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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.
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.
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.
"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?
-- Alastair