Rudolph E. Schild Center for Astrophysics 60 Garden Street Cambridge MA 02138 rschild@cfa.harvard.edu WHITE PAPER ON THE DARK ENERGY PROBLEM 1. INTRODUCTION There probably is no dark energy. Recall that previous to the 1998 supernova brightness anomalies, there was no evidence for dark energy. Today evidence for dark energy comes creeping out of every dark corner of theoretical misunderstanding of complex astrophysical processes, purely from bandwagon following. And why would we be so concerned about brightnesses of distant supernovae when the universe is dominated by baryonic AND non-baryonic dark matter and so we have no idea of how the dominant matter of the universe is affecting the transparency of the universe. Recall that the entire discussion about the transparency of the universe is a discussion about extinction and reddening. But the transparency of the universe is probably limited by achromatic refraction. The refraction is caused by the Ly_alpha clouds acting as spherical lenses. Recall that when the Ly_alpha clouds were first discovered, it was concluded that there must be some hot-intercluster-medium providing pressure to keep them from evaporating. Subsequent X-ray and other studies failed to find evidence for such a hot-intercluster-medium, and today there is no guess about what keeps the Ly_alpha clouds from evaporating. The resolution of this is given in Schild 2004 astro-ph/0409549. The clouds are not confined, but are slowly evaporating. At the same time, the baryonic dark matter primordial planetoids which nucleate the clouds are slowly evaporating and replenishing the clouds. Thus the entire baryonic dark matter of the universe, which already had been discovered by Schild (1996, ApJ 464, 125) from quasar microlensing, can now be understood to be the source of the ubiquitous Ly_alpha clouds, seen by the thousands in any quasar spectrum, and any centrally condensed object becomes a spherical lens that refracts and de-focuses the light from a distant source. The hydrodynamics community has long ago predicted that the baryonic dark matter should have made such a population of planetary mass "Primordial Fog Particles" at the time of recombination, 300,000 years after the big bang (C. Gibson, 1996, Appl. Mech. Review. 49, 299; astro-ph/0003352). If such dimming occurs, is there other evidence of it? Notice that in this process the light of the distant supernova and quasar is not absorbed, but is just re-directed, and so it should produce two effects: 1. There should be little halos around distant supernovae and quasars. 2. There should be a significant cosmic background radiation. Both have been seen! 2. CONFIRMING OBSERVATION OF SMALL HALOS With regard to the small halos, they would not be commented upon if seen because supernovae are often seen in young star groups and blending with other group members would be unsurprising, especially for type 2 supernovae. And fuzz around quasars is well known because the host galaxy is often seen as faint fuzz around the stellar quasar image, and the bright stellar component scatters light in spectrographs and makes significant claims about the fuzz suspicious. But the fiber-optic bundle field resolving spectroscopy of AGN Mrk 509 by Mediavilla et al, (1998, ApJ 494, L8) shows such a halo out to 8 kpc from the central source in the light of the broad emission lines. The possibility of a broad emitting cloud 16 kpc in diameter is rejected and the observations were interpreted in terms of scattering, with refraction not considered. Numerous other examples of such quasar halos observed with this instrument are given by the same author. Thus the small halos around cosmological sources probably have been detected, and whether caused by scattering or refraction, they will reduce the transparency of the universe. 3. OBSERVATION OF THE EXTRAGALACTIC BACKGROUND LIGHT The subject of the extragalactic background light is contentious because while its detection has been claimed, it is a faint background component seen against a bright foreground originating in the solar system (the zodiacal light). The most recent report by Dwek et al (2005, astro-ph/0508262) concludes that it is too bright to be understood as resulting from any Pop III sky background model. Thus it is probably caused by the light that is refracted out of the beams of cosmological distant sources. 4. TRANSMISSION OF THE UNIVERSE TO LIGHT OF QUASARS The study of quasars has long ago produced a puzzling observation that is probably relevant. It has long been known that the number of quasars peaks at a redshift around z = 1.9. This means that if we consider all directions of space and ask how many quasars are contained as a function of redshift, that function will peak at z = 1.9 There is presently no accepted theory of the formation of quasars, and this peak in the number distribution is unexplained. However it can be easily understood as resulting from the reduced transparency of the universe also seen in the supernovae. Recall that the supernova brightness - redshify relation purported to demonstrate dark energy shows about a 1.4 magnitude deficit for the quasar peak at z = 1.9. In other words, the dark matter cosmology curve is fainter than the standard cosmology curve at the quasar density peak by 1.4 magnitudes. This means that the transmission losses by the dark matter are becoming significant at these redshifts, and the proposal is that both the supernova brightness deficit and the quasar brightness peak can reasonably be understood as resulting from reduced transmission of the universe due to the baryonic dark matter. Moreover, the exact form of the reduced transmission law exactly fits the supernova observations. It has long been known (Zuo and Lu, 1993, ApJ 418, 601) that the density of Ly_alpha clouds increases with redshift as (1+z)^2.8. It has also been noticed by Goobar et al (2002, A&A 384, 1) that an absorption law scaling as (1+z)^3 and constant thereafter, can explain the supernova brightness-redshift relationship of Riess et al (2004; astro-ph/0402512). Thus it is easy to understand how the known Ly_alpha clouds can exactly describe the supernova brightness anomaly presently ascribed to dark energy. 5. PROSPOSAL FOR A MODEST RESEARCH EFFORT All that is needed to complete this research effort is to make a model of a collapsing hydrogen cloud and its subsequent cooling, and then compute its refraction properties. This is actually somewhat harder than it first sounds, because the cooling of the primordial object will involve a complex superposition of radiative, conductive, convective, sound dissipation, evaporation, and other unknown processes. However even if the exact cooling is not perfectly known an approximate model will suffice to make a basic refraction model. The theoretical basis has been provided by the hydrodynamics community. The primordial planetary objects were produced when a strong viscosity change at the time of recombination caused fossils of earlier turbulence to collapse as a product of normal particle-void separation. The collapse time of 10^8 years has been followed by slow cooling for the next 10^10 years. The objects would in principal have endured important phase changes from gas to liquid to solid as the universe cooled below the 20K solidification temperature of hydrogen, to eventually approach the 2.7K temperature of the present universe. Thus the baryonic dark matter primordial planetoids discovered in quasar microlensing suffered a complex history of phase changes but is seen today as a population of Ly_alpha clouds of planetary mass permeating all space and dimming objects at cosmological distances with achromatic refraction.