Recent Quasar Observations Support Lots of Mini-Bangs Instead of One Big Bang (wired.com)

Chris Reeve writes: Wired Magazine is reporting that astronomers have since 2014 witnessed up to 100 possible instances of quasars transforming into galaxies over very short timespans, but the article leaves no hint of the trouble this spells for the Big Bang cosmology. The article begins, "Stephanie Lamassa did a double take. She was staring at two images on her computer screen, both of the same object — except they looked nothing alike... The quasar seemed to have vanished, leaving just another galaxy. That had to be impossible, she thought. Although quasars turn off, transitioning into mere galaxies, the process should take 10,000 years or more. This quasar appeared to have shut down in less than 10 years — a cosmic eyeblink."

What the Wired article fails to mention is that the short timespans vindicate the quasar ejection model proposed by Edwin Hubble's assistant, Halton Arp, who insisted that these objects must be considerably closer than the extreme distances inferred by their redshifts:

"The conclusion was very, very strong just from looking at this picture that these objects had been ejected from the central galaxy, and that they were initially at high redshift, and the redshift decayed as time went on. And therefore, we were looking at a physics that was operating in the universe in which matter was born with low mass and very high redshift, and it matured and evolved into our present form, that we were seeing the birth and evolution of galaxies in the universe."

Arp's attempts to publish his quasar ejection model famously led to his removal from the world's largest optical telescope at that time — the 200-inch Palomar. He decided to resign from his permanent position at the Carnegie Institute of Washington on the principle of "whether scientists could follow new lines of investigation, and follow up... on evidence which apparently contradicted the current theorems and the current paradigms." The fact that these quasar changes appear to occur over just months in some cases should raise questions about whether or not the objects are truly at the vast distances and scales implied by their redshift-inferred distances.
The original submission also included a comment with a carefully-documented "list of vindications for Halton Arp" -- and complains again that Wired failed to include any mention of Arp's theory, and it's "dire" implications for the Big Bang theory's assumptions about redshift.

Comments

Re:Ripples, echos, aftershocks

[mikael]

Given that massively heavy objects in space stretch space time, then it seems logical that a quasar could actually create it's own massive gravity well. From our perspective, looking straight at that gravity well, the quasar would appear to be billions of light-years away than it really it. If for any reason, it suddenly disintegrated into lots of smaller objects in the same way of a cloud of a sparks created by a magicians disappearing trick, then that gravity well would suddenly disappear and be replace with the stars of a a galaxy. Then that galaxy of stars would appear to be way closer than the quasar.

A long time ago, observing a galaxy far, far away

[Latent Heat]

Quasars are long known to be highly variable over a broad range of time scales. That was one of the puzzles "a long time ago" (cough 1970s cough) back in the era after of their discovery, along with their immense power output to account for their apparent luminosity at the cosmological distances indicated by their redshifts. A quasar had to be compact -- Solar System sized to account for their variability, so how can something that small keeping putting out high multiples of a galaxy worth of emissions? This is the context of Halton Arp's theory of quasars-can't-be-what-we-think-they-are.

Since then, the galaxy-with-a-central-ultra-massive-black-hole model had been advanced to explain their luminosity along with the compactness needed for their rapid variability. Furthermore, this model does not posit that a quasar turns into an ordinary galaxy, rather, that when the quasar runs down, an otherwise ordinary galaxy is what is still there. We were able to observe these galaxies, far, far away, with or without their central quasar shining, on account of the electronics revolution in solid-state imaging greatly extending the reach of the 200 inch Palomar telescope.

TFA is about how at least one quasar was observed to be even more variable than we thought, which may cause astronomers to formulate new models of their accretion disks. I don't think we have to as of now reinvoke the quasars as white-holes worm-holes models nor revisit Halton Arp's theories.

I regard Halton Arp as having some interesting observations and some thought provoking theories, I hate it when people smugly proclaim that some radical claim has been "debunked", and the treatment of Dr. Arp is perhaps nothing to be proud of. But it appears Dr. Arp's theories had their day before really good CCD cameras came to be.

Why just redshift?

[AJWM]

"The conclusion was very, very strong just from looking at this picture that these objects had been ejected from the central galaxy, and that they were initially at high redshift,

Were that the case, shouldn't we also be seeing ejected objects with a high blueshift? Why are they preferentially being ejected away from us?

Re:Who is submitter Chris Reeve

[paradigmsareconstruc]

Re: "If he'd just put an ounce of two of that energy into learning science instead of peddling pseudo-science, he probably wouldn't be mocked as much."

Mockery comes with the territory of engaging new ideas in science. I'm not trying to avoid it.

What I do is track scientific controversies. I learn the models, as they've been stated by the theorists. I seek out the critiques of those models, so I can understand what the debate is. I resist the urge to judge the model before I've learned it. I also expose other people to the claims so that I can witness their reactions. I systematically seek out persuasive arguments. And over time, I track whether or not new observations can be interpreted as vindicating this competing model. What I've learned - through practice - is that we can use this process to differentiate legitimate groundbreaking science claims from pseudoscience.

I didn't actually make this process up. It's how universities teach critical thinking in humanities programs. This is what students are every day taught to do in elite schools like Harvard with literature: They read challenging texts, and through discussion, practice interpreting those texts from competing perspectives. The daily practice of tracking scientific controversies takes this same technique - a method which has already been shown to teach complex thought in the humanities for many years now - and applies it to science.

Arp himself has noted this difference in how science and humanities are taught:

The courses at Harvard were divided into two: one was the Humanities, the English, literature and so forth. They tended to be quite challenging and quite stimulating because there were quite a few good people. There was an ambience of intellectual creativity so the science courses were good too, but they were much more cut and dried. You had to bring your own stimulation to those courses. Again, in prep school, high school, no I guess prep school, again the literary ends were quite stimulating and the science courses began around a routine, you know, solid stuff, learning intrinsically, they did not have the same intellectual adventure as the Humanities courses.

The price of overly caring about whether or not people are mocking you is that you are not free to think for yourself. Learning to engage multiple working hypotheses is actually learning to "think like a scientist" - which should not be conflated with learning to "think what scientists think." These are two very different things: The former is a process for asking questions about the world or universe such that the answers are not already known, whereas the latter is simply learning to apply the consensus view models.

The science graduate programs today are not teaching people how to think. They're teaching people to be part of a scientific society. Inclusion into this society is determined not by whether or not you are critically thinking about what you're being taught - but rather to what degree you adhere to claims which are said to be "settled". This is actually what makes Big Science "efficient" - so don't get me wrong: there are actually systems-oriented reasons for why the programs are taught this way. It's helped to create this efficient technological capitalist system we live in.

But, there are both social and personal costs for this "efficient" approach to science: The social cost is that progress on big important questions will sometimes become completely stalled. Innovation always involves somebody diverging from the pack, so if you set the culture of your scientific society such that the independent thinkers are mocked as cultists, then you run the risk of eventually waging an ideological war on the next big idea. The personal cost of efficient schooling in science is that it tends to make the practice of science considerably mo