Interpreting SN 2006gy from a Modified Ritzian Viewpoint
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Interpreting SN 2006gy from a Modified Ritzian Viewpoint |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Robert S Fritzius |
| Keywords | Ritzian relativity, Cosmology, Light years, Star images, Stellar explosions |
| Published | 2008 |
| No. of pages | 43 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Supernova 2006gy, which is reputed to be the "brightest stellar explosion ever recorded," is generally considered to be associated with spiral galaxy NGC 1260, some 240 million light years from the solar system. On the other hand, three astrometrically determined positions for the supernova are radically inconsistent with the calculated distance to the spiral galaxy. Walter Ritz's (1908) ballistic emission theory (which predicts apparent time modulation for close binary stars) as modified by J.G. Fox's (1965) extinction theorem, is used to explain the kinematics of the apparent proper motion anomalies for the supernova. Ritzian relativity predicts that the progenitor of SN 2006gy will eventually be found not to be the death of an extremely massive star but rather a (1913) de Sitter binary star whimsical image, and it will be an nearby neighbor to the solar system. See the online version link above to see the animations for some of the slides.
Overview
This is the slide deck of a talk Robert Fritzius (Shade Tree Physics) gave to the AAAS-SWARM division and the Natural Philosophy Alliance at the University of New Mexico on 9 April 2008. Several of its frames were presented as GIF animations, which the static PDF preserves only as first frames; the author points readers to the online version at shadetreephysics.com for the moving versions.
The argument has two halves. The first is a compact defence of Walter Ritz's 1908 ballistic emission electrodynamics — the position that light leaves its source at c relative to that source, so that a moving source yields c′ = c + v — repaired with J. G. Fox's 1965 extinction theorem so as to survive the standard objections. The second applies the repaired theory to a specific object, Supernova 2006gy, and argues that its reported astrometry is inconsistent with the distance normally assigned to it. Where the mainstream reading takes SN 2006gy to be the death of an extremely massive star in the spiral galaxy NGC 1260 at roughly 240 million light years, Fritzius proposes it is instead a nearby, intrinsically dim binary encounter whose apparent brilliance and apparent motion are artefacts of Ritzian light-travel effects — what de Sitter would have called a "whimsical image."
The argument
Ritz versus Einstein
Fritzius frames the two 1905–1908 theories as sharing one premise and differing on one. Both hold that light travels at c with respect to its source. They part on whether the source–observer relative velocity affects the measured speed: writing c′ = c + kv, "Einstein would have k = 0, whereas Ritz would have k = 1." His characterisation of the cost of each choice is even-handed — "Einstein required changing our classical ideas about time, distance to make his k = 0," while "Ritz's k = 1 doesn't work in dispersive media because of extinction." Ritz's theory, being modelled on the Newtonian emission picture, dispenses with time dilation, relativistic mass increase and length contraction altogether. Fritzius also records Ritz's own rejection of Maxwell's partial differential equations, on the grounds that they describe "stresses and elastic deformations in the 'non-existent' solid ether," that they "allow the future to affect the present," and that they are therefore "fundamentally inappropriate to express the comprehensive laws of electrodynamics."
The historical note that Ritz died in 1909 at the age of 31 carries argumentative weight here: on Fritzius's reading Ritz never had the chance to work out how emission particles interact with matter, and it is exactly that gap which later critics exploited.
Fox's extinction theorem as the repair
The gap is filled by J. G. Fox's Evidence Against Emission Theories (Am. J. Phys. 33, 1, 1965), which Fritzius uses against the grain of its title. Fox's theorem states that "when a light wave sets into motion the charges in a medium; these in turn emit new waves whose centers move in vacuum with the velocity of the charges of the medium." In other words, after propagating through matter, light forgets its original source velocity and takes up the velocity of the intervening medium. Fritzius accepts this and takes it as a boundary condition on Ritz rather than a refutation. The extinction distance for visible light is about 0.3 cm in sea-level air and about one light year in local interstellar space; extinction is exponential, with five extinction lengths sufficient to replace the original energy entirely, and the extinction length is inversely proportional to wavelength, so ultraviolet and X-rays propagate further before their source-velocity information is erased. The consequence he draws is a limited domain of validity: "Ritz's relativity may work on microscopic (nano) scales or for modest distances in the near vacuum of space."
Mixed-up light and de Sitter's binaries
Robert Shankland reported that Einstein himself had considered an emission theory before 1905 and abandoned it partly because light from an oscillating source would arrive "badly mixed up" and might even "back up [time-wise] on itself." Fritzius turns this into the mechanism of the paper: "It can be shown that this apparent weakness can be an advantage in understanding variable stars." He quotes Ritz's own statement of the effect — that if a radiating point P′ oscillates and the distance PP′ is large enough, waves emitted at moments t′(1), t′(2), … when the source speed had different values may "arrive at P simultaneously."
Willem de Sitter's 1913 binary-star argument, published in four papers in German and English, is the classical counter. If light from the approaching limb of an orbit travels at c + u and from the receding limb at c − u, arrival times over a path L differ by L/(c − u) − L/(c + u), and the resulting distortion of the apparent orbit should produce departures from Keplerian motion that have never been observed. Fritzius grants that this argument buried Ritz "for nearly 75 years," but presses a point de Sitter did not address: the same overtaking that scrambles arrival times also modulates apparent intensity. Where fast light overtakes slow light, an observer sees the star at two points of its orbit at once. Vladimir Sekerin (1987) developed this: overtaking distances are typically so great that the two images cannot be resolved, superimposed images are brighter than a single image, and therefore "stars that are periodically varying in brightness may be irresolvable binaries." Fritzius lists as candidate de Sitter whimsical images the Cepheid variables, the Crab pulsar, Geminga, SN 1987A, SS 433, and SN 2006gy.
The astrometry of SN 2006gy
The empirical core of the talk is a comparison of published positions. Fritzius cites four astrometric determinations from CBET 644, CBET 648, CBET 695 and Ofek et al. (ApJ 659, L13, 2007), together with Smith et al. (astro-ph/061267v3), and shows the object's reported position history alongside a blink comparison of the Lick infrared and Chandra X-ray images. His arithmetic is the paper's single decisive number: one arcsecond of angular displacement over one month, at a distance of 238 million light years, corresponds to a transverse speed of 18,000 c. "Houston, we've got a problem!"
Since superluminal proper motion of that magnitude is not credible, he concludes that the distance assignment must be wrong: "if the reported celestial coordinates for SN 2006gy are correct, then its 'progenitor' must actually be a very local (dim) star, that passed close to another local (also dim) star. This encounter resulted in Ritzian relativity light variations, and the 'association' with NGC 1260 is only apparent." Being nearby, the object is close enough for us to resolve different positions along its path. The animations illustrate a binary encounter including an apparent time reversal — the sequence in which overtaking light shows phases out of order — and a hypothetical reconstruction embedding the real Chandra and Lick images into manually prepared theoretical frames. As a comparison case for what a genuinely local dim star looks like, he offers Barnard's Star: a red dwarf at 5.98 light years, apparent magnitude 9.57, proper motion 0.86 arcsecond per month, which "flashed" in 1998 from an unknown cause.
Assessment
The talk's strongest move is methodological. Fritzius does not simply assert Ritz against Einstein; he identifies the one place where Ritz's theory is known to fail — propagation through matter — accepts the standard result there, and then asks what survives inside the extinction length. That is a disciplined way to hold a minority position, and his statement of the limits ("microscopic scales or modest distances in the near vacuum of space") is more candid than most emission-theory advocacy. The observation that de Sitter's binary argument addressed arrival times but not intensity modulation is genuine, and Sekerin's suggestion that unresolved overtaking images would appear as brightness variation rather than orbital distortion is a real and non-obvious consequence of c + v. The astrometric anomaly is also a fair thing to raise: a reported position change of that size at the assumed distance does demand explanation.
The difficulties are correspondingly sharp. The 18,000 c figure depends entirely on treating three or four early, independently obtained discovery positions as measurements of the same physical point rather than as successive refinements of a poorly constrained position. Early CBET astrometry of a newly reported transient routinely shifts by arcseconds as better images and better reference catalogues arrive, and the later Ofek and Smith positions are the ones with the small formal errors. The paper does not quote uncertainties for any of the four positions, and without them the anomaly cannot be assessed at all — this is the argument's load-bearing weakness, and it is one measurement table away from being settled.
The proposed reinterpretation also has to answer evidence the talk does not engage. SN 2006gy's spectrum shows the narrow and intermediate-width hydrogen emission characteristic of a Type IIn event with strong circumstellar interaction, at a redshift matching NGC 1260 (z ≈ 0.019); a dim binary a few light years away would show no such redshift and no such line profile. The light curve rose over roughly 70 days and remained above magnitude −21 for months, a timescale set by the diffusion of energy through an expanding envelope rather than by any orbital period, and the paper offers no Ritzian mechanism that reproduces its particular shape. Most directly, the object sits within the visible disc of NGC 1260 in both the Lick and Chandra images the talk itself reproduces; a chance superposition of an unremarkable local red dwarf on a specific galaxy nucleus at the moment of a unique brightening is a large coincidence to accept.
More broadly, the extinction repair that saves Ritz from laboratory refutation cuts against the astronomical application. If the extinction length in the local interstellar medium is about one light year for visible light, as Fritzius states, then light from a binary "nearby neighbor to the solar system" at Barnard's-Star distances — six light years — has already passed through several extinction lengths and should have lost the source-velocity information the whole effect requires. The talk notes that shorter wavelengths travel further before extinction completes, which may be why the Chandra X-ray frame is given prominence, but the point is not developed, and the visible and infrared data are treated as if unaffected. Read as what it is — a conference presentation raising a specific observational puzzle and sketching a heterodox reading of it — the deck is clear and honest about its own speculative status; read as a case against the standard interpretation of SN 2006gy, it needs the astrometric error bars it never supplies.