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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.
97% of cosmologists agree that the redshift is caused by galactic climate change. To state anything else is to be a science denier.
Scientific Community: "Are you gonna go to sleep or you gonna stay up and think your weird thoughts?"
Halton Arp: "I'll stay up and think weird thoughts for a while."
that knows more about astronomy than astronomers?
I'm guessing the after effects of the original big bang are still being experienced, billions of years later.
A quasar running off to become a galaxy is about the same as someone spitting gum on the sidewalk in the cosmic scale.
There is no such thing as "settled science".
That denies science itself, and the fact that all theories (and they are -precisely- named that) are permanently open to revision based on new empirical data.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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.
Yes Chris, i understand.... you peddle pseudoscience to make a living, and it's rough out there when people call out your bullshit. I'm telling you, though... making your imaginary friends their own accounts is going a bit over the line.
You need to pull your head out of your ass.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
"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
Hmm... you really are clueless about science.
Interpretations of QM
You cannot "debunk" any of them based on testability. They are all testable in terms of not being demonstrably overtly false, but not in a manner that differentiates one as scientifically preferred. And the model of reality that results from each of them is vastly different.
Everything I've said regarding theories applies in exactly the same way to models. Dodge semantically all you like, but the very reason they are called models is that they are provisional with respect to how we are interacting with the subject matter. They are also fully revisable based on new data, and rarely will you find a single "perfect" model for a given domain, or one that fits "all" the data. We use multiple models, take weather models if you're ignorant of everything in the domain of, say, engineering. Your methodology is nonsense, as is your conceptualization of "science".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Of course you can't. Just ask Michael Behe.
Translation: "I hold my pastor to one standard of evidence, and my professor to another."
There is a crap-ton of evidence placing quasars at cosmological distances. Arp's idea is one of the DISCARDED ideas about what quasars are for really good reasons.
Starting with - why are there no BLUE shifted quasars? If they are ejected from galaxies, we should should see ones coming at us as well as receding from us.
We have images of gravitationally lensed quasars while necessarily places them FURTHER AWAY than the galaxies acting as lenses. We've even witnessed time delayed changes in the multiple images from those lenses.
We have pictures of some of the galaxies quasars are embedded in - which have the SAME redshift as the associated quasar! Quite the coincidence that, eh?
We can measure adsorption lines in their spectrums from intervening clouds of gas. Again, allowing us to place minimum distances on the quasars since they MUST be further away than the clouds of gas.
We can measure all kinds of properties - and they all agree: Quasars are at cosmological distances.
The post has a ton of misleading information within it, quasars (short of Quasi-stellar object) is a bit of a misnomer. Quasars are associated with Galaxies and the reason some galaxies appear as quasars depends on the activity of their supermassive black hole at the center. When it's very active and eating a lot of mass the galaxy will appear as a quasar, when the feeding of the supermassive black hole shuts down the signature of quasar activity disappears. Quasars are associated with galaxies and do not exist without a galaxy.
The actual article in Wired talks about the new investigations into the physics of matter being accreted by the black hole to explain the rapid shutdown, but the poster erroroneously suggests that this in some way has to do with 'many mini-big bangs,' the article discusses nothing of the sort. In addition, the post mentions that this means that quasars are 'ejected' and not as distant as they appear from their redshift. The redshift of a quasar comes from the galaxy redshift, so even if the supermassive black hole had been ejected, it would still be as distant as the galaxy is. Being ejected from a galaxy will not instantaneously make the black hole substantially closer.
Slashdot should do better to not allow posters to insert their crackpot ideas into the submission of what is actually a really interesting article.
Here is some insight about Arp - his observations and theories (and a comment about eccentric science would-be-vindicators).
Arp noticed some real peculiarities in astronomical and astrophysical data that started piling up in the 1950s. He observed that red shifts appeared to be "quantized" - to appear in buckets along a line-of-sight instead of being continuous. He also observed that high red shifted objects seemed to be statistically too numerous near brighter, less red shifted galaxies.
He was right about both observations, but he proposed a complex but poorly worked out set of hypotheses to explain them (calling them a "theory" credits them with too much coherence). He proposed the red-shift were not due to the Doppler effect but to some brand new physics (which he could not explain), and that red-shifted objects near closer galaxies were actually ejected from them.
We have since learned that the quantized red-shifts is due to the cellular structure of the Universe, there are vast voids and walls and filaments of galaxies, so there are no red-shifts in the voids, but then they are clustered together in walls and filaments. And the anomalous association of high-red shifted objects is due to gravitational lensing (an explanation that Arp rejected, without having a good argument for doing so). There is a lot of interconnecting data that supports all of this now.
Arp tended to undermine acceptance of his valid observations by insisting on fringey and poorly reasoned theories to explain them, rather than simply pushing astronomy to take them seriously and look for possible causes.
Observing some quasars that appear to turn off too fast may resemble some aspects of Arp's hypotheses, and do require explanation, but they cannot be used to "vindicate" a ramshackle theory that was always weak and has since completely collapsed.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Looking at the birth of controversial theories, it seems its better to emphasize the oddity instead of the new interpretation.
If Galileo had said, "Hmmm, look at these interesting observations. It looks as if all the planets go around the Sun, not Earth. Let's investigate further...", he probably wouldn't have got into trouble. Propose the alternative, but don't insist on anything. Just collect more data until it's obvious to peers.
Office politics is still alive and well in science.
Table-ized A.I.
Arp is arguing that there is an inherent redshift component to the total. Quasars appear to start, at the moment of ejection, at something like z = 2 - 4. So, it would not necessarily be a disproof to not see blue-shifted objects since the doppler effect component to redshift would add to that inherent value to produce the total. There is something about new matter that makes it redshifted at birth (and people should be allowed to disagree, for now, about what that actually is).
Then, over time, the redshift equalizes w the surrounding environment. Apparently, this can in some cases happen very quickly.
Is there any obvious predictions that Arp makes that current theories fail at? Einsteins relativity for example predicted where Mercury would be in its orbit in a year, something that Newtons theory failed at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
A list of vindications for Halton Arp:
In most of these cases, cosmologists and science journalists point the public to ad hoc extensions of the Big Bang. Yet, their original model did not predict these observations.
1. Alignment of quasar minor axes (vindication of Arp ejection model)
2. Numerous apparent interactions of objects of wildly different redshifts (not possible with Big Bang, vindication of Arp)
For example, NGC 7603, NGC 4319 and NGC 3628, just to name three. There are many, many more at this point. See the first part of the Universe: Cosmology Quest documentary and Arp's Intrinsic Redshift lecture for a more thorough treatment.
Of particular interest is the press release by the Space Telescope Science Institute - the research arm of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - promoting the claim that NGC 4319 is not connected by a filament to Markarian 205, the object next to it. These press releases appear to be a case of scientific fraud insofar as they point the readers to visible light photographs from the Hubble instead of the far more radio-deep imagery produced on much less expensive, even amateur, CCD telescopes.
Arp commented:
3. Numerous instances where high-redshift quasars appear aligned with the axes of low-redshift "foreground" galaxies (statistics indicate this occurs far too often for a strict recession velocity interpretation of redshift)
Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, by Halton Arp (1987)
I once encountered a cosmic filament expert on Twitter. He agreed that the EU idea was actually a scientific hypothesis, but similar to what you've stated above, he said that if it was true that the many plasma filaments we observe are electric currents, then we should see large magnetic fields and even synchrotron emissions associated with them. He presented a detailed conceptual rebuttal - a short two-page explanation. That interaction was a great example of how people should be discussing these issues - in a calm, rational manner where we are comparing the idea against known observations. People pay attention to different things, so these discussions can bring to light important, missed details when everybody seeks to approach the subject in a scientific manner.
That exchange helped me to see that he was assuming a simple transmission line model. Birkeland currents are not bound to this simple transmission line model now that we can see that they can form into more complex coaxial (Bessel function) configurations. The coaxial configuration of the Birkeland current - known more formally as the "force-free field-aligned Birkeland current" - has two remarkable implications:
1. The coaxial configuration will make it difficult to observe the electric current's magnetic field signature. That part should be fairly straightforward to anybody with a modest EE background or even just familiarity with the right-hand rule.
2. Considerably less obvious is that there would also not necessarily be any synchrotron emissions. From Section 8 of Scott's paper:
In technical terms, this means that such charged matter has zero radial acceleration, meaning zero synchrotron emission.
What was interesting about the exchange was that it had very little impact upon the filament experts' approach and mindset. I've since witnessed him purchase a novelty plasma globe, but that's it!
Guys, I am just one person. There is also a maverick philosopher with expertise in aether, electrical cosmology and Relativity named Juan Calsiano. He has sometimes showed up on request to supplement my own comments. He lives in Argentina, and he's working on a philosophy book. We are two different people. Nobody is tricking you.
Of particular interest is the press release by the Space Telescope Science Institute - the research arm of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - promoting the claim that NGC 4319 is not connected by a filament to Markarian 205, the object next to it. These press releases appear to be a case of scientific fraud insofar as they point the readers to visible light photographs from the Hubble instead of the far more radio-deep imagery produced on much less expensive, even amateur, CCD telescopes.
Arp commented:
Realize that they could have argued that the radio filament was a background object, a "chance" observation. They didn't. They literally said that the filament is not there. But, the filament clearly shows up on CCD imagery - just not the optical.
The public needs to think more clearly about what has happened here. I was able to even get Ethan Siegal, one of the world's most vocal proponents of the Big Bang, to agree with me that something is not right about this particular situation.
Re: ... Such a passionate defense of nothing ...
... Or, alternatively, you've simply put so much effort into refusing to question modern science that you've at this point cultivated your own inability to distinguish well-formed from malformed challenges.
The original definition of "pathological" science is something like this:
If you watch the "Intrinsic Redshift" lecture on Youtube, he tells many stories of fighting with journals and peer reviewers to publish paper after paper after paper. These stories provide an important look at the struggles that a person faces when they publish work which challenges the orthodoxy. You've managed to take away the wrong lesson from the discussion you're reading about. Whatever your process is, it's producing the wrong result. This should alarm you.
The irony of people on Slashdot using the word "cult" to describe people who question academic science is that the graduate programs themselves have been compared to a cult by an academic whistleblower named Jeff Schmidt:
Dear Anonymous Sherlock Holmes,
My posts appear on his feed because he upvotes me. He has closely followed my own work on scientific controversies beyond the confines of Slashdot. We speak together almost daily. I alerted him to the Slashdot submission. Get a grip. Have you ever met somebody who agrees with you about lots of things? That.
If all it takes in order for you to believe something is that somebody is making the claim, then you're probably in over your head participating in a discussion about cosmology and astrophysics.
Jeff Schmidt was an editor of Physics Today for 19 years when he published those comments in his critique of the graduate programs, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul Battering System that Shapes their Lives. He was immediately fired by the American Institute of Physics, which led Jeff to sue them. This case shortly thereafter became the largest freedom-of-expression case in North American physics, with 500 physicists signing a letter of support for Jeff's right to publish his critique without losing his job.
The AIP ultimately settled with Jeff. You can learn about the details of the case here.