Cold fusion in older colder regions of space seems clearly shown in data collected by the Cosmic Origins Instrument Aboard Hubble Space Telescope.

Cosmic Orgins Instrument Installed On Hubble Space Telescope 2009

Observations made by the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, (COS) a $70 million instrument designed by the University of Colorado Boulder and installed at a cost of nearly a billion dollars on the last Hubble Space Telescope service call, have revealed that the universe is “missing” any conventional source for a very large amount of UV light. The report is published in Astrophysical Journal Letters this month.

The UV light that COS irrefutably measures by it’s effects on cosmic hydrogen is energetic enough to turn neutral hydrogen into hydrogen ions. That ionization starts at a temperature of about 6000 degrees and is perfect and complete by the time the temperature reaches 60,000 degrees.

It is the glow of the ionized hydrogen recapturing an electron that is observed and very finely measured by COS. Assuming the original ionization resulted from high energy UV photons the amount of glowing hydrogen seen requires a blazingly huge amount of  high energy UV, five times more than can produced and accounted for from all of the usual suspect sources — stars and galaxies and such.

“The most fascinating possibility is that an exotic new source, not quasars or galaxies, is responsible for (making) the photons,” says Benjamin Oppenheimer lead author.

It has been believed that such UV light might come from only two hot nuclear sources in the universe: quasars, which are powered by hot gas falling onto supermassive black holes over a million times the mass of the sun, and the hottest young stars.

Here’s where it gets really interesting

“If we count up the known sources of ultraviolet ionizing photons, we come up five times too short,” say Benjamin Oppenheimer, lead author of the new report.  “We are missing a source for 80 percent of the ionizing photons, and the question is where are they coming from? ”  

Or I posit to add, “What other source of energy could be ionizing all that hydrogen.”

The COS team was able to further study the phenomenal UV mystery and discovered that curiously it is not uniformly distributed in the universe. There is no missing high energy UV associated with young hot star systems where the measured amount of ionized hydrogen UV that needs to fit with production of high energy UV from local conventional hot young stellar fusion match up perfectly. Such young HOT systems are the farthest away from the us and the instrument, so there is likely more to investigate in that regard.

Rather the massively missing UV mystery as observed comes exclusively best studied parts of the universe from COLD old star systems much closer to the instrument and us. There the HOT star and Quasar sources of the high energy UV just don’t begin to add up to produce the amount of ionized hydrogen UV being measured.

David Weinberg, who co-authored a study on this discovery with Oppenheimer, claims that this is actually good news because it comes with certainty that there is actually something really wrong with current models of the Universe.

“We still don’t know for sure what it is, but at least one thing we thought we knew about the present day Universe isn’t true.”

To try to understand the mystery the scientists created simulations to test possible ideas on where the UV comes from.

“The simulations fit the data beautifully in the early universe, and they fit the local data beautifully if we’re allowed to assume that this extra light is really there,” said CU-Boulder’s Oppenheimer. “It’s possible the simulations do not reflect reality, which by itself would be a surprise, because intergalactic hydrogen is the component of the universe that we think we understand the best.”

“The great thing about a 400 percent discrepancy is that you know something is really wrong,” said co-author David Weinberg of Ohio State University. “We still don’t know for sure what it is, but at least one thing we thought we knew about the present day universe isn’t true.”

Might It Be Cold Fusion Is A Nano Source Of High Energy Capable Of Ionizing Hydrogen

A universe filled with dispersed nano scale cold fusion is natural candidate for the source of the invisible nuclear reactions responsible for the vast amount of high energy needed to ionize hydrogen atoms drifting in the dark of space.  Naturally for some of us who have been pursing and observing cold fusion the strange cosmic cold nuclear reactions that are responsible for the ionized hydrogen is most likely due to the nano-scopic scale at which cold fusion reactions take place. It fits perfectly with the observed data that appears to show less anomalous ionized energy in the distant past and more in the present universe. It simply takes time for the cold fusion associated with dust to build up a signature.

There is ample dust and hydrogen in the cosmos where hydrogen can come together is strange states and under which conditions cold fusion is commonly seen in our experiments. That is associated with catalytic-like nano-particles of hydrogen loving metals also a very common constituent of space dust. From our studies of nano-domain catalysts we know hydrogen converts into a “spillover” form where di-hydrogen molecules become condensed liquid pools of monatomic hydrogen/deuterium atoms. This strange state of condensed hydrogen is likely to easily transition into a BEC on space dust as it does in earth bound catalytic systems. Though such cosmic nano fusions are surely rare and dispersed in the vastness of space they are easily an ample candidate for the production of the observed anomalous UV.

In typical cold fusion experiments here on Earth tiny nano-fusion reactions are typically contained within microscopic metal lattices. The experiments are performed within heavily constructed experiment vessels. This means this cosmic no high energy UV would be measured, nor needed as heat is just fine for ionization. It might just be that we live in a universe filled with cold fusion.

End note: In this universe of mysteries there is likely always room for alternative explanations. We might have to tip our hats to near nuclear reactions in the great comic hydrogen pastures … maybe even hydrinos or dark fusion.

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The Astrophysical Letters study was funded in part by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Ahmanson Foundation.

Read more at in this University of Colorado Press Release