A quasar, too heavy to be true

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25180

[[Mod. note -- Open-access preprint at
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01860
-- jt]]

Here we report observations of the quasar ULAS J134208.10+092838.61
(hereafter J1342+0928) at a redshift of z=7.54. This quasar has a
bolometric luminosity of 4e13 Lsun and a black hole mass of 8e8 Msun.

Wow!

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...1206131946.htm
"This is the only object we have observed from this era," says Robert
Simcoe, the Francis L. Friedman Professor of Physics in MIT's Kavli
Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. "It has an extremely high
mass, and yet the universe is so young that this thing shouldn't exist.
The universe was just not old enough to make a black hole that big. It's
very puzzling."

Exactly. It is at 690 My after the supposed "bang".

Of course there is an explanation. The authors of the nature paper say
that the big bang created black holes and the problem is solved: The big
pre-existing black holes of the universe (with 10E4 solar masses) would
have seeded this thing of course.

How can gravity influence things in the searing hot universe coming from
a big bang???

Before a certain point, not even light can travel isn't it?

Before the decoupling?

How can gravity influence anything at those temperatures?

Mystery. Well anyway, the universe can do anything so let's suppose that.

Why not see otherwise that there wasn't any bang at all and that we are
seeing a very old quasar?

The spectra correspond to a quasar. The simplest explanation is that
this IS a quasar, a very old one.

This implies that the universe must be at least 20-30 Gy old.

What can be salvaged?

Apparently, the red shift exists and it is an indicator of distance
calibrated by other methods using Hubble by NASA. As far as I remember,
in their "Origins" program.

Many theories could explain that red shift, I just do not know which one
will be accepted.

And the CMB?

Obviously it is there, but what it is, nobody knows. Yes, you can find
harmonics, since foreground objects could generate those signatures. Or
other explanations, depending on what you think you are seeing.

From the outside I just see that the more we look, the more galaxies we
find. 72 new ones were discovered in the HUDF just looking with a better
instrument. And it goes on and on, and nobody knows if there is any limit.

BB theory was adopted because it fitted observations. The cosmic
background was thought as the relic radiation Gamow proposed. The
explaining power of that theory was reinforced by a huge theoretical
work figuring out how that bang would have happened. A book that
impressed me more than 3 minutes told us the story...

Since there wasn't any telescopes able to see as far as the modern ones,
this agreement with observations lasted time enough to establish the
theory as the only explanation.

Today, we are seeing that the bang couldn't have happened at that date.
We see old objects everywhere, that make the fatidic birth date of the
universe appear as an error interpretation.

Well, we will figure out a new explanation. But maybe it would be better
if we recognize that we can only speak scientifically for observations.
Astronomy is concerned with observations. Cosmology with the Universe as
a whole, something that astronomy can't answer, it can only answer about
the observed universe, a surely small portion of the Unknown.