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Four Quasars Found Clustered Together Defy Current Cosmological Expectations
StartsWithABang writes: Get a supermassive black hole feeding on matter, particularly on large amounts of cool, dense gas, and you're likely to get a quasar: a luminous, active galaxy emitting radiation from the radio all the way up through the X-ray. Our best understanding and observations indicate that these objects should be rare, transient, and isolated; no more than two have ever been found close together before. Until this discovery, that is, where we just found four within a million light years of one another, posing a problem for our current theories of structure formation in the Universe.
This is just he exception that proves the rule.
It's when you find TWO exceptions, that you should start to worry about the rule itself...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just toss in another adjustment factor with nothing to support it and you'll be fine.
They're just in a new intergalactic living arrangement is all.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The original paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.0378... mentions the red-shift and spectral similarities of 3 of the observed quasars without mentioning the possibility that they may be the result of gravitational lensing by the fourth object and could possibly be millions of light years behind the 4th object.
How dare they defy our theories! Rebel scum!
Maybe multiple gravitational lensing is somehow confusing things. That or the universe took fertility pills and had quadruplets.
We've got Physics to break!
when we develop, sorry, 3D make a warp drive.
The quasars are also emitting RF in short bursts lasting 42 seconds, have we finally decoded the meaning of the universe?
This is the second article today. Typically authors of blogs and news stories get one exposure on slashdot per million years. It's quite rare for even two exposures. Imagine how the Slashdotter community would be rocked if four Ethan articles were posted within a single day!
Why couldn't they have formed further apart and floated or were pulled in closer? Also, a million light years seems pretty far to me...
-SaNo
The article abstract speaks of refinement and of the opportunity to make measurements instead of fundamental problems. Shock and Awe, shock and awe!
but fuck yeah its aliens!!!
"My answer in answering the question: "What does the red spectrum tell us about quasars? There are various words that need to be defined: what is a spectrum, what is a red one, why is it red, and why is it so frequently linked with quasars?......
It seems like God is getting lazy and can't even be bothered to abide by his own rules anymore.
why is this shit published??
Where did you get the idea this is science? It is a lot closer to propaganda. Big Bang preachers, telling us to shut up and agree.
If we're going to get stock stories about the cosmos from someone, could we at least get them from Neil deGrasse Tyson, please? This wanna-be biker guy is hip and all, but his street cred is for shite.
The one thing I know about physics and physicists (my father was one, and my wife is one) is that the search for "truth" is never-ending, and the universe always has a surprise around the next corner!
100% of galaxies have supermassive black holes near them. Quasars form based on mass and age. Galaxies near each other should be around the same age. I don't see the problem here. So four galaxies around the same age had nearly the same mass by sheer random probability and they all turned into quasars at the same time because they're all the same age formation-wise.
"We looked at 1% of the universe and didn't see something like this so it must be impossible" is not valid science. That's right up there with "the Earth looks flat so it must be flat."
without my daily dose of unreadable hipster website clickbait?
Holly: Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?
Rimmer: But five of them? . How can you manage to miss five black holes?
Holly: It's always the way, innit? You hang around for three million years in deep space and there hasn't been one, then all of a sudden five turn up at once.
We have theories, and then observation doesn't meet the theory. So we have two options, we make up some rubbish to cover up what we observe, so we can carry on believing in our theories, or secondly, we change the theory to match observation.
I'd prefer the latter, and whilst it's fascinating to watch science explore space, and be constantly baffled by what we think we see, it's a real shame they're not a little more open minded in their interpretations. The problem as I see it, is that there's only one tool in the tool-box of causes of effects we think we observe - and that's gravity. Gravity alone can't answer what we see, and so we invent place-holders to account for the anomalies. As clearly stated by the article itself, our current thinking on what we see hinges on black holes, and red-shift. Neither of which are proven to be reliable.
A more accurate description of the news would read something like "We can see something, which looks like 4 quasars, but we've no real idea how far away they are, and we can't account for their apparent motions, so we'll explain that away with a super massive black hole, which is just a theory - and we'll explain distances based on red-shift / blue shift, which again is theory, and not proven fact, but treated as if it were by most astrophysicists.
All good fun, really.
we make up some rubbish to cover up what we observe, so we can carry on believing in our theories, or secondly, we change the theory to match observation.
Except changing theories to match observation and making up something to "cover up" what we observe are both the same thing, with the only difference being one having the emotion label rubbish and the other not. It is weird how often you see people on the internet try to rationalize their gut dislike of a new theory by labeling them as not new theories, but just made up stuff which is somehow not a new theory, followed by chastising scientists for not making a new theory.
The relativity of wrong.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Someone obviously didn't read the sign.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
not proven fact
All theories are rubbish until tested. There is no such thing as "proof" in Science, never has been, never will be. That's actually why Science is by far the best method we have found to describe and predict the behaviour of the universe.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Isn't science simply reverse engineering the universe?
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Changing the theory so that it matches the observations is most certainly *not* the same thing as covering up the observation which doesn't match the existing theory.
The history of science is absolutely *littered* with discarded theories which either never fit observations, or fit observations for a while, but then suddenly didn't. It takes more evidence to overrule theories which have proven themselves useful and accurate for long periods of time, and those theories are generally tweaked to mesh with both the new *and* old observations.
Sometimes theories (and the models built up to describe them) work perfectly well within a constrained set of boundaries, and there's no need to discard the theory for a different one when working within those constraints (Newtonian physics vs. general relativity vs. special relativity vs. quantum physics). When that happens, science works pretty much all out to figure out how those theories mesh, and building a unifying theory which includes them both. (In many cases it's simply a matter of effects which are infinitesimal at certain scales of magnitude having to be taken into account to get accurate predictions at other scales of magnitude.)
Theories without supporting evidence, or which don't make better (more accurate) predictions simply don't gain traction, because they don't actually serve a purpose until they can do that. (And sometimes discarded theories get picked back up when new observations suddenly mean that that theory is the better one.)
The key thing in science is that to *be* a theory, it has to be (at least theoretically) falsifiable. That is, there has to be *some* potential observation which would demonstrate that the theory (as it stands) is false. Sometimes, the crucial test is something that can't actually be performed with the currently available technology (eg: time dilation wasn't conclusively measured for quite a long time after it was theorized, because we didn't yet have clocks accurate enough to detect it at the speeds we could achieve).
I think you missed some unstated context from the previous AC's comment. A lot of comments on Slashdot will describe dark matter as covering up for observations that don't match a theory, when it is actually a new theory. They then go on a long spiel about how scientists refuse to come up with a new theory, or make statements like scientists are too lazy to come up with a new theory, all stemming from their refusal to label a theory the dislike as an actual theory.
In the end, there is no simple way to cover up an observation in science, so effectively, there is no difference between changing/creating a theory and what people want to label as covering up observation. Even if what you propose is that an observation involved an error, that is a testable statement that will be tested at the least by future observations.