Can Non-Cosmological Redshifts Explain Anomalies in Galaxy Interactions?

[turbo]

- if quasars are BH ejected from galaxies, why don't we see a huge excess of quasars in (or near) rich clusters? If the quasars are intrinsically rather faint, we should see an even greater degree of clustering (on the sky), near only the nearby clusters (and superclusters).

Hi, Nereid! Sorry it took me so long to locate this, but it was buried in a long paper a few months back in my bookmarks. (I fixed a couple of LATEX characters that didn't paste properly)

There is anisotropy in the radio QSO distribution at high flux densities[113]. The number of QSOs in one side of the M33 region is far larger (~11 sigma) than that of the diametrically opposite region. The strongest concentration of QSOs with z~1 is in an area of the sky covering a solid angle of diameter 40 degrees apparently located in the Local Supercluster[26]. Also, a grouping of 11 QSOs close to NGC 1068 (a Seyfert galaxy which has itself very peculiar kinematics[114]: knots with blueshifted radial velocities up to 3200 km/s, and gradients in radial velocities up to 2000 km/s in 7 pc) have nominal ejection patterns correlated with galaxy rotation, the mean redshifts of the pairs fall off approximately linearly with increasing distance from the Seyfert galaxy and are quantized[99, 115].

This quote was cut from section 2.3.1 of this paper:

http://scholar.google.com/url?q=http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310214

 

[Chronos]

Hi, Nereid! Sorry it took me so long to locate this, but it was buried in a long paper a few months back in my bookmarks. (I fixed a couple of LATEX characters that didn't paste properly)

This quote was cut from section 2.3.1 of this paper:

http://scholar.google.com/url?q=http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310214

Not a reliable source. Check the references. I volunteer to debunk that article, paragraph by paragraph, if desired.

 

[turbo]

Not a reliable source. Check the references. I volunteer to debunk that article, paragraph by paragraph, if desired.

I accept your offer.

Please divorce conventionalism from the scientific method and scholarship. If a source is "not reliable" simply because his work is not "mainstream", then other unreliable people might include Hubble, Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, and Einstein, and any number of other people who dared to think.

 

[Chronos]

General

Well, it's my guantlet so here goes [I should have known better, this was no minor homework assignment].
The paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/?0310214) is fairly broad. In the interest of staying close to the topic, I have focused on the non-cosmological redshift related aspects. I'm breaking it into two parts because I won't even be able to read the whole thing. Permit me to first say this is one of Lopez-Corredoira's better efforts. His approach was nearly even handed. In fact, he probably made a better case for standard cosmology than against it. The paper references a huge number of sources. While many, IMO, are dubious, I will give him an A for effort. Quotes from the paper are italicized. Phrases in brackets are my abbreviations from the text.

p01... I will review some results of observational cosmology which critically cast doubt upon the foundations of the standard cosmology... The review does not pretend to argue against this standard scenario in favour of an alternative theory, but to claim [we] should leave the door wide open to other positions.

This sets the tone for the entire paper. I think it is a bit disengenous, almost self contradictory. Does it cast critical doubts upon the foundations of the standard cosmology? I would say not. It mostly suggests current data is less conclusive than sometimes asserted. I suspect many researchers share that opinion. I also suspect many would take issue with the insinuation the door is not wide open.

p01... Disney’s opinion that cosmological inferences should be tentatively made and skeptically received is something which has been little respected in recent years by many cosmologists, who mostly believe that they have really this final answer... Most works in cosmology are dedicated to refining small details of the standard model and do not worry about the foundations.

On this, I pointedly disagree. This is conspiracy mentality and Disney is an undisguised champion of that cause. All researchers compete for resources and those who control resources must decide which proposals are most deserving. Whining about those choices says as much about the sales pitch as the product. That aside, this raises some more immediate questions: Which cosmologists think they have the final answer? I haven't heard of any. And of course most works are dedicated to refining details. Isn't the foundation of any theory rooted in the details? The obscure predictions of a theory test are the most convincing.

p02... Some observations will be discussed or rediscussed in order to show that these facts were not strictly proven... There are many alternative theories... It is not my purpose to defend a particular theory against the standard cosmology. All theories have their own problems, and will not be discussed here in detail. Only the problems of the standard Big Bang theory are put forward.

No news there, nothing is proven. Of course there are alternative theories, and they clearly have their own problems: even more than standard cosmology [perhaps explaining their lack of popularity].

p02... It may also be that some of the presented caveats are not caveats anymore, or that some of the observational measurements are not correct. Warning: I just review some critical papers, and in some few cases I discuss them, but I do not take responsibility for their contents. My own position is also neutral, I do not have any idea on whether the standard cosmology is correct or not.

Huh? I read this to mean "my questions may already have been answered, my data may be flawed, my sources may be unreliable, and I have no opinion." It sounds like "I intend to speculate without being held accountable".

p02... Perhaps Hubble was not so convinced by the idea of the expansion of the Universe, but following generations decided to claim that Hubble’s discovery is a proof of the expansion, due mainly to the absence of a good theory which explains the possible phenomenological fact of alternative proposals.

Not having a viable, competing theory to explain observation by means other than expansion is a fairly compelling argument.

p02... General relativity provided an explanation for the cosmological expansion, while alternative proposals were not supported by any well-known orthodox theory. The expansion was preferred and the phenomenological approaches which were not supported by present-day theory would be doomed to be forgotten. This position would be right if our physics represented all the phenomena in the Universe, but from a deductive-empiricist point of view we should deduce theories from the observations, and not the opposite.

Rack up another 'Huh?'. What observations, in standard cosmology, have been deduced from theory? In what sense is observation not a 'phenomenological approach'? Theoretical models are adjusted to fit observation, never the other way around.

 

[Chronos]

Specifics

Continued from the previous post

{Source:http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/?0310214}

p02-03... There are other mechanisms to produce redshift beside space expansion or Doppler effect. There are many theories, for example: gravitational redshift, chronometric cosmology, variable mass hypothesis, inertial induction, time acceleration, imperfect photon propagation (A. Stolmar, priv. comm.), or the “tired light” scenarios.

Agreed. And they all have one thing in common - they don't agree with observation or operate according to any known and accepted physical theories.

p03... A tired light scenario assumes that the photon loses energy due to some unknown process of photon-matter or photon-photon interaction...

Agreed. It violates the principle of energy conservancy, which is a fairly well known process that enjoys a great deal of experimental support.

p02... There are several hypothetical theories which can produce this “tired light” effect. The idea of loss of energy of the photon in the intergalactic medium was first suggested in 1929 by Zwicky and was defended by him for a long time... As late as the mid-twentieth century, Zwicky maintained that the hypothesis of tired light was viable.

Interestingly enough, and not the only instance in which, Corredoira follows by driving a stake through the heart of his source:

p02... But there are two problems 1) the bath smears out the coherence of the radiation from the source, and so all images of distant objects look blurred if the intergalactic space produces scattering; 2) the scattering effect and the consequent loss of energy is frequency dependent.

Plodding ahead:

p03... Vigier proposed a mechanism in which the vacuum behaves like a stochastic covariant super fluid aether whose excitations can interfere with the propagation of particles or light waves through it in a dissipative way. This avoids the two former difficulties: the blurring and the frequency dependence.

Aether aside, the candidates proposed to avoid the 'two former difficulties' are:

p03... The “Incoherent Light Coherent Raman Scattering” also explains shifts which emulate Doppler effect with light-matter interaction which does not blur the images.

CREIL is already being kicked around in another thread.

p03... The justification of the shift of photon frequency in a low density plasma could also come from quantum effects derived from standard quantum electrodynamics[40]... According to Paul Marmet and Grote Reber (a co-initiator of radio astronomy), quantum mechanics indicates that a photon gives up a tiny amount of energy as it collides with an electron, but its trajectory does not change [41](appendix). This mechanism also avoids blurring and scattering. Potentially, this effect could explain the high redshifts of apparently nearby QSOs, since light traveling through the outer atmosphere of the QSO could be redshifted before leaving it.

From reference 40, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9703086: "In the paper we calculate the frequency shift induced on a photon by the interaction with a low density electronic plasma... taking into account the many body character of the plasma. The shift in non relativistic approximation is shown to be blue."

Huh? How is this supportive of the case apparently being made? Reference 41 is a popsci book by Eric Lerner, a plasma cosmology adherent, entitled. "The Big Bang never happened: a startling refutation of the dominant theory of the origin of the universe." I also found this interesting remark by Lerner in a 2003 IEEE paper promoting plasma cosmology: "The Big Bang... has effectively become a state-supported theory..." His non-scattering collision theory does not appear to enjoy much support. It may seem unfair to associate validity with credibility, but when you cite them as an authority in a paper, the burden, IMO, falls upon the author. There are numerous other dubious sources cited in this paper. I only zeroed in on this particular one because it relates to the other reference [40] wherein the author cited a paper which contraindicates the implied plasma redshift effect.

p03... In order to explain galactic redshifts with long travel distances in the scattering, the density in the intergalactic medium should be 10^4 atoms/m^3, which is much higher than the density which is normally believed for it.

Or is even remotely possible. Once again, the author drives a stake through the heart of his source.

p03... The dynamic multiple scattering theory is also very interesting for the present question, as a possible tired light mechanism... Several experiments have been succesfully conducted in terrestrial laboratories leading to redshifts exceeding 300 Km/s. The blurring which produces this theory may be a problem when we take the whole intergalactic medium as the substance which produces the shift but not if we consider some loss of energy in the same coronae of the object.

The blurring effect is more than 'may be a problem'. It also fails to account for the apparent relationship between increased loss of energy in coronae as a function of distance.

p03... All these proposed mechanisms show us that it is quite possible to construct a scenario with non-cosmological redshifts. Nonetheless, all these theories are at present just speculations without direct experimental or observational support.

Agreed. It appears possible to construct just about any scenario without direct experimental or observational support.

p11... But in a tired light model in a static universe the [CMBR] photons suffer a redshift that is proportional to the distance traveled, and... we would not see a blackbody background.

Looks like a stake through the heart of that model too.

p11...The universe cannot have an optical depth large enough to preserve a thermal background spectrum in a tired light model[149] because we could not observe radio galaxies at z ~ 3 with the necessary optical depth.

Another stake through the heart.

p12... However, the presence of a huge dust density to make the Universe opaque is forbidden by the observed transparency up to z ~ 4 or 5.
Can't argue that point either.

p12...the final choice between Einstein and Lorentz theories cannot yet be regarded as settled according to Clube[154].

It does, however, appear the Einstein model enjoys a comfortable lead.

p13... At present there is not a satisfactory alternative scenario which has no problem to explain the Microwave Background Radiation, so the standard scenario seems the best solution.

Agreed.

p14... Therefore, there are alternatives to the Big Bang to [explain elemental abundance in the universe], although, of course, the standard model is the most complete in details proposal up to now.

Agreed.

p15... Then, they take [measured elemental] abundances and adjust the model to match more closely so that circularity is completely guaranteed.

So how does tweaking the model to fit the measured elemental abundance fly in the face of other observations? Short answer, it doesn't. It looks more like adjusting the model to fit observation. How/why is that an 'epicycle' if it is not ruled out by other observational evidence?

p15...By this way, the baryon density derived is too low to account for the subsequent large scale structure of the universe and an ad hoc addition of cold, dark non-baryonic matter, cosmological constant must be introduced.

Does this directly lead to the conclusion baryon density is too low to account for large scale structure? I would say not. The 'ad hoc' addition of dark matter appears to be motivated by more urgent concerns. - such as galactic rotational curves.

p15... we cannot say that everything is well undestood in the standard [BBT]. Caveats or open questions are still present. Of course, problems are expected since the total understanding of the phenomenon is difficult...

Agreed.

p16... Most cosmologists appeal to the highly isotropic character of the microwave background as one of the principal justifications for assuming that the Universe is homogeneous on large scales.

Most cosmologists held this opinion before the CMB was discovered.

p17... Some important caveats are still present in the standard scenario, and even if many of the observations reviewed here are not correct, there remain still many others which are.

So why cite observations that may be dubious? Makes it sound like all your data is shaky, but, the sheer quantity statistically favors your chances of tossing out one that defies explanation.

p17... Of course, criticizing is easier than building a theory, and the achievements of the standard theory must not be underestimated, but I think it is too early to close the doors behind us.

Agreed.

 

[Garth]

Another paper Periodicities of Quasar Redshifts in Large Area Surveys by Arp et al.

Garth

 

[Nereid]

I've been wondering when someone would get around to writing a paper like this ... do we have any PF members who are super-good on stats? I have a feeling that such a member would have fun with this paper! But first let me enjoy reading it.

 

[Chronos]

Another paper Periodicities of Quasar Redshifts in Large Area Surveys by Arp et al.

Garth

You just love to stir the pot. You could dismantle that scenario with ease. The statistical approach is... selectively flawed.

 

[Garth]

You just love to stir the pot. You could dismantle that scenario with ease. The statistical approach is... selectively flawed.

Call me Wooden Spoon!
I don't believe it either but I think the case has to be heard.

Garth

 

[Nereid]

I have a marvellous result! I took the data which Arp presents in his paper, for NGC 622, did some quick analyses, and came up with something truly breath-taking!

Did you know that the 7 objects in his list (Table 1) contain a deep, mysterious periodicity? I really would love to write a paper and submit it to ArXiV, but it's just too exciting, so I'll share it with all PF readers!

If you take Arp's z₀ data, and find the position in the base10 expression of \pi that these values occur in, then express these in mod18, you get this wonderful pattern:
3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 12, 12.

I mean isn't this just so cool?!? Only one number is off, and only by 1!

Just think on it ... quasars so far away from Earth are so deeply connected to \pi and 18 (which number is, of course, just twice the number of quasars+the parent galaxy+1).

I just can't wait to analyse all Arp's other data; I feel confident that there are many more marvellous patterns just waiting to be discovered!

 

[Chronos]

You're murdering me, Nereid. Send lotto numbers over usual secure channels...

 

[Brantoc]

I have a lot of problems with the standard model (dark matter/energy) and other made up non-since within. However I am not willing to just adopt a view on Dr. Arp or others view of the universe ad hoc.

The Milky Way is an active Seyfert galaxies, and we know/detect small traces of anti-matter coming from the core. We also know it has a very strong and large black hole. Presuming Quasars come mainly from the core of Active Seyfert galaxies, and presuming ours is normal, and capable of creating quasars, how would either of these effects detectable from here play a roll?

Would a Quasar be a product of the large black hole getting larger than it can hold, and large amounts of mass/energy spin off it? Could the combination of antimatter and matter in a event cause large amounts of dense matter to fly off? Are some of the smaller galaxies within our proximity products of decayed quasars, can we check for some residual effect within the true movement vs redshift of them?

If you want to prove to everyone the idea, it needs an acceptable theory.