Posted on 01/10/2005 1:30:09 PM PST by PatrickHenry
An international team of astronomers has discovered within the heart of a nearby spiral galaxy a quasar whose light spectrum indicates that it is billions of light years away. The finding poses a cosmic puzzle: How could a galaxy 300 million light years away contain a stellar object several billion light years away?
The team’s findings, which were presented today in San Diego at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society and which will appear in the February 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, raise a fundamental problem for astronomers who had long assumed that the “high redshifts” in the light spectra of quasars meant these objects were among the fastest receding objects in the universe and, therefore, billions of light years away.
“Most people have wanted to argue that quasars are right at the edge of the universe,” said Geoffrey Burbidge, a professor of physics and astronomer at the University of California at San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences and a member of the team. “But too many of them are being found closely associated with nearby, active galaxies for this to be accidental. If this quasar is physically associated with this galaxy, it must be close by.”
Astronomers generally estimate the distances to stellar objects by the speed with which they are receding from the earth. That recession velocity is calculated by measuring the amount the star’s light spectra is shifted to the lower frequency, or red end, of the light spectrum. This physical phenomenon, known as the Doppler Effect, can be experienced by someone standing near train tracks when the whistle or engine sounds from a moving train becomes lower in pitch, or sound frequency, as the train travels past.
Astronomers have used redshifts and the known brightness of stars as fundamental yardsticks to measure the distances to stars and galaxies. However, Burbidge said they have been unable to account for the growing number of quasi-stellar objects, or quasars—intense concentrations of energy believed to be produced by the swirling gas and dust surrounding massive black holes—with high redshifts that have been closely associated with nearby galaxies.
“If it weren’t for this redshift dilemma, astronomers would have thought quasars originated from these galaxies or were fired out from them like bullets or cannon balls,” he added.
The discovery reported by the team of astronomers, which includes his spouse, E. Margaret Burbidge, another noted astronomer and professor of physics at UCSD, is especially significant because it is the most extreme example of a quasar with a very large redshift in a nearby galaxy.
“No one has found a quasar with such a high redshift, with a redshift of 2.11, so close to the center of an active galaxy,” said Geoffrey Burbidge.
Margaret Burbidge, who reported the team’s finding at the meeting, said the quasar was first detected by the ROSAT X-ray satellite operated by the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany and found to be closely associated with the nucleus of the spiral galaxy NGC 7319. That galaxy is unusual because it lies in a group of interacting galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet.
Using a three-meter telescope operated by the University of California at Lick Observatory in the mountains above San Jose and the university’s 10-meter Keck I telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, she and her team measured the redshifts of the spiral galaxy and quasar and found that the quasar appears to be interacting with the interstellar gas within the galaxy.
Because quasars and black holes are generally found within the most energetic parts of galaxies, their centers, the astronomers are further persuaded that this particular quasar resides within this spiral galaxy. Geoffrey Burbidge added that the fact that the quasar is so close to the center of this galaxy, only 8 arc seconds from the nucleus, and does not appear to be shrouded in any way by interstellar gas make it highly unlikely that the quasar lies far behind the galaxy, its light shining through the galaxy near its center by “an accident of projection.”
“If this quasar is close by, its redshift cannot be due to the expansion of the universe,” he adds. “If this is the case, this discovery casts doubt on the whole idea that quasars are very far away and can be used to do cosmology.”
Other members of the team, besides Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, included Vesa Junkkarinen, a research physicist at UCSD; Pasquale Galianni of the University of Lecce in Italy; and Halton Arp and Stefano Zibetti of the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.
That's an easy one - wormholes exist. We're just viewing that quasar through a wormhole lens that happens to lie in the 300 million light year away galaxy.
Ignore the wormhole comment above. The writer has no idea what he is talking about
This is the only thing about your reply that I cannot let pass.
They may be a 1000 times more experienced in this field than you or I, but they are no more, nor no less intelligent than anyone else.
Stephen Hawking is considered a mental giant,but that is because his mind has nothing else to do or distract it. FOCUS is a very essential component of achievement.
Correct.
The wisest man is the one who realizes how little he knows...
There may be elements of the universe that can travel faster than the speed of light, but our current theory does not allow acceptance of their existence, if they do.
Wasn't it Einstein who made a remark very similar to this?
Yeah, bummer.
I don't know. Could well be.
"If I am not mistaken, discoveries like this one are calling the entire Big Bang hypothesis in question."
This and Dark Matter do put some wrenches in the system. I still think the Earth is a tad older than 6,000 years though.
And conversely,
Those who know very little, seem to think they know everything.
I thought the Big Bang was the creation of some female porno star in LA.
This is akin to the sound that you hear when a train passes by.. The tone of the whistle gets lower as well as all of the other sounds at they recede from you..
You would only notice red shifting of headlights visually if you were going very very fast.. lets say perhaps 10,000 miles per second or better.. but then again.. you would be vaporizing due to the air resistance. But it wouldn't be red shifting.. you would see a blue tinge because you would be blue shifting when you were approaching.) The red tail lights receding would go dim or seemingly go out.. as the observed light would be tending toward the infrared.
Needless to say, this is slightly faster than the posted speed limits.
Hmmm...I see you've never seen Chicago cabs in between stoplights...
My first thought - relative to skip on am radio. Skipping through time via a worm-hole.
Are you implying that I don't? Then you are mistaken. My doubts about BB have nothing to do with religion.
If a black hole implodes in a cosmic forest do any Martians hear ?
There's a slight qualification that should be made. Special Relativity assumes that no signal or matter can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
This leaves open the possibility that space itself can expand at "super-luminal" rates, as is proposed in the Inflationary version of Big Bang Cosmology, since there's no way to transmit a signal, and no matter is being accelerated in any local frame of reference, by the expansion of space.
There may be elements of the universe that can travel faster than the speed of light, but our current theory does not allow acceptance of their existence, if they do.
Actually the ToR only rules out acceleration past the speed of light. Theoretically there could be entities that came into existence at a higher speed, and which from our point of view travel backwards in time. Such (hypothetical) entitites are known as 'tachyons'.
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