Another prediction comes true for maverick cosmologist Fred Hoyle, RIP. He would have loved this. This is a huge setback for the Big Bang:

….In the new stu­dy, An­drew Steele and Marc Fries of the Car­ne­gie In­sti­tu­tion in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. re­port dis­cov­er­ing an un­usu­al new form of car­bon in min­er­als with­in me­te­orites dat­ing from the forma­t­ion of the So­lar Sys­tem. The find­ings ap­pear in the Feb. 29 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Sci­ence.The “graph­ite whiskers” …. might al­so be cre­at­ed and dis­persed by su­per­novae, he added. A thin haze of the whisk­ers in space would af­fect how light of dif­fer­ent wave­lengths, or en­er­gies, passes through space… light of so-called near-infrared wave­lengths would be par­tic­u­larly af­fected—the same wave­lengths whose dim­ming first led to the dark en­er­gy model.Graph­ite whiskers or si­m­i­lar ma­te­ri­als have been pro­posed to pos­sibly ex­plain those ob­serva­t­ions be­fore, but their pres­ence in space has nev­er been con­firmed pre­vi­ously, said Steele and Fries.

In addition to obviating the need for the frankly silly “dark energy,” this finding completely demolishes one of the three pillars of the Big Bang - its supposed connection to the cosmic microwave background. The iron whiskers, now known to exist in space, re-radiate starlight in a diffuse microwave glow that Big Bangers have assumed was the signature of the Big Bang explosion, but which is really just iron whiskers. 

The plausible existence of these iron/graphite whiskers was predicted by anti-Big Bang people Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe et al back in 1968. That’s 40 years of being right and facing attacks from the wrongheaded establishment, which will now proceed to not apologize.

Here’s anti-Big Banger Jayant Narlikar being right about the whiskers in New Scientist magazine, 17 years ago in 1991:

….First, the cosmic background: could this be of more recent astrophysical origin? The answer is ‘yes’. What it requires is a population of particles that absorb microwaves but are nearly transparent to optical as well as radio waves. These particles, distributed through intergalactic space, serve to absorb and redistribute any radiation as a microwave background. In fact, back in 1968 Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and VC Reddish had shown that if all observed helium were produced in thermonuclear processes in stars, then the resulting starlight would, after being absorbed and re-emitted by intergalactic particles, generate a microwave background at the observed temperature. The main difficulty was to identify a suitable particle.

…Recent work on cosmic grains-small particles of iron, carbon and the like found in interstellar space-has turned up a promising candidate: an iron whisker about 1 millimetre long and 1 micrometre wide. Laboratory experiments show that slowly cooled metallic vapours do condense into such whiskers. Because metals are expected to be ejected in supernova explosions, such whiskers could very well form in the expanding envelopes of supernovae.… Calculations show that such particles could very efficiently wipe out any underlying unevenness in radiation from stars and galaxies.

In short, the microwave background would have been generated after the stars and galaxies had formed instead of before…

So the anti-Big Bang crew was right about this since 1968 - this really is an astounding prediction come true. This never should have been dismissed. The establishment has basically been telling these folks to suck it for 40 years. Will anyone come forward from the establishment and admit that the Big Bang’s connection to cosmic microwave background - fully a third of the Big Bang’s foundation - has been demolished?

Will this kill the Big Bang? It rightly should. At the very least it seems one might say Hoyle’s Steady State theory is back in the game.

…And here’s a link to an account of Hoyle’s famous prediction of an unknown energy state of carbon-12, with an excerpt:

…He pumped Hoyle’s hand and gushed his congratulations. Hoyle’s prediction had been borne out. Unbelievably, there was an energy state of carbon-12 within a whisker of 7.65 MeV [as Hoyle predicted]. It was the most amazing result Fowler had witnessed.

Hoyle’s outrageous prediction had been proved right - quite spectacularly. Hoyle had peered into the heart of nature and spied something that mere mortals - or, at least, mere nuclear physicists - had been unable to see.

But what compounded Fowler’s amazement was the manner of Hoyle’s prediction. He had predicted the 7.65 MeV energy state of carbon-12 using an anthropic argument: it had to exist because, if it didn’t, neither could human beings.

To Fowler, such flaky logic smacked of religion rather than science. To this day, Hoyle is the only person to have made a successful prediction from an anthropic argument in advance of an experiment.

The discovery of the 7.65 MeV state of carbon-12 was just the start. Hoyle, together with Fowler and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, went on to figure out the origin of all the elements in our bodies.

Geoffrey Burbidge is a longtime Big Bang opponent, not sure about Fowler, and Margaret Burbidge isn’t super vocal about opposing the Big Bang but she’s certainly at all their picnics with Halton Arp - the astronomer whose work is a lynchpin of most anti-Big Bang theories, as it threatens to demolish the redshift-distance correlation (i.e. one of the other pillars of the Big Bang). The whole crew is a cosmology in exile.