Are we all wrong about Qasars?

[Dookus]

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcquasar.asp

January 10, 2005

Discovery By UCSD Astronomers Poses A Cosmic Puzzle:
Can A 'Distant' Quasar Lie Within A Nearby Galaxy?

By Kim McDonald

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.”

more at link above
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Very interesting results. Qasars may not be what we thought they were, and may be a lot closer than we expected.

[lazarus]

1. Well, then

obviously God had something to do with it, since science was wrong.

:evilgrin:

[Ediacara]

2. Well

Maybe that galaxy is standing right in front of that Qasar?

[Dookus]

3. Yes

but it seems (and I'm no astrophysicist) that there's evidence indicating the qasar is IN the galaxy, not behind it.

[benEzra]

4. More from Halton Arp et al

and having read Arp's book Seeing Red, I believe their theory is, well, dubious.

If I understand him correctly, Arp believes that active galaxies (Seyferts and such) are actively creating matter out of nothing and ejecting it into space as quasars (which he views as small, relatively low-powered, and close). The quasars gradually gain mass (from nowhere) and eventually become full-fledged galaxies in their own right. In Arp's view, the redshift of a galaxy is determined not by its distance, but its age; when a protogalaxy (quasar) is "created," it has a very high redshift, but as it ages the redshift drops. Arp rejects the entire concept of redshift as a distance measurement.

A lot of the evidence Arp uses is very shaky--"gas bridges" between galaxies at different redshift, quasars near or behind other galaxies, and so on. I have played with raw Hubble images of some of these things, and some of the "bridges" he has claimed using multi-night exposures on old pre-adaptive-optics ground-based telescopes don't show up at all in the much cleaner Hubble images.

I would be very skeptical, personally.

[pmbryant]

5. The usual suspects

Burbidge, Burbidge, and Arp, who've all been pushing this theory for decades now. Plus a few collaborators I'm not familiar with.

Based on what I read here, I see no evidence to rule out that this is just a chance alignment. But there is one intriguing bit of info that suggests that it may not be a chance alignment:

"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.”

Of course, it is certainly possible for there to be a "window" in the galaxies' interstellar gas, through which we see the quasar. If this is so, then one would expect to find other chance alignments, in which the quasar is obscured by the interstellar gas. The problem with finding those, of course, is that, if the quasar is obscured, it becomes much harder to find in the first place.

--Peter