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Originally posted by Duane@Jan 7 2005, 06:00 PM
Another is his contention that "many" quasars are seen to be aligned with low redshift galaxies. A silly comment because there are literally billions of galaxies, so of course some will appear to be aligned with distant quasars. Further while "many" might like that way, "most" do not.
Arp's biggest failing, IMHO, is his reliance on 2-dimensional images to support a premise requiring three dimensions. He can say "it looks like" all he wants, but it does not change the fact that he has no other objective evidence to support his contention.
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This is another common misconception. First, Arp is arguing that quasars are intrinsically low luminosity which means that most of the observed quasars must be local (within 100 Mpc - at least prior to surveys like SDSS) in his model. So you don't have billions of galaxies to choose from. You have the local sample.
Second, Arp model makes a very specific prediction - active galaxies such as Seyferts and starbursts should dominate the population of low redshift parent galaxies associated with ejected quasars - and that's what his results show. If you read his papers you find that the vast majority of his examples involve active galaxies.
The mainstream suffers from the opposite failing of what you're accusing Arp of - relying on a assumption (redshift = distance) that creates a 3-dimensional interpretation which may in fact be contradicted by the observations.