Conjecture on Baez's 'Quasar without a host galaxy'

In article ,
robert bristow-johnson wrote:

i thought (my amateur understanding) the other thing about quasars is that
they are moving away from us real fast, putting them near the edge of our
observable universe (and putting them back in time quite a bit).

Not really. The redshifts of quasars - and thus their distances and
ages - vary quite a lot.

Here's a nice picture that illustrates this:

http://www.2dfquasar.org/wedgeplot.html

taken from the 2dF quasar redshift survey.

You'll see there are plenty of quasars between 2 and 12 billion
light-years away. I don't know why there's an apparent shortage
of closer ones! The shortage of more distant ones happens for
the reason you suggest:

anyway,
wouldn't it take a lot of time for a black hole to get that big, to eat
everything else in reach, etc.? i thought that black holes represented
something more "mature" in the universe than what distant (and young)
quasars would be.

WMAP data puts the universe at 13.7 billion years old - an implausibly
precise figure, but that's what they say! The first stars formed around
200 million years after that. As far as I can tell after a few minutes
searching, the oldest known quasar formed about a billion years after
the Big Bang, with a redshift of 5.82:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000419.html

But, I don't think there are many this old.

John Baez wrote:
Not really. The redshifts of quasars - and thus their distances and
ages - vary quite a lot.

Here's a nice picture that illustrates this:
http://www.2dfquasar.org/wedgeplot.html
taken from the 2dF quasar redshift survey.

Yes, it is nice.

It rather shows that Arps redshift periodicity in quasars does not exist.

You'll see there are plenty of quasars between 2 and 12 billion
light-years away. I don't know why there's an apparent shortage
of closer ones! ...

Well, either we live at an exceptionally interesting time when the
number of quasars is far less than in any other time, or there is
something wrong with the assumptions. When this is combined with the
very large scatter of quasar brightness versus redshift we can easily
come to the conclusion that for quasars the redshift is not a reliable
measure of distance.

As Arp has argued, and as supported by a very reasonable theory by
Narlikar (based on particles having a mass that depends on their region
of "communication" with other matter), quasars may very well have an
additional component to their redshift resulting from their young age.
Yes, *young*, because they are ejected from galaxies along the axes
according to Arp.

Such an understanding explains a host of facts that are inexplicable in
models in which redshift is a reliable measure of distance for quasars
and galaxies:

1. The wide scatter of quasar brightness versus redshift. It shows the
unreliablity of the redshift as a measure of redshift for quasars.

2. The lack of low redshift quasars, because they all have an additional
"internal" redshift (in Arp's nomenclature).

3. The much greater number of quasars found near large close spiral
galaxies, especially near the axes where they are ejected according to
Arp. Burbidge has done a study confirming this.

4. A study that attempted to disprove this was a 1978 article in the
Astrophysical Jouirnal 223:747-757, "The Nature of QSO Redshifts", Alan
Stockton demonstrated that *some* quasars are at the same distance as
galaxies with the same redshift. However his data shows that the
suppossedly line of sight pairings of galaxies with quasars (i.e with
different redshift) also prove that they are not at different distances.
This is because the separations are smaller for higher redshifts,
exactly what would be expected for true pairs at the same distance, but
not for random line of sight pairs. See my web page at
http://ray.tomes.biz/bigbangbung.html for more details and graphics.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Arp has got some things right but
not all of them.

--
Ray Tomes
http://ray.tomes.biz/
http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/

Ray Tomes wrote:
John Baez wrote:

Not really. The redshifts of quasars - and thus their distances and
ages - vary quite a lot.


Here's a nice picture that illustrates this:
http://www.2dfquasar.org/wedgeplot.html
taken from the 2dF quasar redshift survey.


Yes, it is nice.

It rather shows that Arps redshift periodicity in quasars does not exist.

You'll see there are plenty of quasars between 2 and 12 billion
light-years away. I don't know why there's an apparent shortage
of closer ones! ...

The common thinking is that many galaxies goes through a state early
in their lifes when they develop a quasar in their lifes. During this
state a massive black hole in the galactic nucleus is accreting the
surrounding matter be it stars or gas, but as the density drops in the
neighbourhood of the black hole the activity will drop and the galactic
nucleus will settle down in a more quiescent state. Therefore we expect
that young galaxies are more active than the middle-age galaxies that we
see around us today.

Well, either we live at an exceptionally interesting time when the
number of quasars is far less than in any other time, or there is
something wrong with the assumptions. When this is combined with the
very large scatter of quasar brightness versus redshift we can easily
come to the conclusion that for quasars the redshift is not a reliable
measure of distance.

As Arp has argued, and as supported by a very reasonable theory by
Narlikar (based on particles having a mass that depends on their region
of "communication" with other matter), quasars may very well have an
additional component to their redshift resulting from their young age.
Yes, *young*, because they are ejected from galaxies along the axes
according to Arp.

There are severe problems with this explanation. Firstly if the
quasars are actually ejected from galaxies, then we would expect to see
some blue-shifted quasars, or at least we should be able to see
galaxy-quasar pairs in which the quasar has a smaller redshift than the
galaxy, but such pairs are not observed.

Secondly, in the last 25 years a number of gravitational lenses have
been observed. The classical kind of a gravitational lens consists of a
galaxy that is lensing the light from a distant quasar, such that we see
several images of the quasar surrounding the galaxy. We always find in
these lenses that the redshift of the quasar is significantly larger
than that of the galaxy, which is in complete accord with that the
redshift is a good estimator of the distance to both the galaxy and the
quasar.

Ulf Torkelsson

Ulf Torkelsson wrote:
There are severe problems with this explanation. Firstly if the
quasars are actually ejected from galaxies, then we would expect to see
some blue-shifted quasars, or at least we should be able to see
galaxy-quasar pairs in which the quasar has a smaller redshift than the
galaxy, but such pairs are not observed.

No we wouldn't. The reason is that in this hypothesis of Narlikar and
Arp, newly created matter that exists in quasars at the time of ejection
has much lower energy, mass and frequencies than normal matter, i.e all
spectral lines are moved considerably to the red. This variation may be
a factor of 3 or more and so far exceeds any velocity component which is
likely to be less than a .01 variation in z.

As the quasar ages it comes into contact with surrounding matter (at the
speed of light interactions) and this brings its matter into line with
that surrounding matter. This appears to happen in a series of discrete
jump in redshift ultimately becoming very close to galaxy redshifts.

Arp has found cases where quasar pairs are found along opposite axes of
large spirals and might have relative redshifts of e.g. 1.3 and 0.3 with
the pairs having extremely similar values to each other.

Secondly, in the last 25 years a number of gravitational lenses have
been observed. The classical kind of a gravitational lens consists of a
galaxy that is lensing the light from a distant quasar, such that we see
several images of the quasar surrounding the galaxy. We always find in
these lenses that the redshift of the quasar is significantly larger
than that of the galaxy, which is in complete accord with that the
redshift is a good estimator of the distance to both the galaxy and the
quasar.

For the above reason that the "internal" frequency is always a redshift,
quasars will always have an equal or higher redshift than a galaxy at
the same distance. To distinguish between the theories you need to find
instances of quasars making gravitational lenses of galaxies. If Arp and
Narlikar are right then there could be cases of quasars lensing galaxies
with lower redshifts.

The idea that all quasars are new galaxies is supported by Arp and
Narlikar, except that the quasar ages are much less than is generally
assumed based on redshift = distance. It is still the case that quasars
evolve to galaxies. The larger galaxies are older in this theory and we
do find support for this from the fact that the larger members of
clusters generally are slightly bluer than the average member. In
standard cosmology this is unexpected because if anything the larger
galaxies would be more massive and possibly have a small gravitational
redshift.

To come back to the original topic - quasars with no host galaxy are the
earliest stage when they have just been ejected from a galaxy, and when
they have the highest internal redshift.

--
Ray Tomes
http://ray.tomes.biz/
http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/

Ray Tomes wrote:
Ulf Torkelsson wrote:

There are severe problems with this explanation. Firstly if the
quasars are actually ejected from galaxies, then we would expect to
see some blue-shifted quasars, or at least we should be able to see
galaxy-quasar pairs in which the quasar has a smaller redshift than
the galaxy, but such pairs are not observed.


No we wouldn't. The reason is that in this hypothesis of Narlikar and
Arp, newly created matter that exists in quasars at the time of ejection
has much lower energy, mass and frequencies than normal matter, i.e all
spectral lines are moved considerably to the red.

This postulate does not have any basis in conventional physics.
Matter behaving this way has never been studied in a laboratory.

This variation may be
a factor of 3 or more and so far exceeds any velocity component which is
likely to be less than a .01 variation in z.

As the quasar ages it comes into contact with surrounding matter (at the
speed of light interactions) and this brings its matter into line with
that surrounding matter. This appears to happen in a series of discrete
jump in redshift ultimately becoming very close to galaxy redshifts.

Arp has found cases where quasar pairs are found along opposite axes of
large spirals and might have relative redshifts of e.g. 1.3 and 0.3 with
the pairs having extremely similar values to each other.

This just shows that you can explain any observed phenomenon by
postulating some new physics.

Secondly, in the last 25 years a number of gravitational lenses have
been observed. The classical kind of a gravitational lens consists of
a galaxy that is lensing the light from a distant quasar, such that we
see several images of the quasar surrounding the galaxy. We always
find in these lenses that the redshift of the quasar is significantly
larger than that of the galaxy, which is in complete accord with that
the redshift is a good estimator of the distance to both the galaxy
and the quasar.


For the above reason that the "internal" frequency is always a redshift,
quasars will always have an equal or higher redshift than a galaxy at
the same distance. To distinguish between the theories you need to find
instances of quasars making gravitational lenses of galaxies. If Arp and
Narlikar are right then there could be cases of quasars lensing galaxies
with lower redshifts.

I am afraid that you are missing my point here. My point is that in
all gravitational lenses the lens is at a lower redshift than the lensed
object. This gives a strong support to that the redshift is a good
indicator of distance for both galaxies and quasars. The fact that we
have never observed a high-redshift quasar lensing a lower-redshift
quasar is a weak point for the Arp-Narlikar mechanism, though you may
argue that that is because a quasar without a host galaxy would be much
lighter than an ordinary galaxy. Then again quasars in general do have
host galaxies, which is also a weak point for a mechanism that
postulates that quasars are ejected from galaxies.

The idea that all quasars are new galaxies is supported by Arp and
Narlikar, except that the quasar ages are much less than is generally
assumed based on redshift = distance. It is still the case that quasars
evolve to galaxies.

This begs the question where the quasars find the material to make
galaxies. Are we to postulate that they create that material on their
own out of nothing?

The larger galaxies are older in this theory and we
do find support for this from the fact that the larger members of
clusters generally are slightly bluer than the average member.

This is a highly contentious statement for several reasons. Firstly
it is patently wrong to claim that older galaxies are bluer than
younger galaxies. Young galaxies are blue because they contain plenty
of hot massive stars with short life times, while these stars are absent
from older galaxies, which are therefore redder.

Secondly there are several types of clusters of galaxies. Some small
clusters like our local cluster are dominated by a few large spiral
galaxies. Spiral galaxies are in general bluer than elliptical
galaxies, since there is still star formation going on in spiral
galaxies, while elliptical galaxies are almost devoid of gas from which
new stars may be formed, and are therefore redder. On the other hand
there are large clusters which are dominated by elliptical galaxies, in
some cases one giant cD galaxy, which has grown to an enormous size by
capturing smaller galaxies in its surroundings.

In
standard cosmology this is unexpected because if anything the larger
galaxies would be more massive and possibly have a small gravitational
redshift.

This effect is completely negligible. The gravitational field that
you need to achieve that effect is way beyond what is reasonable for any
galaxy.

To come back to the original topic - quasars with no host galaxy are the
earliest stage when they have just been ejected from a galaxy, and when
they have the highest internal redshift.

it used to be true that we observed quasars at higher redshifts than
galaxies, but that changed with the Hubble Deep Field, and we are now
observing galaxies at equal or even higher redshifts than quasars, so I
cannot find that there is any observational support for this idea.

Ulf Torkelsson

Ulf Torkelsson wrote:

This begs the question where the quasars find the material to make
galaxies. Are we to postulate that they create that material on their
own out of nothing?

The larger galaxies are older in this theory and we
do find support for this from the fact that the larger members of
clusters generally are slightly bluer than the average member.

This is a highly contentious statement for several reasons. Firstly
it is patently wrong to claim that older galaxies are bluer than
younger galaxies. Young galaxies are blue because they contain plenty
of hot massive stars with short life times, while these stars are absent
from older galaxies, which are therefore redder.

etc. etc.

The details and mechanism of the ejection are not yet important here
(and I think the models proposed are wrong, although Narlikar's C field
is an interesting theory), only the hypothesis of association of
galaxies and quasars of disparate redshift, and the theories will wait
on the statistical evidence, if only the problem would be studied in
earnest. A cursory glance at Arp's catalog will convince you that we
are barely off square one.


-drl

Ray Tomes wrote in support of Halton Arp's theory - that
quasar redshifts are caused by newly created matter having
longer wavelength spectral lines due to its constituent
particles being less massive, due to mass being a property
acquired by Machian particles which connect the particle to
other matter in a sphere which grows at the speed of light
after the particle's creation.

However there's no evidence at all that newly created matter
is any different from the old stuff - and everything to the
contrary.

Arp's theory has been rejected by most astronomers for this
reason and others, such as his theory being incompatible
with the vast amount of evidence showing that quasars and
the like are powered by black-holes and their accretion
discs.

If you are in trying to explain quasars as being closer
then usually believed, and can't figure out how the light
could have been made in this redshifted state, then what is
needed is a "redshift mechanism" which affects the light in
transit.

There's plenty of plasma or gas the light travels through
where the average inter-particle spacing is longer than
the coherence length of the light in question. So the
wavefront (which is about as long in the direction of
travel as the "coherence length") is basically travelling at
full light speed through vacuum until part of it encounters
a lone electron, proton, ion etc.

Since we know the cloud of protons, ions and electrons slows
down the light somewhat, we must conclude that the wavefront
is slowed down by individual protons, ions and electrons,
one at a time, creating a slight dimple in the otherwise
flat wavefront as it propagates through space. In other
words, these sparse plasmas are an inhomogeneous media. Since
light carries momentum, anything which slows down the light
gets at least a temporary kick of momentum, and can so be
expected to move in the direction of the light. If you can
figure out how such an interaction can leave the travelling
wavefront somewhat redshifted, then you have a plasma
redshift mechanism which would radically alter how we
interpret the light which falls into our telescopes.

I can't see a way of doing this with the traditional idea of
a "photon" starting in one place, spreading out in space and
eventually, entirely on its own, delivering its packet of
energy to another place. Ari Brynjolfsson's "Plasma Redshift
of Photons" theory apparently works on this basis, but I
don't understand it:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0401420

An alternative is the "photon" notion of electromagnetic
radiation is to see the radiation itself as unquantitized,
despite the observations that the way it is generated and
absorbed does involve quanta proportional to frequency. In
this model, the waves carry the probability of quanta being
delivered, and so they carry energy, momentum etc. - but they
are not individual "photons". Then all that is required is
a mechanism by which these em waves are generally lengthened
as they travel through sparse plasma.

Such a theory, combined with the theory that the Universe is
not expanding al-la Big Bang, would require that there be
little or no observable redshift in signals such as
narrow-bandwidth long wavelength microwave emission and
absorption signals. So we would expect differing redshift
between microwave signals observed with VLB to redshift of
optical wavelengths from the same object. (Also, if the VLB
signals come from clouds at the end of jets and most of the
optical redshift happens nearer the core than the clouds.)

It would require that there be less redshift for coherent
signals such as emission and absorption lines in IR, optical
etc. wavelengths where the coherence length of these signals
gets close to or exceeds the average inter-particle spacing
of the plasma it is passing through.

Then, a good way of explaining high redshift quasars is that
they are surrounded by a denser (than the inter-cluster
medium) plasma, probably due to gravitational attraction,
and that this redshifts the light we see from it at a more
rapid rate per parsec than the ordinary inter-cluster medium.
(In this model, the Lyman-alpha forest would be caused by a
bunch of neutral hydrogen clouds embedded, and relatively
close together, in this halo of plasma.)

A plasma-redshift explanation for the cosmological redshift
only needs to produce about one part in 14 billion per year
travelling through the inter-cluster medium. If your plasma
redshift model deposits energy in this plasma, then you can
explain the inter-cluster medium being exceedingly hot -
heated by dim starlight passing through it, and having
virtually no way of cooling itself radiatively because the
particles are so sparse they hardly ever come together in a
coulomb interaction. Then you can explain the way clusters
are like the soapy water between bubbles - the voids are
exceedingly hot and therefore at a relatively high pressure,
corralling the galaxies and their denser, cooler,
gravitationally bound coronae, into the corners between the
bubbles. The same process of heating and momentum
deposition would probably also explain the heating and
acceleration of the solar corona and wind.

There are a whole series of problems with this, and I won't
go on about it here. Unfortunately, due to lack of time
and my own limited knowledge, I am not able to answer
properly the thoughtful criticisms offered here in the past.

I am not suggesting this is solid science, yet. I am
addressing Big Bang critics, not supporters. I wish Big
Bang critics would leave the Machian mass theory of quasars
behind and work on something more promising, such as plasma
redshift.

I am not surprised that a "naked quasar" has been found.
I think they are not so big or far away as usually believed,
and that they are not necessarily found in the middle of
huge galaxies. Maybe some of them are relatively close -
just black holes which were ejected from galaxies after close
encounters with other dense objects, and they go on to live
a lonely life travelling through and between clusters,
concentrating and devouring the otherwise sparse plasma in
their general vicinity.

- Robin http://astroneu.com

In article .com,
Robin Whittle writes:

If you are in trying to explain quasars as being closer
then usually believed, and can't figure out how the light
could have been made in this redshifted state, then what is
needed is a "redshift mechanism" which affects the light in
transit.

Any such mechanism would have to give the same redshift for every
frequency.

Then all that is required is
a mechanism by which these em waves are generally lengthened
as they travel through sparse plasma.

Any concrete mechanism has to be frequency-independent (since the
observed redshift is independent of frequency).

Such a theory, combined with the theory that the Universe is
not expanding al-la Big Bang, would require that there be
little or no observable redshift in signals such as
narrow-bandwidth long wavelength microwave emission and
absorption signals.

A non-expanding universe would have to have an explanation as to WHY it
is static. One approach, tried by Einstein, is to have a fine-tuned
cosmological constant. (Such a universe is unstable, but I don't know
if that is really a good counterargument, since there is nothing to
disturb it. Also, the Einstein-de Sitter universe is, mathematically,
just as unstable, and the same argument hasn't been used against it near
as much. Of course, within the context of traditional cosmology, the
Einstein static universe is ruled out by observations.)

Historically, there was some motivation to have quasars closer, since
otherwise one has to explain where the enormous energy comes from.
These days, that's not a problem, since a) the energy is not as high as
it appears due to beaming and b) the accretion-disk mechanism can
generate enough energy.

So, apart from playing devil's advocate, what's the point in trying to
shoehorn a static universe with close quasars into the framework
specified by observations?

In article , Ulf Torkelsson
writes:

As Arp has argued, and as supported by a very reasonable theory by
Narlikar (based on particles having a mass that depends on their region
of "communication" with other matter), quasars may very well have an
additional component to their redshift resulting from their young age.
Yes, *young*, because they are ejected from galaxies along the axes
according to Arp.

There are severe problems with this explanation. Firstly if the
quasars are actually ejected from galaxies, then we would expect to see
some blue-shifted quasars, or at least we should be able to see
galaxy-quasar pairs in which the quasar has a smaller redshift than the
galaxy, but such pairs are not observed.

Secondly, in the last 25 years a number of gravitational lenses have
been observed. The classical kind of a gravitational lens consists of a
galaxy that is lensing the light from a distant quasar, such that we see
several images of the quasar surrounding the galaxy. We always find in
these lenses that the redshift of the quasar is significantly larger
than that of the galaxy, which is in complete accord with that the
redshift is a good estimator of the distance to both the galaxy and the
quasar.

Thirdly, taking the ejection scenario at face value, one could observe a
proper motion. As far as I know, no such proper motions (i.e. that
indicate ejection from a nearby galaxy) have been observed.

Phillip Helbig wrote:
Thirdly, taking the ejection scenario at face value, one could observe a
proper motion. As far as I know, no such proper motions (i.e. that
indicate ejection from a nearby galaxy) have been observed.

This is a reasonable suggestion to investigate (hey, most of the
objections do not fall into this category!). I have done some rough
calculations based on reasonable assumptions. Checking of these and
comments on whether the proper motion should be detectable please.

According to Arp (it sounds almost as good as according to Hoyle :-) )
the ejected quasars do not achieve quite escape velocity because they
eventually fall back and become companion galaxies like the Magellanic
clouds. Therefore for a galaxy of mass m=10^44 g (~ typical spiral) the
escape velocity at a distance of r=10^23 cm (~30 k parsecs) is
v=(2Gm/r)^.5 or v=~10^7 cm/s = ~.0003c.

As a cross check, such a quasar will travel 10 k parsecs in about 100
million years which sounds reasonable. I would expect the time involved
for the quasar to leave the galaxy and change redshift a few times and
lose all its velocity to be of the order of 1 billion years which this
calculation supports.

Now to the proper motion. Assuming that we see things side on (if not
the motion will be less) the apparent motion per year will be .0001
parsecs / distance. For quasars associated with Andromeda this gives
1.4x10^-10 radians/year or about .00003 "/year which is quite small. I
am not sure that such a figure is measurable for a quasar although it
might be over a few decades. Note that observed motion would be expected
to be less as they would be below escape velocity and proobably seen not
directly across the flight path. However they aren't going to be
actually screaming across the sky on human timescales are they?

Arp has indicated that some of the excess count of quasars near
Andromeda are likely to be ejections. In particular the matched pairs of
hight redshift quasars would fall into this category.

Note that the Arp / Narlikar ideas also explain the observed "faster
than light" motions within some quasars (yes I know that there is a
contrived explanation for this) as if the distances are much less the
motion is corresponding less also.

--
Ray Tomes
http://ray.tomes.biz/
http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/