quasar anomalies

ratfink

You will have to wait - off topic (BTW did the latest WMAP stuff confirm the axis of evil?)

SpaceTiger

That was sarcasm. If you have a personal theory, it belongs in IR.


It's not as significant as before, but it's still there. The WMAP team feels that the arguments concerning the "axis of evil" are too a posteriori to be of much use. That's always been my feeling as well. If you want to discuss it, please feel free to bring it up in the WMAP thread.

Nereid

As has already been pointed out to you, your analysis here is far too simplistic - quasars have several components (which contribute to the observed light), and quasars evolve.

Or perhaps I've misunderstood - do you have a study which you can provide a link to which shows that no 4-component model of quasars can possibly reproduce the observed (Hawkins) power spectra? Or you've done this (quantitative) work yourself, and are considering submitting it to ApJ (or PF's IR section)?

If you've got nothing better than this simplistic handwaving, please stop posting such.And your references for this are (I assume they are papers published in peer-reviewed journals)?

Garth

Hawkins explanation is that the 'blinking' isn't too far away after all, the variability is actually caused by 'local' Jupiter sized primordial black holes microlensing a more or less constant output from a much more distant quasar. See my posts and SpaceTiger's responses from post #29 on the Self Creation Cosmology thread.

Garth

Chronos

I agree with Nereid's 'handwaving' characterization. Aside from your confusion between Hawkin and Hawking assertions, let's take another look at the 'axis of evil' thing:

CMB multipole measurements in the presence of foregrounds
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0603369
Authors: Angelica de Oliveira-Costa (MIT), Max Tegmark (MIT)
. . . Applying our method to the WMAP quadrupole and octopole, we find that their previously reported "axis of evil" alignment appears to be rather robust to Galactic cut and foreground contamination."

How is Nereid 'clearly in error' with her evolutionary explanation? You pointed out nothing aside from unsupported assertions.

Nereid

All you have to do, to get started, is develop some kind of model of how each component changes as it ages, turn the handle, and out pops a predicted relationship (which you can then compare with Hawkins, or anyone else's, observations).

This work doesn't have to assume anything about the origin of quasars, just that they evolve.

I don't see how your input assumption about quasars popping into existence "ruins the Hawkins result" - the observations are what they are.Thanks.

I note that that paper was written in 1997, almost the dark ages for high-z SNe studies, and that Adam Riess himself is an author of at least a dozen papers on this topic since then.

Nereid

[Moderator note: this is the original post. It should appear between #72 (03-18-2006, 09:39 PM) and #73 (03-19-2006 07:33 AM). I accidentally deleted it, while trying to move an extract to the Feedback section. The extract can be found here. My apologies to ratfink for the error.]

Chronos

Make your point, ratfink. I'm not a moderator, so the strawman you flung at Nereid is a mere ghost to me. I'm not a big fan of quasar evolution as an explanation of the periodicity anomaly, but, do you have clear, cogent and convincing evidence that rules it out? Citations to peer reviewed papers would be a good place to start.

ratfink

Very kind of you to request my views on this matter. However, I thought this thread was now as dead as a dodo for the following reasons:

We agreed that the hawkins results were correct (least that is what was said when I asked if anyone had repeated them to show if they were wrong).

Hawkins, in his paper suggested that the variations might well be due to the nearby lensing galaxy i.e. the light from quasars was constant but the lensing galaxies produced the variation and hence no time delay.

No doubt this was included as a sop to the BB contingent just to get the paper published.

It cannot be this because these quasar light curves can be used to determine the Hubble constant, H. Biggs/Briggs? at Joderal bank does this all the time. One looks at two lensed images, determine the delay in the light curves and, hey presto, one can find H - and get it correct. So, no. The variation in the light curves must be due to the quasar itself.

Quasar evolution is out as it would require more distant quasars to 'blink' at a faster rate than younger, nearby ones - so that with the effects of time dilation they would all 'blink' at the same rate here on earth. This is nonsense. I will readily admit that I have not got my head round what it actually means but it requires a relation between redshift, z and the birthdays of the quasars themselves. No way.

So what are we left with?

My conclusion is that the results show that the universe is not expanding and we should not be debating the problem of quasar non time dilation, but the problem of why are supernovae light curves stretched?

However, I don't want to be banned. I have been instructed that i can only respond to the problem of quasar light curves with main stream ideas - and main stream ideas can only say that main stream is wrong.

I put forward a way out to mainstreamers. Regarding the 'quasar inside a galaxy' debate, the quasar mainstream says it is 'behind' a galaxy but others say is 'inside a galaxy. I suggested that it could be explained by looking to see if the quasar is lensed. Mainstream says it should be, others say it should not. I was shouted down on this by main streamers who came up with excuses as to why mainstream science could not explain mainstream ideas.

So you see Chronus, the thread is dead.

I am in to 'fingers of God' now so if that appears as a thread I will return. Until then (or something else that interests me) thanks.

matt.o

So the universe is not expanding? Or the expansion is not accelerating?

What is so interesting about "fingers of god"? Galaxies in clusters are expected to have velocities distributed in a random manner about the redshift of the cluster, hence the velocities tend to be smeared out in a radial direction.

Chronos

ratfink, your views do matter. That is the reason we are all here. I only object to leaping to conclusions. Assuming that particular shred of evidence means the universe is not expanding is unsound, IMO. There are an overwhelming number of other observations that insist it is expanding. But, the few, the proud, and downright confusing observations to the contrary deserve examination. You never know. One odd observation could turn the tables. I'm just not convinced this is it. I would hate to latch on to this issue only to find out it was due to dust on the lens.