Quasar found 13 billion years away

[[Mod. note -- I apologise to the author and the s.a.r readership
for the week-long delay in posting this article, which arrived at my
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Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:24:43 +0100
but was mistakenly categorized as spam by an over-eager (and *not*
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If it's any consolation, computer support just sent around a message
today that they're preparing to switch to a new spam filter... -- jt]]

Thus spake Kent Paul Dolan
Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply:

It swallowed the MASS of 1 sun per year,
on average. Perhaps mass which had not
yet formed stars.

Wouldn't you expect the same radiation
pressure limits on that as on star formation?

You would expect it to form more slowly. Remember if there is any
transverse orbital velocity at all matter will tend towards an orbit,
irrespective of mass, whether it has been formed into stars or not.

On the other hand, supposedly those early
stars had mass about 200-300 times the mass
of Sol, so the individual "swallowed a star"
events could have been more widely spaced.

I don't think that makes a lot of difference to the calculation.


So long as the cosmic microwave background
radiation continues to shine, and it shows no sign
of going away, the universe keeps testifying for
all to understand: "I had a beginning, and in
that beginning, things were different from today".

Why is this so hard for some people to accept?

I don't see any problem with accepting that there was a big bang, and I
would certainly expect a big bang to be a feature of any future model of
cosmology. Nonetheless, we should accept that there are very
considerable observational problems and even inconsistencies in the
standard, concordance, Lamda-CDM, cosmological model, and that, so long
as we do not have a unified theory of physics, calculations based only
on classical general relativity may be open to challenge in ways which
we are unlikely to anticipate in the absence of unification between
general relativity and quantum theory.

Regards

--
Charles Francis
moderator sci.physics.foundations.
substitute charles for NotI to email