Another Problem With Big Bang?

[TV's Frank]

So there are two “shifts” involved that effect the light we see from distant stars. The Doppler shift, caused by the relative motions of distant stars and Earth; and the cosmological shift, caused by the light being “stretched” on it’s journey to Earth by expanding space. How is it possible to know what percentage of which “shift“ causes the result we see?

Yes! There are indeed two "shifts" involved. To figure out the percentage, essentially we take an average. We need to make one key, but reasonable, assumption: that the universe is pretty much the same no matter what direction we look. So if we look at as many galaxies as possible, in as many directions as possible, we can figure out an average shift. It is THIS average shift that matches up with the cosmological expectation.

But TV's Frank, you say, what if all the galaxies were somehow conspiring to just move away from us, and the universe isn't really expanding? What if aliens strapped rockets to all the galaxies, and are playing a trick on us poor earthlings?? If you were to assume that galaxies had an average velocity (due to their own motion) that on average was moving away from us, you could calculate what that Doppler shift would be, and it's not the answer you get! If instead you figure that this average shift is due to an expanding universe, then you get a different number, and that IS the number you observe.

Also, there's another important cosmological prediciton. An expanding universe predicts that the more distant a galaxy is, the FASTER it will be moving away from us, simply because there's more space between us and the galaxy. Imagine you and me are on a giant rubber band, and the band is stretching. As it gets longer and longer, I would appear to be moving faster and faster away from you, because there's more to stretch between us. If redshifts were caused by a Doppler shift, however, then all galaxies, no matter how far away, would have roughly the same shift! Guess what? Cosmology wins (this is what Hubble first discovered, by the way)!

It's important to remember that cosmology deals with very large scales, and almost by definition, average quantities. Once you figure out the average shift, and realize it's not an ordinary Doppler shift, you can look at an invidual galaxy's motion, and figure out how much is due to an expanding universe, and how much is due to its own motion (called "peculiar velocity").

Cheers,
TV's Frank

 

[Yllanes]

Perhaps but it is curious that objects that were supposed to be invisible and swallow everything they encountered are now repeatedly invoked by Big Bang enthusiasts to explain all manner of material and energy being ejected from galaxies and quasars.

That makes no sense. When something with an electric charge falls into a BH it emits radiation. This is obvious and known from the beginning of the theory. You make it sound as if we started by saying that BH are magical vacuum cleaners that swallow everything around and leave no trace and then changed our theory. In reality, black holes do not swallow everything. If the Sun turned intom a BH of its same mass, the orbit of the Earth would not change. The gravitational attraction of a black hole outside its horizon is the same as that of a star.

Not black holes, per se, but they violate what we know from a 100 years experience to explain how black holes throw matter and energy out in jets.

This is false, show me when they do that. And things like

"Basically, as you're dumping material on, it's spiraling in, and that tends to tangle up the magnetic fields," Eikenberry said. "What may happen is, once you get the magnetic field too tangled, it will just reconnect suddenly," he offered. "It'll just sort of untangle itself and, in doing so, release a whole lot of energy."

which are a simplified explanation for laymen are not enough. The real papers do not use that kind of language, but derive actual formulas from Maxwell's equations. There is much talk about astronomers violating the equations in your post but not a single trace of evidence.

Second, it appears that the reason given for the Big Bang not becoming a Black Hole is "it is expanding rapidly near the beginning". Are they talking about inflation? Because if they are, they are using a gnome to explain the problem away.

They are pointing out how the Big Bang is different from the astrophysical black holes.

Don't obssess yourself with singularities. I said from the beginning that current theory cannot explain the initial singularity (that's why it's called a singularity). We probably need a quantum theory to do that. That does not change the fact that it can explain what happened afterwards.

In any case, the existence of a singularity is not important to the Big Bang model

It seem Yllanes and Cuddles are tossing out anything related to the Big Bang theory that gives them trouble in this debate. ROTFLOL!

Don't be childish, I said that from the beginning. The moment of the singularity is not part of the theory. The singularity itself is not part of spacetime, if you want it in different words. Nobody claimed otherwise. From very general considerations one can arrive at the conclusion that the universe must have started with a singularity. At this point the predictive power of our theory stops. Perhaps a more advanced theory will remove the singularity or perhaps not, but this won't change what we already know for later moments.

 

[BeAChooser]

Quote:
But the modification shouldn't invoke magic and non-falsifiable objects, forces, interactions and events to fit the data. Not if it want's to be called science.

Of course not. Neither does the big bang theory. Please point out to where it is.

Sure it does. It postulates a whole zoo of magical items to explain observations ...

- singularities and then black holes, which according to the Big Bang believers are in almost every large cosmological object we see out there,

- dark matter. Actually, a variety of different kinds of magic they call *matter*, but which have properties that lie completely outside ordinary experience and haven't been detected, only inferred,

- dark energy. Can you even define what it is? Yet supposedly 76% of the universe's mass consists of it and again it is only inferred from the behavior of most distant of objects (many of which, if Arp is right, may not be all that distant afterall),

- inflation. Do you have any notion of what caused it ... an explanation that doesn't involve magic or some other unseen, unseeable entity?,

- 11 dimensional (or is it 12?) space and strings. Even the string theorists admit that strings may never be seen,

- magnetic properties that no lab on earth has ever seen and that violate established laws of physics. I covered this in one of my last few posts.

And I'm probably missing a few others. In fact, in this thread I've provided sources giving examples where when faced with yet another unexplained observation that didn't fit the current Big Bang kludge, the first tendency of the astrophysics and big bang cosmology community is to speculate about yet another unseen force with magical properties. See the thread's article where a new force is invoked to salvage Dark Matter. Another of the sources proposed an object called a MECO, which ignores everything that plasma physicists have been trying to tell the big bang and astrophysics community for half a century.

And be careful. "Unable to detect" does not mean "unfalsifiable".

If after 30 years and many, many billions of dollars, we still haven't detected any of the primary dark matter entities that have been postulated, that should tell begin to tell us something. If we are rational. And if entities are so far away in space and time that for all intents and purposes they can't be directly seen or experimented on, then for all intent and purpose, they are indeed unfalsifiable. We might as well postulate God or gnomes are responsible.

What is to say that the universe is entirely made up of things we can directly detect? You seem to be making a large assumption.

I'm making a large assumption? ROTFLOL!

I may be biased, but I try to not get my information from books, but from peer review journals.

Some of the sources I've cited about plasma cosmology were peer reviewed in prestigious astronomical journals (of course, that was before the Big Bang priesthood started getting worried about the truth of what plasma cosmologists say). Some of the books were written by Nobel Prize winners in the field they were writting about. Others are from peer reviewed plasma physics journals. And it would be wise to keep in mind that if the peer view process is corrupted by the use of deductive method (that's what religions and Big Bang theorists rely on), then relying only on articles in peer reviewed sources may lead you astray. That has been the warning of plasma cosmologists for 30 years (about the same time the mysterious Dark *Matter* has been missing). A warning that has gone unheaded. Read the quote from Alfven about reconnecting magnetic fields in one my of my last posts, and you'll get an idea of how far astray from real science the peer review process has taken Big Bang astrophysics.

Quote:
By the way ... do you have an explanation for what is seen in the photo of NGC 7319? I'm still waiting for *someone* to offer one and salvage BB.

Perhaps I missed it, but where did you prove that it was, in fact, not very far away?

You must have missed it. Well perhaps looking at my last post will help you catch up. It's from a peer reviewed source.
__________________

 

[Yllanes]

Eric Lerner in http://bigbangneverhappened.org/ states " [snip a lot of stuff about Eric Lerner]

I was going to write about your claims on nucleosynthesis and superstructures that would take too long to form, but I have just remembered that Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial does a great job of debunking the book by Eric Lerner.

 

[BeAChooser]

Thanks, Puppycow. So no one's done the work necessary to estimate the distance of this quasar vs the galaxy?

This is false. I posted a source ( http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issues/ApJ/v620n1/60493/60493.html ) that proves it. The difference in redshift says the quasar is 93 times farther from us than the galaxy according to the Big Bang cosmologist's model of what redshift means. But the peer reviewed source rather carefully shows that the quasar must be closer than the galaxy to us because there is no indication that the quasar light is being affected by the clouds of gas that are surely in the core of that galaxy. Plus they give other reasons. Don't let yourself be deceived by Puppycow who is simply too lazy or too biased to even use his/her web browser with the key word "NGC 7319".

And by the way, I take it you had no problem with my original link?

I brought up a faux redshift because BAC has stated that its red shift is greater than the galaxy's but he thinks that it's actuall closer than said galaxy.

I think that only because I was diligent enough to seek out expert sources like the one I quoted that say the red shift of the object called a quasar is much much higher than the galaxy behind it. I say that only because experts have said that the object THEY call a quasar is in front of the galaxy. I make no claim to being an expert, like some here.

So, I'm thinking that this body is fairly unique and perhaps isn't a quasar after all but some new type of body.

No, according to many sources, it fits the definition of a quasar as has been used for decades. Now it may not be the type of object that Big Bang cosmologists have been imagining since its power output, if it is not as far in the distance, will be much lower than they thought to produce the measured electromagnetic emissions.

That seems to me to be a simpler explanation than dooming a theory with so much evidence behind it.

And what exactly is the evidence that makes Big Bang preferrable to Plasma Cosmology? Maybe I should summarize all the inconsistencies with observations and logic that I've pointed out for Big Bang in this thread and put it in one post ... since so far those points have mostly been ignored. In contrast, I have answered every challenge to Plasma Cosmology on this thread with facts and sound logic.

 

[BeAChooser]

Originally Posted by BeAChooser
Donald Scott had a lot to say about this ... just as Eric Lerner did decades ago. Scott says what you see is what you get when deductive method replaces empirical method, and the scientists controlling the peer review and funding process have a vested interest in keeping the beast alive. Big Bang has piled one magical gnome on top of another for years until the process of science has been thoroughly corrupted. But the edifice is wobbling.

See, when you say things like this, you seem vastly less credible.

Well I guess that depends on your point of view.

I imagine the folks who believed in an earth centered universe felt much the same as you about the time of Galileo Galilei.

 

[BeAChooser]

Given that one of the brightest known quasars outputs the energy of 100 milkyway-like galaxies, I do not find it hard to accept that the light can pass through a galaxy before reaching us.

Well first of all you are ASSUMING they put out that much energy based on the redshift relationship being right.

Second, read the *peer reviewed* paper I linked and quoted regarding observations investigating whether the light from the object has the appearance of having come through the dust that would surely have been encountered in the core region of that type of galaxy. They concluded it had not. Now would you like to post a *peer reviewed* paper to challenge that data based conclusion?

 

[BeAChooser]

And are these the same guys who also don't believe in nuclear fusion, special and general relativity and quantum mechanics? Or was that just on the website you linked to?

Well you can read, can't you? Or is throwing out strawmen all you have to offer in this debate?

The electric sun proponents do believe in nuclear fusion. They've even incorporated it in their model. They just have reason to believe (perhaps valid ones) that fusion in the core is not the process that generates most of the energy coming from the sun.

As to SR, GR and quantum mechanics, that's a little outside the scope of this thread and you'll have to ask the plasma cosmologists directly what each of them thinks. I hope you aren't foolish enough to decide they all believe something just because the author of one website that I happened to link on the spur of the moment only because it says something about magnetic fields that I know to be true speculates about SR, GR and quantum mechanics, topics I don't have a whole lot of interest in at the moment. Now would you like to comment on the other sources I mentioned in that same thread? The one from the Astrophysical Journal article or the one from LANL? No? I figured that would be your answer.

 

[ynot]

Yes! There are indeed two "shifts" involved. To figure out the percentage, essentially we take an average. We need to make one key, but reasonable, assumption: that the universe is pretty much the same no matter what direction we look. So if we look at as many galaxies as possible, in as many directions as possible, we can figure out an average shift. It is THIS average shift that matches up with the cosmological expectation.

But TV's Frank, you say, what if all the galaxies were somehow conspiring to just move away from us, and the universe isn't really expanding? What if aliens strapped rockets to all the galaxies, and are playing a trick on us poor earthlings?? If you were to assume that galaxies had an average velocity (due to their own motion) that on average was moving away from us, you could calculate what that Doppler shift would be, and it's not the answer you get! If instead you figure that this average shift is due to an expanding universe, then you get a different number, and that IS the number you observe.

Also, there's another important cosmological prediciton. An expanding universe predicts that the more distant a galaxy is, the FASTER it will be moving away from us, simply because there's more space between us and the galaxy. Imagine you and me are on a giant rubber band, and the band is stretching. As it gets longer and longer, I would appear to be moving faster and faster away from you, because there's more to stretch between us. If redshifts were caused by a Doppler shift, however, then all galaxies, no matter how far away, would have roughly the same shift! Guess what? Cosmology wins (this is what Hubble first discovered, by the way)!

It's important to remember that cosmology deals with very large scales, and almost by definition, average quantities. Once you figure out the average shift, and realize it's not an ordinary Doppler shift, you can look at an invidual galaxy's motion, and figure out how much is due to an expanding universe, and how much is due to its own motion (called "peculiar velocity").

Cheers,
TV's Frank

Thanks - very informative answer.

So to arrive at an “average shift” you need to consider the Doppler shift of galaxy’s “peculiar velocities“ plus the Doppler shift and cosmological shift of space expansion (phew!!) .

 

[BeAChooser]

Where did that matter come from? What created the electromagnetic field in the first place? Where did the plasma come from ?

Maybe God made the matter and made most of it plasma on a whim. I suggest you read the paper I linked by Alfven and what he had to say about this. Or perhaps you should follow the wisdom of one of the other posters on this forum (an apparent Big Bang proponent) who finally said the Big Bang doesn't matter ... all that matters is to have some explanation for the expansion and then focus on explaining what happened since it started.

Quote:
You might want to read the paper by Alfven that I linked above titled "On Hierarchical Cosmology". It presents his view of it back in the 1980s. There are changes to the theory since then, but I think it is still fundamentally intact. He also has a book titled Cosmic Plasma that goes into even more detail.

Realistically it ain’t gonna happen.

Why not, it's not that long a paper and I think you'd find it an eye-opener.

You know criticising other people’s model is the wrong way to win them over.

Oh please ... criticism is at the heart of scientific method.

If your model is better you need to sell it

I think that's what I'm in the process of doing.

You might also find this helpful: http://www.plasmacosmology.net/tech.html.

 

[TV's Frank]

Thanks - very informative answer.

So to arrive at an “average shift” you need to consider the Doppler shift of galaxy’s “peculiar velocities“ plus the Doppler shift and cosmological shift of space expansion (phew!!) .

I'm glad you liked it! Sorry if I was not entirely clear. The redshift we see for a galaxy is due to two effects: the Doppler shift from its "peculiar velocity" and the cosmological redshift of space expansion. If we average over a bunch of galaxies, their peculiar velocities average out to 0 (some move away, some move sideways, some move towards us, etc.), so the average redshift will be purely the cosmological redshift of space expansion (i.e., all the galaxies may wiggle to and fro a little bit, but on average the expansion of space is driving them apart).

Once we know the cosmological redshift, we can look at a single galaxy, and figure out it's Doppler shift:

Doppler shift = total redshift of galaxy - known cosmological redshift.

That Doppler shift we can use to figure out its peculiar velocity, which is how fast the galaxy is moving relative to the expansion of space.

If I may go on....you may hear sometimes that galaxies are receding faster than the speed of light. Well, some of them are! But that's only if we interpret the cosmological redshift as an indicator of "speed", but that's really not fair. Special relativity is a local law of physics (or is that, law of local physics?). Special relativity says that if I stand still, and something flies by me, I will never measure that thing to have a speed greater than the speed of light.

If we go back to the rubber band analogy, if I make the band reaaaaaaly big, and expand it at a moderate rate, it will look like I'm receding faster than light! But, I'm not making a local measurement, am I? The "speed" of an object is something that I measure when I'm near it...which is the peculiar velocity! Thus, the peculiar velocity will never be greater than that of light, and the "speed" due to space expansion can be as high as it wants to be, because it's not really a speed.

Nifty, eh?

Cheers,
TV's Frank

 

[TV's Frank]

Here's an interesting order-of-magnitude calculation that shows that electromagnetic forces are too weak to even keep the sun in its orbit in the galaxy:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/bunn_on_plasma.txt

 

[BeAChooser]

Neither of these observations or explanations have anything to do with each other.

I really don't think you will convince many people of that. But you go ahead and try.

Quote:
Really? Then explain that photo.

There are several possible explanations. The most likely is that it is not closer.

Not according to this peer reviewed paper:

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issues/ApJ/v620n1/60493/60493.html

Do you have a peer reviewed paper you'd like to challenge it with?

It is not at all unlikely that something as incredibly bright as a quasar could be seen through another galaxy.

But you only assume the quasar is as bright as you think because you ASSUME it must be much farther away than the galaxy that the peer reviewed article I cited says is behind it.

There is also the possibility of gravitational lensing making it appear to be behind the galaxy when it is really off to one side.

Funny, that peer reviewed article doesn't mention any sign of lensing but does look at the probability it might be a chance alignment. And again concludes that is highly unlikely.

Another explanation is that it is in front of the galaxy, as you claim.

Yes, this would seem to be the most likely explanation.

However, if this is the case then it is not a quasar.

No, that peer reviewed article I supplied compared it to other quasars and concluded that it has the emission characteristics, etc., that other quasars have. They concluded that it is indeed a QSO.

Quasars are extremely large and bright.

No, you only ASSUME they are bright because you assume they are all extremely far away. As to being small, yes they are apparently very small. They also apparently have something to do with ejection from galaxies. If you believe what the peer reviewed article I linked above says.

If it is actually muh closer then its real magnitude and size are much, much less, and it cannot possibly be a quasar.

Is pluto a planet?

There is therefore nothing that actually needs explaining.

See the sort of illogic that Big Bang proponents offer in defense of Big Bang, folks?

If you assume that it is in fact closer to us than the galaxy, that doesn't mean distant things don't have a redshift, it simply means that in this particular case the redshift is due to local movement.

Away from or toward us?

 

[BeAChooser]

Um, have you looked yet and seen where the stuff you were saying about dark matter and energy is very similar to what was said about the pi-meson before the photographic plates showed it was a possibility and not just theoretical?

Again, like in the other cases discussed, pi mesons were predicted based on the absence of something they could study here on earth. And again it took only about a decade to confirm their existence despite a World War on and a case of mistaken identity along the way.

http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~ghtc/meson-e.htm "It was in 1947 that the existence of the pi meson was established. ... snip ... In 1935, the Japanese theoretical physicist Hideki Yukawa proposed an explanation of nuclear forces. He suggested the existence of a new particle, with a mass about 200 times larger than that of the electron. ... snip ... This particle received the name "meson" (from the Greek "mesos" = intermediate) because its mass was intermediate between those of the electron and of the proton. ... snip ... In 1937-38, Carl D. Anderson and Seth H. Neddermeyer found in the cosmic radiation, that continually reaches the ground, signs of something that looked like Yukawa's meson: it has the expected mass and disintegrated as Yukawa's particle was expected to disintegrate. For ten years, it seemed that everything fit in the scheme, and that there was a nice theory on the constitution of matter. In 1947, however, this peace was shaken. It became clear that the meson of Anderson and Neddermeyer did not behave as predicted by Yukawa's theory. ... snip ... That is where Lattes' group comes in. In 1946, a research group in Bristol, England, ... snip ... analyzed some emulsions of a new kind ... snip ... after a few days of detailed study, they found two special tracks of mesons that gradually reduced their speed in the emulsion, and finally stopped. At the end of those tracks, they observed that a new meson appeared. ... snip ... One of the mesons was about 30% or 40% heavier than the other one. The heavier meson was able to disintegrate and to produce the lighter meson. The second particle was the one that was already known from the studies of Anderson and Neddermeyer. To distinguish it from the other one, it was called "mu meson" (nowadays, it is called "muon"). The primary meson, on the other side, was something new, unknown. It was called "pi meson", and its identification was announced in October 1947. Later tests showed that it strongly interacted with nuclei and that its characteristic properties were those required by Yukawa's theory. The particles that hold the nucleus together had been found."

And partcile acceleartor people don't really think of themselves as BBE consmologists.

Perhaps, but they sure use the Big Bang to justify the Big Toys.

Speaking of government waste, do you think we need to spend so much on the 'defense' budget?

I think it's fear of the weapons developed with those big toys that lead to big defense budgets.

 

[TV's Frank]

Hi, BeAChooser, you seem to be pretty quick in responding to questions. So, please find what plasma cosmology predicts for the folllowing 4 numbers. I have posted them below in case you may have missed them in this lengthy thread. These are basic observations about our universe. For example, the CMB exists. You may dispute its source, but it still exists whether you like it or not, and has anisotropies. Plasma cosmology should give predictions for these anistropies. If it does not provide predictions, then it fails as a theory. If you give us these 4 numbers, we can compare them to observations, and test the predictions of plasma cosmology directly against the real universe, and move on with our lives.

-If I were to go out and measure the spatial curvature of the universe, what does plasma cosmology predict to be the answer?

-If I go looking for CMB anisotropies, at what multipole should I find the largest peak?

-If I look for spectral index of CMB fluctuations, what does plasma cosmology say I will find?

-If I go looking at the distribution of matter in the universe, what are the RMS fluctuations in 8 Mpc spheres?

Cheers,
TV's Frank

 

[BeAChooser]

you are assuming that the object is on this side of the galazy.

No, I'm drawing this conclusion based on data and logic.

And that does mean the current structure will be re-evaluated.

Good, I'm glad we agree on that. Do you think Arp and Plasma Cosmologists will be invited to the round table? If so, maybe this will be the crack in the door they need. If not, that will say something too.

This is not some secret information being suppressed, but maybe I read more than most people. It has been discussed for a while.

And simply rejected by the Big Bang community with handwaving and excuses. Now they will have no excuses. It will be interesting to see what happens.

If the model changes that is cool.

Oh boy. The Big Bang community gets to adjust their interpretation of the data and model AGAIN. Any bets on how old the new universe will be, how old the new oldest stars will be, how much the quantities of Dark Matter and Dark Energy will be adjusted, and how many new magic particles, forces, interactions will be needed?

 

[Darth Rotor]

No, I'm drawing this conclusion based on data and logic.

Another gentleman used logic, and came to the opposite conclusion. That would be in the short analysis provided by the gent at the UCLA link. I note you failed to comment on it, but it at least was accessible to the layman.

==snip==
Then the Sun's magnetic moment is of order 10^{35} G cm^3.
=snip=
To estimate the force, we have to multiply by a typical field gradient. This is of order 2 microgauss divided by a galactic distance scale of, say, 1 kiloparsec. So grad B is of order 10^{-27} gauss/cm. Multiply that by the Sun's magnetic moment, and you get a force of 10^8 dynes.
==snip==
So the magnetic force on the Sun is about 1000 Newtons, or a couple of
hundred pounds. This is a very rough estimate, and if pressed I'll
gladly grant you two or three orders of magnitude uncertainty in it.
=snip= (Note: 1,000,000Newtons is thus granted as an upper bound.)
I will not, however, grant you 17 orders of magnitude uncertainty.
(Note: That would be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 Newtons.)
==snip==(More calculations, at the link Frank provided, for electric forces, with similar difficulties in orders of magnitude of forces.)
In short, the idea that electromagnetic forces are responsible for the dynamics of stars in galaxies is not just a little bit implausible; it's ruled out by many, many orders of magnitude.

And simply rejected by the Big Bang community with handwaving and excuses. Now they will have no excuses. It will be interesting to see what happens.

It seems that some are rejecting it based on mathematics and analysis.

Oh boy. The Big Bang community gets to adjust their interpretation of the data and model AGAIN. Any bets on how old the new universe will be, how old the new oldest stars will be, how much the quantities of Dark Matter and Dark Energy will be adjusted, and how many new magic particles, forces, interactions will be needed?

IIRC, scientific theories get refined and adjusted, and sometimes discarded, when new data are applied to the models, and a check for coherence, within limits using standard probability and statistics, is made.

It appears that the plasma model is already having some difficulty, so it likely needs revision, refinement, or rejection as more comparisons to observations are made. (Your complaint that a bit more resourcing for the the research could improve the prospects for finding its strenghts and weaknesses, and fit to observations, is an echo of the complaints some disease researchers make as compared to cancer or AIDS research. Not uncommon.)
The scientific method is an iterative process of asking questions, and finding out through patient analysis where those questions lead, what can be answered, and what cannot. (yet)

From your presentation, you appear to be moving toward the stance of "The One Unifying Answer," and are placing your bet on plasma cosmology, even though the Unified Theory has long eluded the best minds in the businesses of physics and cosmology.

Might you be jumping the gun, a little bit?

DR

 

[BeAChooser]

http://heritage.stsci.edu/2002/23/supplemental.html

Discusses this and apparently somebody cared enough to put the Hubble on it.

First, they don't mention plasma ... seems everything is neutral "gas" to these folks.

Second, they say "Enhanced stretches of the HST image show a debatable 'luminous bridge' between NGC 4319 and Mrk205"

I'll certainly agree it's debatable but perhaps it would help if they processed the image in a different way. Here's what others were able to get out of the Hubble images with better processing:

http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies/hhn4319a.jpg

http://www.haltonarp.com/articles/rebuttals/illustrations/mk205a-neg.jpg

http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/controversies/Arp_controversy.htm (see the CCD image by David Strange)

Some of those shows a more defined bridge. And make me doubt the claim of the author that there are similar "gas" features around the galaxy and quasar. But it is debatable.

Third, there seems to be some confusion in that source. First it states that "In time, many quasars were found to lie in galaxies with exactly the same redshift, providing powerful evidence that quasars are an event that occurs in the nucleus of galaxies." Then it states "Today the redshift controversy has almost faded from view. Only a few astronomers still think there is reasonable evidence for noncosmological redshifts". Those seem to be contradictory statements.

This page at least discusses the ESO 1327-206 galaxy and quazar and says that the galaxy's spectrum is superimposed on the quazar.

http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/agn/redshifts.html

Yes, that's an interesting case. That's why I mentioned it earlier.

And a google search for the Fornax quazars NGC 1097 A (of which there are a bunch) show more than just Arp being interested in it. hardly what i would call squelched.

I'm not saying it's been totally squelched, just that there's a certain ... shall we say ... .disinterest on the part of the mainstream astronomical community. For one thing, they choose to treat each case as individual rather than look at the likelihood that all are just optical illusions.

And this article discusses the NGC 7320 and NGC 7320 C redshifts:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0007.html

And what does it say? That "A few hundred million years ago the galaxy NGC 7320C (just outside the left-hand edge of the Hubble image) passed through the group from behind (as seen from Earth). It collided with the galaxies in the group, ripping out gas and stars to form a long tidal tail as it flew by. ... snip ... Their observations revealed that all but one of the galaxies are receding from Earth at about the same velocity (~6000 km/s). The discordant galaxy (NGC 7320 seen in the bottom of the Hubble image) is receding much less rapidly (~800 km/s). Some astronomers saw this as evidence that redshift is unrelated to distance, opposing the idea that the Universe is expanding. However, today there is general agreement that NGC 7320 is merely a foreground galaxy, 35 million light years away, projected onto the more distant (270 million light years) compact group by chance. ... A few hundred million years ago the galaxy NGC 7320C (just outside the left-hand edge of the Hubble image) passed through the group from behind (as seen from Earth). It collided with the galaxies in the group, ripping out gas and stars to form a long tidal tail as it flew by."

Now let's see, what did they leave out of the above description? That there is ALSO a tail coming out of NGC 7320 (the one that's supposedly 8 times closer than the others) that sweeps around in an arc directly towards NGC 7320C. The one out of NGC 7319 is only in the general direction of NGC 7320. You can see an image of this here: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm . If an encounter with NGC 7320C is what caused the tail of NGC 7319 to point in its general direction, what caused the tail that's clearly coming off NGC 7320 which is supposedly many times closer? They and other sources dismiss this as a chance alignment (and maybe it is) ... but it must be a *really* chance alignment since now we have NGC 7320 sitting exactly on a tail that sweeps directly into NGC 7320C. But like always, they threat the alignment in isolation from all the other "chance alignments" Arp noted. Looked at probabilistically, that's not a reasonable thing to do. Sure, some of them may be chance alignments. But all of them?

And again we have an article that talks about "gas" and never mentions plasma.

You might find this source of interest (another chance alignment?):

http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361:20034260
"The field surrounding NGC*7603: Cosmological or non-cosmological redshifts? ... snip ... Abstract
We present new observations of the field surrounding the Seyfert galaxy NGC*7603, where four galaxies with different redshifts*-*NGC*7603 ( z=0.029), NGC*7603B ( z=0.057) and two fainter emission line galaxies ( z=0.245 and z=0.394)*-*are apparently connected by a narrow filament, leading to a possible case of anomalous redshift. The observations comprise broad and narrow band imaging and intermediate resolution spectroscopy of some of the objects in the field. The new data confirm the redshift of the two emission-line objects found within the filament connecting NGC*7603 and NGC*7603B, and settles their type with better accuracy. Although both objects are point-like in ground based images, using HST archive images we show that the objects have structure with a FWHM = 0.3-0.4*arcsec. The photometry in the R-band obtained during three different campaigns spread over two years does not show any signs of variability in these objects above 0.3-0.4*mag. All the above information and the relative strength and width of the main spectral lines allow us to classify these as*HII galaxies with very vigorous star formation, while the rest of the filament and NGC*7603B lack star formation. We delineate the halo of NGC*7603 out to 26.2*mag/arcsec 2 in the Sloan r*band filter and find evidence for strong internal distortions. New narrow emission line galaxies at z=0.246, 0.117 and*0.401 are also found at respectively*0.8, 1.5 and 1.7*arcmin to the West of the filament within the fainter contour of this halo. We have studied the spatial distribution of objects in the field within*1.5*arcmin of NGC*7603. We conclude that the density of*QSOs is roughly within the expected value of the limiting magnitude of our observations. However, the configuration of the four galaxies apparently connected by the filament appears highly unusual. The probability of three background galaxies of any type with apparent B-magnitudes up to*16.6, 21.1 and*22.1 (the observed magnitudes, extinction correction included) being randomly projected on the filament of the fourth galaxy (NGC*7603) is . Furthermore, the possible detection of very vigorous star formation observed in the HII*galaxies of the filament would have a low probability if they were background normal-giant galaxies; instead, the intensity of the lines is typical of dwarf HII*galaxies. Hence, a set of coincidences with a very low probability would be necessary to explain this as a fortuitous projection of background sources. Several explanations in terms of cosmological or non-cosmological redshifts are discussed."

 

[ynot]

I'm glad you liked it! Sorry if I was not entirely clear. The redshift we see for a galaxy is due to two effects: the Doppler shift from its "peculiar velocity" and the cosmological redshift of space expansion. If we average over a bunch of galaxies, their peculiar velocities average out to 0 (some move away, some move sideways, some move towards us, etc.), so the average redshift will be purely the cosmological redshift of space expansion (i.e., all the galaxies may wiggle to and fro a little bit, but on average the expansion of space is driving them apart).

Once we know the cosmological redshift, we can look at a single galaxy, and figure out it's Doppler shift:

Doppler shift = total redshift of galaxy - known cosmological redshift.

That Doppler shift we can use to figure out its peculiar velocity, which is how fast the galaxy is moving relative to the expansion of space.

If I may go on....you may hear sometimes that galaxies are receding faster than the speed of light. Well, some of them are! But that's only if we interpret the cosmological redshift as an indicator of "speed", but that's really not fair. Special relativity is a local law of physics (or is that, law of local physics?). Special relativity says that if I stand still, and something flies by me, I will never measure that thing to have a speed greater than the speed of light.

If we go back to the rubber band analogy, if I make the band reaaaaaaly big, and expand it at a moderate rate, it will look like I'm receding faster than light! But, I'm not making a local measurement, am I? The "speed" of an object is something that I measure when I'm near it...which is the peculiar velocity! Thus, the peculiar velocity will never be greater than that of light, and the "speed" due to space expansion can be as high as it wants to be, because it's not really a speed.

Nifty, eh?

Cheers,
TV's Frank

Sorry if I’m being a pain, but I want to make sure I understand what the term “cosmological shift” covers. Is it a combination of Doppler shift caused by objects moving apart due to space expansion, plus “stretching” of light as it travels through expanding space - or just the “stretching“?

 

[TV's Frank]

Sorry if I’m being a pain, but I want to make sure I understand what the term “cosmological shift” covers. Is it a combination of Doppler shift caused by objects moving apart due to space expansion, plus “stretching” of light as it travels through expanding space - or just the “stretching“?

No worries! It is entirely my fault that I am not explaining this well enough. The term "cosmological redshift" applies ONLY to the streching of light as it travels through expanding space.

Cheers,
TV's Frank