Hi All

Raoul wrote [my comments]...

Most recent observations disturb the very notion of the Big Bang:

1) Galaxies with a redshift close to z [= 10... I think you mean] (only 470 Million years after the "Big bang") are already loaded with gas and stars. More than 300 elliptical and evolved galaxies were found by Gemini (Hawai) in places that are supposed to be not older than between 3 and 6 million years after the B B. [gee... there's a first... galaxies at z = 100... I think you've misread those figures Raoul]

[and the punchline is??? The first stars are expected at z ~ 20, so seeing stars and dust at z ~ 10 is no big surprise. Recent modelling of the detonation of high-mass supernovae produce a lot more dust than expected, so much so that it masks some supernovae]

2) Huge amount of iron was found in a quasar (by XMM) where it wasn't supposed to be older than 1.5 Billion years after the B B.
[made by VMOs exploding as hypernova probably... still no problem. Quasars are a lot younger than z = 10 galaxies]

3) Where's Dark Matter? Nowhere to be found; does it even exist?

[good point BUT it's only a problem for Dark Matter dependent models. MOND or something else - scalar fields etc - could be as natural an explanation as "no BB". The BB still explains all the data better than any other model]

It all looks like the epicycles theory to explain the orbits of planets (centuries ago)....

[epicycles generated no new observations. Adding them just fitted the theory to the data better. Inflation and the BB DO generate new understanding of the data - for example the flatness of the Universe and the power-spectrum of the CMB... here's a recent corroboration of an inflation generated power-spectrum... Seljak et al (2004) ]

Edwin Hubble had great quotes for those matters.

[doubtless, but he's over 70 years out of date]

Raoul

*Finally, nothing else fits as well as the BB. All the supposed alternatives fall on their arses by focussing on just one anomaly or bit of data, explaining nothing else as well as the BB does. Check out Ned Wright's review of the alternatives and their many and varied flaws, some very subtle... Cosmic fads and fallacies. As ugly as the BB is, it remains the only model flexible enough to handle the data. Every alternative is too brittle.