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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.
that knows more about astronomy than astronomers?
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.
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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
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.
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