Hubble Deep Field

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Wikipedia Dispute: wikipedia:Hubble Deep Field

This Natural Philosophy wiki page disputes content found on Wikipedia page wikipedia:Hubble Deep Field

The Hubble Deep Field

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area about 2.6 arcminutes on a side, about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.

The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies. In mainstream astronomy the image is read as a view of the early universe, on the understanding that the redshifts of those galaxies measure their distance and therefore their look-back time.

That reading is what makes the deep fields contentious. Because the Big Bang model predicts that the distant universe should look different — less evolved, dimmer per unit area, and eventually empty of galaxies altogether — the deep fields are among the most direct tests the model has ever been given. Many of the researchers catalogued on this wiki argue that it failed them: that the most distant galaxies look disconcertingly like nearby ones, that their surface brightness does not dim as expansion requires, and that every increase in telescope depth has simply revealed more galaxies rather than an edge. Those arguments, and the non-expanding cosmologies advanced in their place, are set out in the criticism section below.

The image and how it was made

The HDF is at the centre of this image of one degree of sky. The Moon as seen from Earth would fill roughly one quarter of this image.

Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, committed a large share of his director's discretionary time in 1995 to imaging a single ordinary patch of sky for as long as possible. The field had to sit at high galactic latitude, away from the dust of the Milky Way, free of bright foreground sources, and inside Hubble's northern continuous viewing zone so that northern observatories could follow it up. Three candidates in Ursa Major survived those cuts; the one chosen lies at right ascension 12h 36m 49.4s, declination +62° 12′ 58″.

Between 18 and 28 December 1995, over roughly 150 orbits, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 took 342 exposures through four broadband filters centred at 300, 450, 606 and 814 nm — about 141 hours of total exposure. The many short exposures allowed cosmic-ray hits to be identified and removed by comparison, and the telescope was deliberately re-pointed by less than one pixel between exposure sets so that the frames could be combined by "drizzling" to a final resolution finer than the detector's native 0.09 arcseconds per pixel. Three of the four monochrome images were assigned to red, green and blue to produce the familiar colour composite; the filters were chosen for scientific usefulness rather than to reproduce what the eye would see.

Contents of the field

The final images were released at the American Astronomical Society meeting in January 1996. About 3,000 distinct objects can be identified in a field 2.6 arcminutes across — roughly one twenty-four-millionth of the sky, the angular size of a tennis ball at 100 metres. Fewer than twenty are foreground stars of the Milky Way; essentially everything else is a galaxy, in every apparent shape and size, some spanning only a few pixels. About fifty blue point-like objects are also present, some associated with nearby galaxies and probably regions of intense star formation, others possibly distant quasars or white dwarfs.

The standard interpretation

Details from the HDF illustrate the wide variety of galaxy shapes, sizes and colours found in the field.

In mainstream cosmology the field is read as a core sample of cosmic history. Redshift is taken to measure recession velocity and hence distance, so faint high-redshift galaxies — the HDF contains many, some quoted as high as z = 6 — are understood to be seen as they were billions of years ago. On that reading the image supports the conclusions that galaxies were more disturbed and irregular in the past, that mergers were more frequent, that the cosmic star-formation rate peaked 8–10 billion years ago and has since fallen by roughly a factor of ten, and that faint red dwarfs are too few to account for dark matter. Follow-up observations at other wavelengths — with the Infrared Space Observatory, Spitzer, SCUBA on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, Chandra, the VLA, MERLIN and others — detected infrared, submillimetre, X-ray and radio counterparts to objects in the field.

A southern counterpart, the Hubble Deep Field South, was imaged in 1998 and looks much like the original, which is usually cited as support for the cosmological principle. Deeper images followed: the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field in 2004 and the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field in 2012, whose galaxies are attributed to the first 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The remainder of this article sets out why the researchers catalogued on this wiki dispute that interpretation.

What the deep fields were expected to show

Because light takes time to travel, an image this faint is also an image of the remote past — that much is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what the past should look like. If the universe began 13.8 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since, the deep fields were expected to deliver three things:

1. Evolution with distance. The most distant galaxies should be visibly immature — small, clumpy, blue, chemically primitive, and assembled out of mergers — because there had not yet been time to build large, ordered, metal-rich systems.
2. Rapid surface-brightness dimming. In any Friedmann–Robertson–Walker expanding model, surface brightness falls as (1+z)⁻⁴ in bolometric units, or (1+z)⁻³ when measured in AB magnitudes per unit angular area. This is the Tolman test, and it is independent of the values chosen for the cosmological parameters. In a non-expanding universe surface brightness is instead constant with distance.
3. An end to the galaxies. A universe of finite age has a horizon. Looking deeper should eventually reach an epoch before galaxies existed.

The critics catalogued on this wiki argue that the deep fields delivered none of the three cleanly, and that each shortfall was absorbed by adding a free parameter — evolution, size evolution, dust, reionization history — rather than by revisiting the assumption that redshift measures recession.

Criticism and reinterpretation by researchers on this wiki

The "elderly galaxies" problem

The oldest and most persistent objection is that the deep fields show too little evolution. Tom Van Flandern made this the ninth entry in The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang (2002), later expanded as The Top 50 Problems with the Big Bang:

Tom Van Flandern, The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang, Meta Research Bulletin 11 (2002); reprinted Apeiron 9(2)

Billie Westergard argued the same case directly from the images in Structure Formation in the Early Big-Bang Universe? Deep & Ultra Deep Fields Say No! (2005), and developed a matter-creation alternative in Structure Formation in the Universe by Spin and Matter Creation. Van Flandern's A Universe Older Than Itself? presses the related timeline problem, and Big Bang Reaches Deflation Stage surveys the accumulating conflicts.

Glenn Borchardt has made this observation the centerpiece of his cosmological writing, coining the term "elderly galaxies" for well-formed spiral systems seen at the greatest look-back times. Writing about the Hubble image reproduced in his book Infinite Universe Theory, he notes that "the spiral galaxies at a distance of 13.2 billion light years were no different than our own Milky Way, which is 13.7 billion years old," and continues:

Of course, the Big Bang Theory claims that we should see younger and younger objects the farther we look out into space. … So far, there is no evidence to support that conjecture. Instead, the presence of the "elderly galaxies" … falsifies the theory.

— Glenn Borchardt, "Still more light found at the 'end of the universe'", Progressive Science Institute blog, 30 January 2019

The argument has strengthened rather than weakened with better instruments. Borchardt has kept a running tally of what he counts as falsifications of the Big Bang, many of them drawn from the James Webb Space Telescope successors to the Hubble deep fields: the confirmation of a well-ordered spiral at z ≈ 11, the finding that the Hubble sequence of galaxy morphologies appears to be already in place at z ≈ 8, and the spectroscopic confirmation of JADES-GS-z14-0 at z = 14.32 — roughly 290 million years after the nominal beginning — in which oxygen has been detected, implying that generations of massive stars had already lived and died.

For accuracy it should be recorded that not every "impossibly early" object survives scrutiny. The six candidate massive galaxies reported by Labbé and colleagues in Nature in 2023 have largely been reinterpreted as compact broad-line active nuclei ("little red dots") with substantially smaller stellar masses, and the once-notorious "Methuselah star" HD 140283 has been re-dated downward from 14.5 to about 12 billion years. The dissident case here rests on the pattern — that each deep image pushes mature structure earlier and is met with a new mechanism — rather than on any single object.

Surface brightness: the Tolman test

The most quantitative challenge mounted from the deep-field data is Eric J Lerner's, and it is notable for having been published in the mainstream literature. Using ultraviolet surface brightnesses of galaxies from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field matched against GALEX observations of nearby galaxies at the same emitted wavelengths, Lerner argued that surface brightness does not dim as expansion requires. In the first version of the analysis, presented at the 2005 Crisis in Cosmology conference, he reported:

Eric J. Lerner, "Evidence for a Non-Expanding Universe: Surface Brightness Data From HUDF", AIP Conference Proceedings 822, 60–74 (2006)

The stakes are large because the predicted effect is large: at z = 6 the expanding and non-expanding predictions differ by a factor of 7³, or 343. The fuller study with Renato Falomo and Riccardo Scarpa (International Journal of Modern Physics D 23, 1450058, 2014) found the mean surface-brightness difference between the high-redshift and low-redshift samples to be −0.017 ± 0.05 magnitudes per square arcsecond over the range z = 0.03 to z ≈ 5 — consistent with no dimming at all. Their sharpest point is not the measurement but what the standard model must then assume:

Mathematically, in order to fit the observed constancy of SB data, any expanding universe model must require that the radii of galaxies with constant absolute luminosity evolve exactly as (1 + z)^−1.5 in order to cancel out the (1 + z)³ SB dimming.

— Lerner, Falomo & Scarpa (2014)

That is, the size evolution invoked to rescue the Tolman test must conspire to cancel the dimming almost exactly, across two very different galaxy populations. Lerner pursued this in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 477, 3185 (2018), arguing that the published size-evolution mechanisms — "puffing up", major mergers, and minor mergers — each fail quantitatively, requiring gas fractions or merger rates an order of magnitude above what is observed, and that for elliptical galaxies the required evolution implies dynamical masses smaller than their stellar masses, which is physically impossible.

Ari Brynjolfsson reaches a similar conclusion from a different mechanism in Surface Brightness in Plasma-Redshift Cosmology (2006), deriving the observed constancy from plasma redshift in a static universe. Tom Van Flandern also addressed the Tolman test, though his numbers differ from Lerner's: he argued that a transverse-loss tired-light model predicts intensity falling as (1+z)⁻², "in good agreement with most observations without any adjustable parameters," against the Big Bang's (1+z)⁻⁴.

An honest account must note the mainstream position: the four-paper series by Lubin and Sandage (2001) reports that the Tolman signal is detected and that static models are excluded at high significance — but only after a luminosity-evolution correction is applied. That the conclusion depends on an evolution model is not disputed by either side; it is the whole battleground. Critics of Lerner's papers reply that he tests a single static model chosen to mimic ΛCDM in flux–luminosity behaviour rather than comparing a range of models.

Counting galaxies: the deep fields and infinity

For Glenn Borchardt, the recurring headline that each new deep image contains far more galaxies than the last is not a curiosity but the observational signature of an infinite universe. His Infinite Universe Theory (2007) and Ten Assumptions of Science and the Demise of Cosmogony (2004) argue that the choice between a finite and an infinite universe is an assumption that cannot be proved either way, and that infinity is the assumption that avoids the contradictions:

As is well-known, the BBT was devised and is maintained by mathematicians. Mathematics really cannot yield a satisfactory treatment of infinity, so an assumption of finity comes natural. The problem is that, if one assumes finity at the beginning, one will end up with finity at the end. The argument becomes circular no matter which assumption one uses. I chose infinity (microcosmic and macrocosmic) here because the resulting logical argument avoids the many contradictions inherent in the BBT.

— Glenn Borchardt, "Infinite Universe Theory", Proceedings of the NPA (2007)

On his account the very project of explaining where the universe came from is misconceived. He calls it cosmogony rather than cosmology, and treats the distinction as the heart of the matter:

IUT denies that cosmogony, the study of the origin of the universe, is legitimate. The word "cosmogony" has not seen popular use in cosmology. To do so would imply that an alternative view was possible. … Conservation, the First Law of Thermodynamics, assumes that matter and the motion of matter neither can be created nor destroyed. The BBT, of course, is the most blatant violation of conservation ever devised. The creation of something from nothing is clearly a religious assumption, not a scientific one.

— Glenn Borchardt, "Infinite Universe Theory" (2007)

Applied to the deep fields, the argument is that the galaxy inventory keeps growing with instrumental reach and shows no sign of terminating: the post-HDF census of roughly 120 billion observable galaxies was revised upward to about two trillion once the ultra-deep counts were extrapolated, and Borchardt has predicted a further order-of-magnitude increase as the Webb surveys are completed. Two cautions belong with that claim. The higher figures are extrapolations rather than counts, and the two-trillion estimate is itself contested within the mainstream — Lauer and colleagues' 2021 measurement of the cosmic optical background from beyond the zodiacal light argues for hundreds of billions rather than trillions. What is not contested is the direction of travel: every increase in depth has increased the count.

Tom Van Flandern made a geometrical version of the same point, noting an excess of faint blue galaxies by a factor of ten at magnitude 28 and observing that this "implies that the volume of space is larger than in the Big Bang, where it should get smaller as one looks back in time." He also remarked that the early appearance of bound aggregates of order 100,000 stars remains unsolved in the standard model but "is no mystery in infinite universe models."

If redshift is not distance, the deep field is not a time machine

Every claim about what the deep fields show about the early universe depends on reading redshift as distance and therefore as look-back time. That reading is the point this wiki disputes most often, and if it fails, the deep fields are simply pictures of galaxies at unknown distances.

Halton Arp argued from physically associated objects with discordant redshifts that a large part of the measured redshift is intrinsic and a function of age rather than recession — young matter is born highly redshifted and its redshift declines as it ages. In Observational Cosmology: From High Redshift Galaxies to the Blue Pacific (2005) he put the consequence plainly: "With our galaxy redshifts a function of age, however, the look back time to a distant galaxy shows it to us when it was younger and more intrinsically redshifted. No Doppler recession needed!" The case is made at book length in Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science. On this view the "high-redshift galaxies" of the deep fields need not be either distant or early.

Paul Marmet developed a non-Doppler redshift produced by the interaction of light with the tenuous matter it traverses, in A New Mechanism to Explain Observations Incompatible with the Big Bang (1991), Cosmic Matter and the Nonexpanding Universe (1989, with the radio astronomer Grote Reber), The Cosmological Red Shift in an Unlimited Universe (1995) and Big Bang Cosmology Meets an Astronomical Death (1990). Borchardt's own mechanism is likewise absorptive: light loses energy over distance to the matter in the space it crosses, which he argues also disposes of Olbers' paradox and accounts for the microwave background without a hot beginning. Related mechanisms are collected on this wiki under Tired Light, Plasma Cosmology, and Intrinsic redshift.

Non-expanding cosmologies represented on this wiki

Several complete alternatives to the expanding-universe reading of the deep fields are catalogued here. Thomas B Andrews sets out a static Euclidean framework in Theoretical Basis for a Non-Expanding and Euclidean Universe (1994). Ari Brynjolfsson's plasma-redshift cosmology accounts for both redshift and surface brightness without expansion. Tuomo Suntola's Dynamic Universe, argued in Zero-Energy Space Cancels the Need for Dark Energy (2007), reproduces the supernova magnitude–redshift relation without a cosmological constant. C Johan Masreliez's Scale Expanding Cosmos, developed across Scale Expanding Cosmos Theory I and II, is an expanding model of a different kind, in which scale rather than distance evolves.

Disagreements among the critics

The dissenting literature is not a single school, and the deep fields are one of the places where its internal disagreements are sharpest.

• Arp rejects tired light. The mechanism most other critics rely on — photons losing energy en route — is one Arp explicitly ruled out, on the grounds that objects with the same path length to the observer show very different redshifts and that the shift is uniform across each object. His alternative is the Narlikar–Arp variable-mass hypothesis, in which particle masses increase with age. Borchardt's absorption redshift and Marmet's and Brynjolfsson's interaction redshifts are incompatible with that reading.
• The critics do not agree on the numbers. Van Flandern's tired-light model predicts surface brightness falling as (1+z)⁻²; Lerner's static Euclidean model predicts constancy in AB magnitudes. Both are offered against the Big Bang's (1+z)⁻⁴, but they are not the same prediction and the deep-field data cannot confirm both.
• Not every alternative is static. Masreliez's scale-expanding cosmos and the various matter-creation models accept a changing universe; what they reject is the singular beginning, not change itself.

Recording these disagreements is not a concession. A research literature that argued in one voice about a body of data this rich would be more suspicious, not less.

The mainstream reply

The standard answer to all of the above is that galaxy evolution is real, expected, and observed; that the maturity of high-redshift systems has repeatedly been overstated by photometric estimates later corrected by spectroscopy; that the Tolman test has been carried out and passed once luminosity evolution is accounted for; and that the growth of galaxy counts with instrumental depth is exactly what a finite universe with a horizon predicts, since faint galaxies are numerous and were simply below earlier detection limits. Astronomers cited by the critics — including the authors of the Webb morphology and high-redshift papers — generally do not endorse a non-expanding interpretation of their results.

The dissenting reply, stated most broadly in the 2004 "Open Letter to the Scientific Community" organised by Lerner and signed by Arp, Van Flandern and some thirty others, is that this pattern of accommodation is itself the problem:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed — inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation.

— "An Open Letter to the Scientific Community", New Scientist, 22 May 2004

Papers on this wiki

• Halton Arp (1989), Extragalactic Evidence for Quantum Causality
• Paul Marmet and Grote Reber (1989), Cosmic Matter and the Nonexpanding Universe
• Paul Marmet (1990), Big Bang Cosmology Meets an Astronomical Death
• Paul Marmet (1991), A New Mechanism to Explain Observations Incompatible with the Big Bang
• Thomas B Andrews (1994), Theoretical Basis for a Non-Expanding and Euclidean Universe
• Paul Marmet and James B. Wright (1995), The Cosmological Red Shift in an Unlimited Universe
• Halton Arp (1998), Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
• Halton Arp (2000), Cosmology: "Contradictions Between Theory and Observations"
• Tom Van Flandern (2002), The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang
• Tom Van Flandern (2002), A Universe Older Than Itself?
• C Johan Masreliez (2004), Scale Expanding Cosmos Theory II — Cosmic Drag
• Glenn Borchardt (2004), Ten Assumptions of Science and the Demise of Cosmogony
• Billie Westergard (2004), Structure Formation in the Universe by Spin and Matter Creation
• Billie Westergard (2005), Structure Formation in the Early Big-Bang Universe? Deep & Ultra Deep Fields Say No!
• Halton Arp (2005), Observational Cosmology: From High Redshift Galaxies to the Blue Pacific
• Tom Van Flandern (2005), The Top 50 Problems with the Big Bang
• Ari Brynjolfsson (2006), Surface Brightness in Plasma-Redshift Cosmology
• Tuomo Suntola (2007), Zero-Energy Space Cancels the Need for Dark Energy
• Glenn Borchardt (2007), Infinite Universe Theory
• Tom Van Flandern (2008), Big Bang Reaches Deflation Stage
• Charles Sven (2011), Center of the Universe Located by Triangulation of NASA Data

Off-wiki, the primary technical sources for the surface-brightness argument are E. J. Lerner, "Evidence for a Non-Expanding Universe: Surface Brightness Data From HUDF", AIP Conf. Proc. 822, 60 (2006); E. J. Lerner, R. Falomo & R. Scarpa, "UV surface brightness of galaxies from the local universe to z ~ 5", Int. J. Mod. Phys. D 23, 1450058 (2014); and E. J. Lerner, "Observations contradict galaxy size and surface brightness predictions that are based on the expanding universe hypothesis", MNRAS 477, 3185 (2018).

See also

• Big Bang
• Eternal Universe
• Infinite Universe Theory
• Red Shift
• Intrinsic redshift
• Tired Light
• Plasma Cosmology
• Dark Matter
• Dark Energy
• Category: Cosmology

References

The primary technical description of the observations is R. E. Williams et al., "The Hubble Deep Field: Observations, Data Reduction, and Galaxy Photometry", Astronomical Journal 112, 1335 (1996). Sources for the criticism sections are cited inline above.

External links

• The Hubble Deep Field — Space Telescope Science Institute project site.
• "Hubble's Deepest View of the Universe Unveils Bewildering Galaxies across Billions of Years" — NASA press release, 15 January 1996.
• Lerner, "Evidence for a Non-Expanding Universe: Surface Brightness Data From HUDF" (2006).
• Lerner, Falomo & Scarpa, "UV surface brightness of galaxies from the local universe to z ~ 5" (2014).
• Lerner, "Observations contradict galaxy size and surface brightness predictions that are based on the expanding universe hypothesis", MNRAS 477, 3185 (2018).
• Van Flandern, "The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang" (2002, archived).
• "An Open Letter to the Scientific Community", New Scientist, 22 May 2004.