Quote Originally Posted by Cougar
What's wrong with this explanation?
NOTHING! In fact it makes my case!

Quote Originally Posted by NASA
The unexpected preponderance of far infrared light implies that many stars have "fallen between the cracks" in ultra- sensitive visible light probes of the distant corners of the universe, such as the Hubble Deep Field. One possible explanation is that the universe is very dusty, with many stars hidden in blankets of dust. Alternatively, many stars may have been born in a flurry of activity in the very early universe but faded away at earlier times than yet reached with large telescopes.
Lots of interesting things to look at here: This "Surprisingly large amount" of faded starlight was not predicted to exist – it is not part of the BB paradigm. It really contra- indicates the BB, or at least the consensus interpretation of the BB, that calls the CMB a pristine remnant of the main BB event.

Secondly, the “dusty” explanation is incredibly weak, and completely ignores the fact the ‘most distant’ quasars indicate just the opposite – you cannot have it both ways. If the Far infrared background indicates a universe filled with dust at high z, the quasars have to be more local, because they certainly do not reveal a lot of dust. (Ironically, in my view of the universe, interstellar dust does play a major role at these distances, but the quasars are more local events and so the lack of dust is not a conflict.)

The second explanation – a “flurry of activity” is at odds with current interpretations of the CMB – this flurry should have also created a flurry of smaller peaks in the CMB. In fact either a “dusty” or “flurry” past should scramble the CMB like an omelet.

Finally, if you look at the FIR plots they are utterly cool – the ‘Milky Way’ contamination is very similar to the Milky Way contamination in the CMB. They can filter out the Milky Way from the survey, but in no way can they claim the remaining radiation – underneath the Milky Way is highly representative of the IR sources behind it.

This is also true of the radiation contributed by the most local galaxies and clusters, we do not know what the specific FIR signatures are behind these galaxies, and I still maintain we cannot accurately map the CMB literally behind-the-face of all these contaminants for the very same reason: Radiation deconvolution requires an intimate knowledge of both the scattering profile and the radiation source. In the case of the CMB, we have neither.

Since we are only guessing at the cause of the FIR background, we can only guess it does not impact the CMB. This is a BAD guess. How could it be a good one, when we don’t know what we are dealing with?