Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Joe L. Ogan on 06/02/2010 21:37:13
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Have Astronomers been misled by The Quasar Red Shift? Thanks for Comments. Joe L. Ogan
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Have Astronomers been confused by The Quasar Red Shift? Thanks for Comments. Joe L. Ogan
No. Astronomers clearly observe the red shift. I don't think they are at all confused.
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Many years ago, a very good and productive astronomer named C. Halton Arp discovered a few quasars close to some galaxies. What if, he imagined, quasars were things that were thrown out of galaxies? This seemed unlikely in the cases he found, because the quasars were of vastly different redshift than the galaxies that looked like they were near to them. What if, he imagined, quasars have a different redshift than other things?
Arp became enamoured with his imaginings and went on to write books and articles about how people were lead astray about the nature of the universe because of the strange nature of quasars and their redshifts.
Over the course of the years, many other people looked at quasars and tried to tell how far away they are. In every case, they discovered that the quasars were just as far away as their redshift suggested. That means that these quasars don't have a strange and different redshift.
That's OK, said Arp, it just means that some quasars have normal redshift and some quasars have a strange and different redshift.
But of course, by this time almost nobody was listening. Because even before they found ways to measure the distance to the quasars, they realized that the relationship between redshift and distance could be measured in lots of different ways and it explained so many things so very well and that Arp's strange redshift could explain very little and what it explained it explained very poorly.
But Arp continues to cry out into the emptiness. Sometimes a voice cries back, but these voices are little but pale echoes of what Arp himself has said.
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One of the more recent suggestions is that quasars in fact can trigger the formation of galaxies because the collamated jets that come out of their poles create shock waves that can trigger the formation of a galaxy by compressing the gas and dust locally.
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Have Astronomers been confused by The Quasar Red Shift? Thanks for Comments. Joe L. Ogan
Do you mean confused, or do you really mean mislead?
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One of the more recent suggestions is that quasars in fact can trigger the formation of galaxies because the collamated jets that come out of their poles create shock waves that can trigger the formation of a galaxy by compressing the gas and dust locally.
That makes sense.
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I also think that globular clusters, many of which are the oldest structures in our universe were created in a very similar way. As the very first stars were forming a large star forms at the centre of a cloud of slowly collapsing gas and rapidly runs through its short life and goes supernova in the middle of the large collapsing cloud. this produces an expanding shockwave through the cloud and triggers the formation of many smaller stars as it progresses outwards thus creating a densely packed star cluster that is gravitationally bound. The stars themselves continue to fall towards the centre and sort out their orbits with relatively few collisions but many deviations and a few ejections but the cluster should stay bound and stable.
In quite a lot of searching for papers on theories of the origins of globular clusters I have been unable to find this idea expressed I am most surprised.
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Oh no! It's the topic policeman again. Scarper - quick!
Some very interesting stuff here, but is it really addresssing the original question?
If we want to discuss galaxy formation, please do it in an existing topic on that subject if there is one, and if not, launch a new topic.
If we don't do this, we end up with all kinds of subjects in one big jumble. If we are going to do that we might as well discuss everything in one topic!
Thanks
Geezer
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Geezer. joe's topic was inaccurate, badly stated and largely pointless. I was just trying to get some value out of it by putting in a bit of more interesting recent research to deflect it into something that is worthwhile. My general policy is not to introduce topics but respond to questions if i think they are worthwhile. The quality of questions has fallen off badly in recent weeks and i have been getting a bit bored reading ignoring the bad ones.
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Geezer. joe's topic was inaccurate, badly stated and largely pointless. I was just trying to get some value out of it by putting in a bit of more interesting recent research to deflect it into something that is worthwhile. My general policy is not to introduce topics but respond to questions if i think they are worthwhile. The quality of questions has fallen off badly in recent weeks and i have been getting a bit bored reading ignoring the bad ones.
Actually, I thought your post was very worthy of a new topic SS, and well beyond the original topic. That's why I suggested it. If you don't want to launch a new one I'll take a shot at it, if you have no objections.
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None whatever i will be happy to contribute
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Have Astronomers been confused by The Quasar Red Shift? Thanks for Comments. Joe L. Ogan
I found this in Google "Halton Arp's discoveries about redshift". I know it goes against current thinking but I would just like for you to look at it and give me your opinion. Thanks for comments. Joe L. Ogan
No. Astronomers clearly observe the red shift. I don't think they are at all confused.
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Halton Arp thought that he made discoveries of high and low redshift objects that were not only near each other, but actually connected by material, "bridges of light" as some people say.
To understand why one might find bridges of light between objects that one observes when there is none there, one has to think about how we come to see these bridges. We see distant galaxies not with our own eyes, but thanks to long-exposure photographs (today thanks to special exposure digital images). When one is exposing film to light, there can be distortions, especially between two nearby bright images. The presense of bright regions on a photographic plate can increase the apparent brightness of those images between those regions. Additionally, the lens and construction of telescopes can lead to diffraction of bright images that can smear the images in a number of directions.
Additionally, the human brain tends to pick out patterns and relationships in random noise that aren't supported by a more objective analysis of an image.
In many cases where Arp has said there is a light bridge, later analysis with more accurate equipment has shown that there is nothing of the sort. These cases tend not to be trumpeted by astronomers because astronomers and cosmologists don't really care about what Arp had to say. His particular observations were immediately recognized as probably artefacts of instrumentation or chance alignment of objects and they bore on only one aspect of the web of evidence for the standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, the evidence is out there. Pick an example light bridge discovered by Arp and look for recent observations of the galaxy and see for youself whether there is a bridge there.
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Have Astronomers been confused by The Quasar Red Shift? Thanks for Comments. Joe L. Ogan
Do you mean confused, or do you really mean mislead?
Probably, mislead is a better word. Thanks for comments. Joe L. Ogan