I'm interested to learn your reasons, are you close to completing your follow-up work perhaps?

Cheers.

Here's a question or three for Arp idea fans:
1) if quasars are 'local' (no further than the Virgo cluster say), why can't we see Cepheids, HII regions, SN, pulsars, etc in them?
2) if quasars are 'local', what is the physical mechanism which gives rise to the absorption lines (Lyman forest) in their spectra?
3) if quasars are 'local', where is the galaxy that mainstream folk say is the (gravitational) lens for 'multiple quasars'?
4) if quasars are ejected from the nuclei of 'local' active galaxies, what should a very recent ejection look like?
5) if quasars are local, and ejected from galactic nuclei, what distribution of distance/z/luminosity/etc should we expect to see?
6) if quasars are ejected from 'local' galaxies, why don't we see them near more distant galaxies (e.g. in HUDF, HDF, GOODS)? - this assumes of course that the distribution in 5 doesn't just happen to be such that no 'quasars ejected from distant galaxies' could ever be seen.

Dear Nereid,
Having read Arp's "Seeing Red" but once, I'm no authority on his ideas. However, to the last of the six questions you raised ("If quasars are ejected from local galaxies, why don't we see them near more distant galaxies?) I offer a comment not an answer. According to Arp, quasars grow dimmer the farther they go from their parent galaxies as the former's red shift declines: all of which means the more distant the parent galaxy is from us, the less the apparent separation but closer parent galaxies and their spawn will be apparently more separated. Add the fact that quasars are no brighter than the thirteenth magnitude with shifting redshifts and the observations are not easy,at least optically. Yr obt srvt, Hyginus

In order for a mass to eject matter from it, that ejected matter must reach or exceed the escape speed of the ejecting mass...

For example, if the Sun were to eject a mass, that mass must meet or exceed 500 mps..
The Earth would have to eject a mass moving at or in excess of 7 mps..

What is the calculated escape speed of these Seyfert galaxies? Are the velocity redshifts of the quasars matching such a speed?

What is the ratio of any of Arp's "parent" Seyfert Galaxy's mass to the quasars'
masses? I would expect a ratio much larger than that of the Sun to the largest solar flare ever recorded..

I would expect a recoil by the the Seyfert galaxy that would change its orbit within its local group to become very elliptical...

If redshifts are intrinsic, then a blueshift survey would find nothing..
The intrinsic redshifts seen could mean Hydrogen is emitting Balmer spectral lines in a deep gravitational well..

With quasars ejecting from Seyfert galaxies, we should see stellar objects that are
blueshifted relative to the galaxy...

String theorists are interested in any claims of seeing double images..They are hoping Arp would find about 100 in less than 16 arc minutes FOV...That would be evidence for a massive superstring...Why aren't they supporting him?

Somehow, this all adds up to a mirror image of Veilikovsky's vision of Jupiter ejecting a comet that would have to change its very highly elliptical orbit into a very nearly circular one in just 2000 Earth years as it settled in Venus' orbit.

The only difference is that Arp's propsal seems to require that we bend the laws of physics further than Veilikovsky did...


blueshift

Other sources suggest otherwise, see those listed at Science Frontiers and those Abstracts in the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

Obviously these do not necessary support Arp, but there do appear to be anomalies nevertheless.

Regards,
Ian Tresman

__________________
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Well, you may not have gotten that out of Arp's articles, but that is his model. The quasars evolve into normal galaxies.

Transitional phases? BL Lac objects, for example, objects classified as Seyfert galaxies - but with non-local redshifts (z=.1-.5), HII galaxies are all examples Arp interprets as intermediates.

I don't know what you find suspect about Arp's interpretation of the material surrounding a quasar nucleus. That's the model. Quasars evolve into galaxies. So quasars will eventually develop surrounding galaxy structure. That material will have the same redshift as the nucleus because its the same object.

As a QSO evolves, Arp predicts the redshift will decrease. In fact he does not expect that once its a normal galaxy its redshift distance exactly equals the Hubble distance. The object can still have some excess redshift. But that's a question about mechanism - which I plan to address in response to Nereid.

__________________
"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

1) Since the quasars are interpreted as recent ejections have not yet evolved to a normal galaxy, they have not yet developed all of that structure.
2) That depends upon the mechanism for generation of intrinsic redshifts. The answer would no doubt vary depending upon which of the proposed mechanisms you look at. I'm not convinced any mechanism proposed is the correct explanation.
3) Assuming you're referring to a "lens" galaxy in the midst of the quasars, you have an incorrect presumption here. The quasars - being ejected in his model, have moved away from the parent galaxy.
4) One example he has referred to is the condensations in the jet of M-87. Certainly closer scrutiny of the jets of active nuclei would help shed light on that question.
5) In general, as an ejected quasar "ages" and moves outward from the parent galaxy, Arp predict that redshifts will decrease, luminosity will increase, and structure will evolve toward a galaxy. That's an empirical model. You can't get more precise than that without a theory to explain a mechanism for ejection and intrinsic redshifts. Nobody is claiming that a satisfactory mechanism has been proposed.
6) Ultimately it appears you answered your own question. QSO's are extremely low luminosity in Arp's model. The various surveys you've mentioned would need to have active galaxies that are close enough that any associated quasars would be detectable. I don't know if anybody has explored that.

The mechanism question is important. Sure it would be great if somebody had a demonstrated mechanism for explaining everything Arp proposes. But the lack of such a mechanism does not constitute proof against Arp. That would be equivalent to saying that since Wegener lacked a mechanism for continental drift, his hypothesis was disproven.

It is important to distinguish between empirical science and theoretical science. While Arp has offerred a variable mass mechanism with Narlikar, the success or failure of that mechanism has no relevance to the question of whether or not quasars can be ejected from active galaxies. This is just basic science - you identify a phenomenon and then you try to develop a theory to explain it once you've established enough evidence the phenomenon is real.

In fact, developing a theory to explain all this would be made easier by a detailed study of the full scope and nature of the observational evidence for intrinsic redshifts. One of the problems with most of the proposed intrinsic redshift mechanisms is that they focus on intrinsic redshifts in quasars and cannot even hope to explain intrinsic redshifts in galaxies. Maybe two mechanisms are needed - one for galaxies and one for quasars. I think it more likely that a correct mechanism would explain all intrinsic redshifts.

__________________
"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

Hello Hyginus,

Nice answer, and quite good at the 'handwaving' level.

However, doing even a half-OOM (order of magnitude) quantitative analysis (takes about 2 minutes), you can see that this doesn't hold water.

Some examples:

NGC 1086 is one of the classics, for Arp et al; it's a 10th magnitude galaxy with ~10 quasars 'nearby' (on the sky), ranging from 15 to 19 mag (Burbidge, E.M. 1999, ApJ, 511, L9 - this is cited so many times by the Arpians that it's just not funny). NGC 1068 has a z ~= 0.003; the ~10 'nearby' quasars have z's ranging from 0.026 to >2. So, on the back of an envelope, we can say 'empirically' (thank you DGR), in the Arpian-way ejected quasars are fainter by ~5 to 10 mags; and further (in z-space) by ~0.02 to >2.

SO, in the HDFs and HUDF, the faintest objects are ~28 to 30, so if they are quasars, their 'parent' galaxies will be ~18 to 25. If we look at these fields, what z are galaxies of this mag? (I haven't checked, but IIRC, z ~ 2 to 5). Further, since ~2% of nearby galaxies are Seyferts (the parents of quasars, according to followers of The A-Way), and they generate ~10 quasars each, we would expect to find ~1 quasar for every 5 galaxies (of 18 to 25 mag) in the fields. Further, since they are much further away, they will appear much closer on the sky than NGC 1068's do.

Let's check shall we?

If 'quasars grow dimmer the farther they go from their parent galaxies as the former's red shift declines', then why do the ~10 quasars near NGC 1068 show the opposite relationship (the higher-z quasars are fainter than the lower-z ones)?

Other sources suggest otherwise, see those listed at Science Frontiers and those Abstracts in the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

Obviously these do not necessary support Arp, but there do appear to be anomalies nevertheless.

Regards,
Ian Tresman [/b][/quote]
That's a very interesting collection of articles!

But did you read them?

First, most (all?) are based on data collected before the two recent, really big surveys (2dF and SDSS), and most of the work before these two is well known to have difficulties wrt systematics and selection effects. A much more worth-the-time-to-read paper would be one which showed good analyses based on these surveys which found clear evidence of a lack of correlation between redshift and distance (perhaps Arp's most recent paper - in preprint just this year - wil be such?)

Second, most of the papers in the list (that I bothered to read) do NOT challenge antoniseb's assertion (the key word is 'correlation'; for good observations to be inconsistent with the statement, they'd have to show that there is essentially NO CORRELATION between redshift and distance).

Third, the various 'quantised redshift' papers in the list are mutually inconsistent; sure they all report evidence of this, but they differ - sometimes markedly - in what the quantisations are, how extensive the effect is, etc. Further, few if any stike as being even half-way rigourous wrt statistical analyses, esp re the treatment of error budgets and selection effects.

Fourth, seeing as how recent analyses of the 2dF and first data releases from SDSS are consistent with the hypothesis that quasars have an intrinsic luminosity relationship, and evolve into what we call Seyferts and other AGNs (close to, but not quite, 'pure luminosity evolution'), the conclusions of some of the papers in the list would appear to be quite inconsistent with the much larger, much more accurate, less affected by systematics and selection effects 2dF and SDSS data.

1) Since the quasars are interpreted as recent ejections have not yet evolved to a normal galaxy, they have not yet developed all of that structure. [/b][/quote]
Taking these one by one ...

Nice handwaving DGR, but not all that convincing.

As someone earlier pointed out, HST images of quasars show clearly that they ARE in the centre of galaxies, just where the nucleus would be! However, those galaxies look for all the world just like others ... with comparable redshifts! So, since there's no sign of Cepheids (etc) in distant galaxies (they're too far away for even the HST to detect them), the lack of such in the galaxies surrounding the quasars imaged by the HST is consistent with the mainstream view. However, it is inconsistent with the Arpian Way ... if quasars are local, then the galaxies which appear in HST images SHOULD be resolvable into Cepheids, HII regions, ...

Mainstream 1, Arp 0.

Sorry DGR, but this is a non-answer--a dodge. If the ejection model is correct, there must be instances of of developing structure. At the least you would expect the evolution of massive young stars which then explode as Type II supernova, and you would further expect at least a few that are in the Wolfe-Rayat stage. That you can see none of these does not bode well for the ejection model.

Nor should anyone be convinced that these is any such mechanism.

I think you need to come back to this one. The question is, why do we see multiple lensed images of quasars, if they are mostly close as proposed by Arp et al? For such a lensing event to occur, there has to be a large gravitational mass in front of the lensed object.

Radio Observational Studies Of M87; Formation of the radio jet in M87 at 100 Schwarzschild radii from the central black hole ; Radio Images Show the Source of Towering Cosmic Jet; HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE Observations of Superluminal Motion in the M87 Jet ; Formation of the radio jet in M87 at 100 Schwarzschild radii from the central black hole; Observational evidence for the accretion-disk origin for a radio jet in an active galaxy. Seems to me that there is already alot of study underway, and I see nothing to suggest that there is a QSO nor galaxy-sized ejection of material in any of the studies.


I think this goes to the heart of the problem. It is an empirical model with no observational, experimental or theoritical support. Arp says the QSO's are "associated" yet can provide nothing to support the premise. It fails on all counts.

.

The mechanism question is everything to this model. While absese of proof is not necessarily proof of absense, there must at the least be something to explain how it could happen. It is like the faces on Mars--show lots of pictures and claim anything you want.

Of course, one must first show the phenomenom is real. Arp has only shown images that he thinks display something, without anything else to support the premise. He can't explain the process. He can't offer a mechanism. He can't show evidence of evolution or transition. He can't equate his redshift ideas to actual physical examples, and he can't offer counter explanations to the findings of researchers studying red-shift.

Maybe there is something to intrinsic redshift. Having said that, Arp's ideas on the subject are pure fantasy.

__________________
All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.~ Carl Sagan ~

Humanity must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will we fully understand the world in which we live.~Socrates, 500 B.C. ~

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him. ~Albert Einstein~

Thanks for that, it's good to be brought up to date. Do you have (a) a reference to an article on the latest data (b) I'd also be interested to look up the "original" or current article corralating redshift with distance in galaxies (it's always good to re-read them).

Regards,
Ian Tresman

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plasma-universe.com

2) That depends upon the mechanism for generation of intrinsic redshifts. The answer would no doubt vary depending upon which of the proposed mechanisms you look at. I'm not convinced any mechanism proposed is the correct explanation. [/b][/quote]
I've read this several times, and it still doesn't make sense.

My gloss is 'the Arpians have no idea; it remains a mystery'

Nothing wrong with that of course ... it's quite normal in science for good observations to be inconsistent with theory. The difference here is that the absorption lines are well accounted for in the mainstream theories (clouds of gas lying between the truly distant QSR and us; these clouds are 'close to' galaxies and other quasars that are a little way off the line of sight ... ~30 to 100 kpc. The clouds are comprised of several different clumps, the gas in the clumps is not particularly turbulent, and the gas is heated by the EM from the galaxy or quasar it's near ... with some effects from the (locally higher temperature) CMBR). For a good paper on this, see Boksenberg, Sargent, Rauch "PROPERTIES OF QSO METAL LINE ABSORPTION SYSTEMS AT HIGH REDSHIFTS: NATURE AND EVOLUTION OF THE ABSORBERS AND THE IONIZING RADIATION BACKGROUND" (arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0307557).

Mainstream 2, Arp 0.

The 2DF Survey. The Sloan survey.

Both are updated occasionally.

__________________
All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.~ Carl Sagan ~

Humanity must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will we fully understand the world in which we live.~Socrates, 500 B.C. ~

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him. ~Albert Einstein~

Another excellent paper on the distance-redshift relationship is the final paper of the Hubble Key Project to measure the Hubble constant (arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0012376).

For 'distant' supernovae (Type Ia), this 2002 paper makes for some interesting reading.

Dear Nereid,
While we wait for mutual respect to build up against the human grain...
Thanks for seizing upon an ambiguity in my response to your post of January 6.
I did say quasars grow dimmer as they go from their parent galaxies... Of course, Arp et al argue they grow brighter, but my hidden pet theory that a quasars begins as a spinning vacuous disk moving into the electric ether-
Meanwhile back at reality, I wonder aloud even if Nature abhors a vacuum, can it squeeze a vacuum out of existence? Yr obt srvt, Hyginus

Halton Arp also wrights, that where seeing far less of the universe than mainstream astranomers think not 13.7 billion light years butt a mere 55 milion light years only. If that's true we might this would be a small revolution !.. <_<

__________________
"There are many ways of noing nothing"

Actually no, a quasar developing into a galaxy starts as a point-like source, it needs time to evolve into a well-defined galaxy, there's an evolutionary sequence and somewhere along the line the HII regions and Cepheids become detectable.
As DGR says:
So there's no reason to think it doesn't fit Arp's model.

Mainstream 1, Arp 1

Cheers.

Before I start going against the human grain again, let me make sure I understand this ... in Arp's model, the ejected objects start as quasars, become BL Lac objects, then high-z Seyferts, "HII galaxies" (whatever they are), and finally 'normal' galaxies - have I got it right?

Hmm. And the mainstream view is that objects such as quasars, Seyferts, etc are at distances commensurate with their observed redshifts, and where they have been detected, Cepheids, novae, supernovae, HII regions, globular clusters, planetary nebulae, tip-of-the-red-giant-branch stars, etc ALL have redshifts consistent with the galaxy/quasars/BL Lacs/etc in which they reside AND the distance infered from the that redshift.

Dear Hyginus, as you know, I'm new to this forum, and am still learning its mode of discourse.

As well, fellow members are still learning about my own views.

In a nutshell, anyone can have good ideas; but to qualify as a theory - which is the second word in the title of this section of UTF - IMHO the proponent needs to at least state which sets of good observational and experimental results are consistent with the theory, and what inconsistent. In astronomy and physics this means getting quantitative.

Now I realise that in common parlance, 'theory' can be a synonym for 'idea', but I for one am keen to promote the more rigourous meaning, as used in science.

So, I certainly respect your contributions, and hope that you would respect mine.

Back to Arp et al ... what do they have to say about quantifying 'grow brighter'? When we have some numbers, or relationships expressed in equations, we can start doing some real tests of the Arp model (oh, and btw, in astrophysics, 'model' means a set of equations describing the physical entities in the model, and their relationships, from which estimates of what you would see from Earth can be made).

Kind Regards
Nereid ("let's get scientific!")

So are we suggesting that there can be (a) a correlation between redshift and distance, AND (b) anomalous redshift/distance observations?

In other words, there could be both a correlection for 99% of measurements and a small set of "anomalies" which may not correlate, and consequently don't nulify the original correlation.

I would agree with that, tthere is a correlation, and there are anonalous readings.

Regards,
Ian Tresman

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There haven't been shown to be ANY "anomalies" that are far outside the correlation, with any certainty, or even strong likelyhood. There certainly are some variation in recession velocity within clusters, for example the mild blue-shift of M31, but these are within the range of the velocities in the bound systems that make up the clusters [plus dark matter].

Another type of "anomaly" is that we have observed a serious gravitational red-shift from the positron annihilation gamma-rays at the surface of a neutron star. taking the energy down from 511KeV to about 400KeV.

There is also a bias in the distance-redshift correlation associated with "The Great Attractor", and another one associated with the Sun's velocity around the Milky Way, and the Milky Way's movement within the local cluster.

Aside from these things, there are no anomalies.

__________________
Forming opinions as we speak

There's also the 2dF QSO Redshift Survey, which is now done,

So are we suggesting that there can be (a) a correlation between redshift and distance, AND (B) anomalous redshift/distance observations?

In other words, there could be both a correlection for 99% of measurements and a small set of "anomalies" which may not correlate, and consequently don't nulify the original correlation.

I would agree with that, tthere is a correlation, and there are anonalous readings.

Regards,
Ian Tresman [/b][/quote]
AFAIK, in mainstream astrophysics today there are three effects which give rise to redshifts:

- relative line-of-sight motion ("Doppler"), which is well understood (for example, it's one mechanism used by police to estimate speed, the better to book law-breakers); plenty of well observed extra-terrestrial object blueshifts too.

- gravity, which is also well understood.

- expansion of the universe.

"The Hubble relationship" is what astrophysicists call the 'correlation between redshift and distance'; in terms of theory, it's that caused by the expansion of the universe.

Having now read the EU thread, in its entirety, I gather Ian that you are somewhat of proponent of 'alternative theories' (where 'theory' is used in its ordinary, every-day sense; not to be confused with an astrophysical theory). This helps, because I was quite puzzled by your use of 'anomalous readings' ... if you mean 'are there good observations which seem to be inconsistent with theory', then the only two which spring to mind are rotation curves of (some) spiral galaxies, and distant type Ia supernovae.

It'd be fun to discuss either of these, but it would take us away from 'More from Arp et al.'

Thank you for taking the time to read through everything. You wouldn't include The Wolf Effect as a possible alternative, as suggested by Emil Wolf in his paper Noncosmological redshifts of spectral lines (1987)?

Regards,
Ian Tresman

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Thank you for taking the time to read through everything. You wouldn't include The Wolf Effect as a possible alternative, as suggested by Emil Wolf in his paper Noncosmological redshifts of spectral lines (1987)?

Regards,
Ian Tresman [/b][/quote]
Your link is to only the abstract; do you know if the paper is online?

Do you know how much work was done on it subsequently? If it were anything other than a minor curiosity, I expect there'd be hundreds of papers on it by now (new physical effects like this are juicy topics for quite a few physicists ... and can be a good opportunity for someone to do a PhD which will make a real splash).

Hi Nereid,

I don't have the original paper (it's too old for most on-line databases), but maybe these articles help:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0310004
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9807205
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904061

Cheers.

Thank you VanderL.

I have learned that the Wolf effect has been amply supported by experiments, and is now a standard part of mainstream optics (perhaps some reader who has training in this field can expand on this?).

I also note that the three papers you provided links to were all theoretical; they sketched some mechanisms by which the Wolf effect might give rise to observed quasar redshifts. However, none of them mentioned how (physical model) such redshifted radiation could arise. Nor was any of the work complete in the sense that other spectral features of the Wolf effect (cf Doppler or gravitational) were discussed at any length. This is a pity; I got the impression that there would be quite clear features in the spectrum of an astronomical source exhibiting the Wolf effect which could be used to distinguish such from the three causes I listed.

This makes me quite curious ... seeing that the Wolf effect has been around for a while now, and that Arp has several followers, why hasn't any of them done the work to construct models of the 'ejected bodies' to show that their redshifts arise at least partly from the Wolf effect? After all, the physics isn't all that hard ... indeed, I expect a bright undergraduate summer student could probably make good headway in just a couple of months.

Personally I don't think the Wolf effect is the whole story, there are other people around trying to explain redshift, like Moret-Bailly's CREIL and Brynjolffson's Plasma Reshift mechanism, but all of these ideas lack experimental verification. We could argue that expansion as a redshift mechanism also lacks experimental verification, so I really haven't seen any mechanism yet that explains all observations (I count discordant redshift associations as a real observation).
Russell recently showed that intrinsic redshift in galaxies (not quasars this time) is highly probable. So in my mind an intrinsic mechanism must exist (gravitational redshift seems too weak), we're not there yet.

Really? I'd say it would take much more than that.

Cheers.

Please be more specific - what aspects of the Hubble Key Project do not meet your standards for 'experimental verification'? Wrt the 'discordant redshift associations', please list the reasons why you regard the observational basis is 'real'. Among the ~>200k galaxies and ~>20k quasars whose spectra were obtained in the 2dF redshift survey, what would expect the extent of 'chance alignment' to be? How many 'discordant redshift associations' have been reported in this set of good observational data?Source please.How much longer? What, specifically, do you feel would take so long?