}$ of the galaxies or galaxy clusters. It was found that ${\gamma }^{*}$ decreases as $M_{*}$ increases. Full article

The cosmic time dilation observed in Type Ia supernova light curves suggests that the passage of cosmic time varies throughout the evolution of the Universe. This observation implies that the rate of proper time is not constant, as assumed in the standard FLRW metric, but instead is time-dependent. Consequently, the commonly used FLRW metric should be replaced by a more general framework, known as the Conformal Cosmology (CC) metric, to properly account for cosmic time dilation. The CC metric incorporates both spatial expansion and time dilation during cosmic evolution. As a result, it is necessary to distinguish between comoving and proper (physical) time, similar to the distinction made between comoving and proper distances. In addition to successfully explaining cosmic time dilation, the CC metric offers several further advantages: (1) it preserves Lorentz invariance, (2) it maintains the form of Maxwell’s equations as in Minkowski spacetime, (3) it eliminates the need for dark matter and dark energy in the Friedmann equations, and (4) it successfully predicts the expansion and morphology of spiral galaxies in agreement with observations. Full article

The asymmetry in the large-scale distribution of the directions in which spiral galaxies rotate has been observed by multiple telescopes, all showing a consistent asymmetry in the distribution of galaxy spin directions as observed from Earth. Here, galaxies with a redshift from HSC DR3 are annotated by their direction of rotation, and their distribution is analyzed. The results show that galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way as observed from Earth are significantly more prevalent compared to galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way. The asymmetry also forms a dipole axis that becomes stronger when the redshift gets higher. These results are aligned with observations from virtually all premier digital sky surveys, as well as space telescopes such as the HST and the JWST. This shows that the distribution of galaxy spin directions as observed from Earth is not symmetrical, and has a possible link to the rotational velocity of the Milky Way. This experiment provides data, code, and a full protocol that allows the results to be easily reproduced in a transparent manner. This practice is used to overcome the “reproducibility crisis” in science. Full article

Recent advancements have shown tensions between observations and our current understanding of the Universe. Such observations may include the $H_0$ tension and massive galaxies at high redshift that are older than traditional galaxy formation models have predict. Since these observations are based on redshift as the primary distance indicator, a bias in the redshift may explain these tensions. While redshift follows an established model, when applied to astronomy it is based on the assumption that the rotational velocity of the Milky Way galaxy relative to the observed galaxies has a negligible effect on redshift. But given the mysterious nature of the physics of galaxy rotation, that assumption needed to be tested. The test was done by comparing the redshift of galaxies rotating in the same direction relative to the Milky Way to the redshift of galaxies rotating in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way. The results show that the mean redshift of galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way is higher than the mean redshift of galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction. Additionally, the redshift difference becomes larger as the redshift gets higher. The consistency of the analysis was verified by comparing data collected by three different telescopes, annotated using four different methods, released by three different research teams, and covering both the northern and southern ends of the galactic pole. All the datasets are in excellent agreement with each other, showing consistency in the observed redshift bias. Given the “reproducibility crisis” in science, all the datasets used in this study are publicly available, and the results can be easily reproduced. This observation could be the first direct empirical reproducible observation for the Zwicky’s “tired-light” model. Full article

It is already known that a simple nonlocal de Sitter gravity model, which we denote as $\sqrt{dS}$ gravity, contains an exact vacuum cosmological solution that mimics dark energy and dark matter and is in very good agreement with the standard model of cosmology. This success of $\sqrt{dS}$ gravity motivated us to investigate how it works at a lower-than-cosmic scale—galactic and the solar system. This paper contains our investigation of the corresponding Schwarzschild–de Sitter metric of the $\sqrt{dS}$ gravity model. To obtain an exact solution, it is necessary to solve the corresponding nonlinear differential equation, which is a very complicated and difficult problem. What we obtained is a solution to a linearized equation, which is related to space metrics far from the massive body, where the gravitational field is weak. The obtained approximate solution is of particular interest for examining the possible role of nonlocal de Sitter gravity $\sqrt{dS}$ in describing the effects in galactic dynamics that are usually attributed to dark matter. This solution was tested on the Milky Way and the spiral galaxy M33 and is in good agreement with observational measurements. Full article

We consider a multi-scalar field model in the Jordan frame, which can be seen as a two-scalar field model where the Brans–Dicke field interacts in the kinetic part with the second scalar field. This theory under a conformal transformation reduces to the hyperbolic inflation. We show that scaling solutions and the de Sitter universe are provided by the theory. In the study of asymptotic dynamics, we determine an attractor where all the fluid sources contribute in the cosmological fluid. This attractor is always a spiral, and it can be seen as the analogue of the hyperbolic inflation in the Jordan frame. Full article

For the spherically symmetric Stephani cosmological model with an accelerated expansion, we investigate the main scenarios of the test particle and photon motion. We show that a comoving observer sees an appropriate picture. In the case of purely radial motion, the radial velocity decreases slightly with time due to the universe expansion. Both particles and photons spiral out of the center when the radial coordinate is constant. In the case of the motion with arbitrary initial velocity, the observable radial distance to the test particle can increase under negative observable radial velocity. Full article

After the first clear evidence of the recession—at very high speeds—of the spiral nebulae was announced by V.M. Slipher in 1914, as a result of his work started in 1912, it still took several decades to properly understand the phenomenon in terms of an expansion of the Universe. Some historical issues around that crucial discovery and the contemporary attempts at determining the scale of the visible Universe will be discussed. Presently, very important questions to answer are: What is the precise value of the expansion rate? What drives the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion? The latter is called dark energy, but what is it actually? The possibility that this could be the result of a sort of Casimir effect at the cosmological level has not been discarded, yet. One of the main technical problems in tackling this issue is constituted by the regularization and corresponding renormalization procedures. Beautiful but rather non-trivial mathematics, involving the zeta function of pseudodifferential operators (associated with physical quantities), are key in this respect. A discussion of those items is provided here. Full article

We derive an effective gravitational potential, induced by the quantum wavefunction of a physical vacuum of a self-gravitating configuration, while the vacuum itself is viewed as the superfluid described by the logarithmic quantum wave equation. We determine that gravity has a multiple-scale pattern, to such an extent that one can distinguish sub-Newtonian, Newtonian, galactic, extragalactic and cosmological terms. The last of these dominates at the largest length scale of the model, where superfluid vacuum induces an asymptotically Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker-type spacetime, which provides an explanation for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. The model describes different types of expansion mechanisms, which could explain the discrepancy between measurements of the Hubble constant using different methods. On a galactic scale, our model explains the non-Keplerian behaviour of galactic rotation curves, and also why their profiles can vary depending on the galaxy. It also makes a number of predictions about the behaviour of gravity at larger galactic and extragalactic scales. We demonstrate how the behaviour of rotation curves varies with distance from a gravitating center, growing from an inner galactic scale towards a metagalactic scale: A squared orbital velocity’s profile crosses over from Keplerian to flat, and then to non-flat. The asymptotic non-flat regime is thus expected to be seen in the outer regions of large spiral galaxies. Full article

Automated quantification of galaxy morphology is necessary because the size of upcoming sky surveys will overwhelm human volunteers. Existing classification schemes are inadequate because (a) their uncertainty increases near the boundary of classes and astronomers need more control over these uncertainties; (b) galaxy morphology is continuous rather than discrete; and (c) sometimes we need to know not only the type of an object, but whether a particular image of the object exhibits visible structure. We propose that regression is better suited to these tasks than classification, and focus specifically on determining the extent to which an image of a spiral galaxy exhibits visible spiral structure. We use the human vote distributions from Galaxy Zoo 1 (GZ1) to train a random forest of decision trees to reproduce the fraction of GZ1 humans who vote for the “Spiral” class. We prefer the random forest model over other black box models like neural networks because it allows us to trace post hoc the precise reasoning behind the regression of each image. Finally, we demonstrate that using features from SpArcFiRe—a code designed to isolate and quantify arm structure in spiral galaxies—improves regression results over and above using traditional features alone, across a sample of 470,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Full article

For disk galaxies (spirals and irregulars), the inner circular-velocity gradient d_RV₀ (inner steepness of the rotation curve) correlates with the central surface brightness ∑_*,0 with a slope of ~0.5. This implies that the central dynamical mass density scales almost linearly with the central baryonic density. Here I show that this empirical relation is consistent with a simple model where the central baryonic fraction ƒ_bar,0 is fixed to 1 (no dark matter) and the observed scatter is due to differences in the baryonic mass-to-light ratio M_bar / L_R (ranging from 1 to 3 in the R-band) and in the characteristic thickness of the central stellar component Δz (ranging from 100 to 500 pc). Models with lower baryonic fractions are possible, although they require some fine-tuning in the values of M_bar/L_R and Δz. Regardless of the actual value of ƒ_bar,0, the fact that different types of galaxies do not show strong variations in ƒ_bar,0 is surprising, and may represent a challenge for models of galaxy formation in a Λ Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmology. Full article