What did you make of Horizon?

[JamesF]

I think they should henceforth be renamed "dark fudge"

James

[4lefts]

The entire idea of dark matter and dark energy still leaves me feeling slightly uneasy as if they're some gigantic fudge to get the numbers to work and could still turn out to be completely wrong

yeah. i remember watching a lecture on academic earth about this, and the guy mentioned that it "smelled of epicycles", which i thought was a nice way of putting it.

[Ainsley]

I thought it was good. Given its audience, they did a pretty good job.

I too thought how much better we now see the Universe, just remembering what my astronomy books from the 70's and 80's said and showed compared to what we now know is a fantastic leap forward.

[DrRobin]

I think they should henceforth be renamed "dark fudge"

James

Hi James,

Moon made of cheese and the rest of the universe made of dark fudge, sounds good to me, I like fudge.

[MarkMayf]

I didn't really grasp the triangles on the CMB section either.

I understand the principle, curved surface >180 degrees, flat surface 180 degrees, but how do they measure the triangles?

[DrRobin]

I didn't really grasp the triangles on the CMB section either.

I understand the principle, curved surface >180 degrees, flat surface 180 degrees, but how do they measure the triangles?

Hi,

I am with you on that one. I understand the principle very well, and it would be easy enough to measure the angle at earth, difficult to measure to the accuracy they were looking for, but how do you measure the angle out in space? It wasn't very well explained.

I suppose, if you took two objects with exactly the same red shift, they would be the same distance from earth and then the angle out in space would be the same. If you measure the angular distance from earth between them then you can work out the missing information, but I wouldn't have thought that red shift was accurate enough. Perhaps they do a combination of this, with measurements taken from both sides of earths orbit (the principle of a parsec) and compare distance that way?

[4lefts]

yeah, i wanted this explaining better at well. i assume that all points on the cmb are at the same distance, so you can measure the angular size of features on it. but how they know what that distance is to any degree of accuracy (an particularly the accuracy they are looking for), i've no idea.