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Posted on 01/10/2005 1:30:09 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Unlikely, since the "Big Bang" theory has been confirmed in many ways already, and as far as I know doesn't depend on what quasars may or may not be anyway.
I don't expect this will have dramatic implications for cosmology. Quasars aren't used as part of the "distance ladder", as we have no idea how intrinsically bright they are. For cosmological distances, Type 1a supernovae are used.
The implications for quasar research, by contrast, are huge.
Not likely. Probably it's just the nature of quasars that's the real issue. The BB is supported by other evidence than just the redshifts.
The Four Pillars of the Standard Cosmology.
I think Yo-yo was referring to the Cepheid variables that are used to calibrate the redshift-distance relation. FWIW, I think that's pretty solid. In fact, that's what the Hubble Space Telescope was designed to measure.
I've wondered for some time if the fundamental assumption for cosmology could be flawed - that some of the redshifts in question could be from gravitational forces.
Gravitational Redshift?
Until the J'em Hadar show up, of course.
I'm delighted you've arrived. My ability to deal with this is very limited indeed.
"That would be REALLY cool, to find a worm-hole that was stable!"
Yeah! But how usable would it be 300 million light years away?
:0)
This dissent from normal, accepted Science should be denigrated and censored. What should we call them...quasarists?
>> If I used that same color theory with car headlights on the highway, I'd have run into someone with HID lights by now.<<
Yes, because HID lights are produced by a different gas.
Each element gives off a different spectrum when burned. It's not just a single color, but an entire array of colors, all in relative proportions to each other.
>> I am not an astronomer, but I never did accept the stipulation that all stars of a certain type are of a certain brightness, <<
It's not brightness, but color. And they can measure color in billions of measures your eyes can't.
One damnable effect of idiot liberals in fields like sociology and psychology and politics is that they weaken the concept of "expert." The physicists are men a thousand times more intelligent than you or I. That doesn't mean they are wise (case in point: Steven Hawkins), but it does mean that you're unlikely to an uneducated critique that is going to get them to slap their heads and say, "why didn't we think of that!"
My opinions aren't worth all that much. All I do is try to follow what the smart guys are discovering.
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There was a time in the recent past when many astonomers were confused by the fact that some stars appeared to be older than the presumed age of the actual universe, but later realized that it was an observational anomaly, as you put it. I think this may turn out to be a similar instance.
In order for a gravity to cause the quasar redshifts, essentially all of the radiating matter would have to park itself impossibly close to the quasar. It's physically possible, but contrived. You not only have to balance a huge amount of matter right on the edge of the event horizon, you also have to prevent other matter from forming a normal accretion disk with a second, more normal redshift, which would dominate the quasar's spectrum.
That's something different. You may be thinking of Cepheid Variable Stars, which as it turns out have a closely linked period of brightness variation to absolute brightness. I don't think there's many who question the perodicity/brightness connection of Cepheid variable stars.
The article is referring to detecting the Doppler shift of spectra in the light from an object in space, and using that to infer if the object is moving away or towards the observer. It's a theory that is easily observable in many areas of nature. There are two leaps of faith coming into play here. First is when the observer assumes that because an object appears to be moving away from the observer (based on its spectra), that it in FACT moving away from the observer, and second is assuming that because an object is moving away from you now, that it has always been moving away from you. Really cool stuff! As for me, I've never been completely convinced that a high red/blue shift is absolute proof of a high relative velocity, but it appears to have fit well with observations up to this point. This'll be interesting to follow up on.
That's the very thing I had in mind. It was the short-lived "age crisis," but it went away.
Yes, but the relationship between redshift and distance is what's at issue here. We know that certain galaxies are redshifted, but how do we know that they are far away? We know it by looking at the Cepheid variables. At some distance, you lose the ability to distinguish individual Cepheids, but fortunately there's enough overlap between the measurably redshifted galaxies and the distinguishable-Cepheid galaxies to get a measure of the Hubble constant. Once you have that, you can plug in redshift and crank out distances--but not, it seems, for quasars!
To say nothing of co-authorship.
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Halton Arp deserves a Nobel Prize if this holds up. Few people in science have taken as much grief as he has in trying to prove something that nobody wanted to hear.