Anomalies in Modern Astronomy Research: An Online Symposium

Join the symposium early to match & converse one-on-one with attendees for 3-minute sessions. Meet up to five new people before the day even begins.

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Get an overview of the Airmeet platform and the speakers of the day with Program Chair Beatriz Villarroel and host Annalisa Ventola.

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The search for extraterrestrial life is one of the most exciting frontiers in science. First tentative clues were identified close to Earth in the form of the extraordinary interstellar meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08, the unusual interstellar object `Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) near Earth. The recently announced "Galileo Project" ushers the new frontier of "space archeology" in search of extraterrestrial technological relics. The lecture will feature content from the book "Extraterrestrial" and textbook "Life in the Cosmos", both published in 2021, as well as material from recent commentaries.

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In recent years, there has been an increasing number of scientific papers announcing the discovery of galaxies without dark matter. Dark matter is supposed to bind ordinary matter and accelerate the formation of galaxies. Therefore, the existence of galaxies lacking dark matter is difficult to fit into the current paradigm of galaxy formation and evolution. In this talk, I will review some of the best-known examples of dark matter-deficient galaxies and what solutions the scientific community has proposed to explain the mysterious nature of these objects.

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The hypothesis that any cold or warm dark matter particles of any mass exist has been falsified with much more than 5-sigma confidence using the distribution of galaxies on scales of 100kpc to Gpc as well as Chandrasekhar dynamical friction. The Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model of cosmology is therefore invalid, despite its continued popularity with the research community. The Bonn/Prague research group is now studying galaxy-formation and evolution using Milgromian gravitation. Many of the extragalactic problems disappear automatically, but an issue of debate is currently which background cosmology accounts for the observed Universe.

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Grab a bite and join us in the SSE's social lounge for small group discussion around our virtual tables. An additional table will be reserved for "Aspiring Explorers" - student currently enrolled at a college or university and professors interested in mentoring.

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Cosmological observations find explanations within the standard Lambda-CDM model, although many times after a number of ad hoc corrections. Nevertheless, the expression “crisis in cosmology” stubbornly reverberates in the scientific literature: the higher the precision with which the standard cosmological model tries to fit the data, the greater the number of tensions that arise. Moreover, there are alternative explanations for most of the observations.

 Prof. Pavel Kroupa will show in his presentation some anomalies on galactic to Gpc scales (large-scale structure) including some examples of 5-sigma tensions and some mention of MOND as an alternative to standard gravity and dark matter. Here I complement the range of anomalies in cosmology with further cases on CMBR, nucleosynthesis, tests of expansion, charge-parity violation, inflation and other topics.The general conclusion is that cosmological hypotheses should be very cautiously proposed and even more cautiously received.

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In the introductory part, several known astronomical anomalies are mentioned, where observations apparently contradict the canonic theory of stellar evolu-tion (SN 1987A), where some of the same kind of observed phenomena (GRB and FRB) cannot be easily explained as a high-energy stellar event of astrophysical nature, and where prosaic astrophysical explanations for highly variable stellar objects with a thick surrounding envelope are not completely convincing (Kic 8462852). The subsequent part of the presentation will be focused on what we would expect to observe from possible techno-signatures produced by Type II Kardashev extraterrestrial civilizations. The discussion will be concentrated on three main aspects: a) the search for G-type stars with a strong infrared excess; b) the search for exoplanets, using the photometric occultation technique (Kepler), that show anomalous light curves; c) the search for infrared and radio-emitting objects characterized by a very strong proper motion. This search is proposed to be the main selective protocol to be used as a “viewfinder” for re-observing the objects using standard SETI methods (radio and optical) in order to search for possible intelligent signals. A proposal of observation using the James Webb Space Telescope and other ground and space optical, infrared and radio telescopes, both photometrically and spectroscopically, is strongly advocated.

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