David Pratt
If light from stars or galaxies is passed through a prism or grating, a spectrum is obtained, consisting of a series of lines and bands. These spectra can be used to identify the atomic elements present in the objects concerned, as each element has a distinct spectral "signature." But if we compare the spectral lines of distant galaxies with those produced by the same elements on earth, we find that in every case the lines are displaced towards longer (redder) wavelengths. This is known as the redshift, and is the subject of intense controversy. The majority of astronomers and cosmologists subscribe to the big bang theory, and interpret the redshift to mean that all galaxies are flying apart at high speed and that the universe is expanding. A growing minority of scientists, however, maintains that the redshift is produced by other causes, and that the universe is not expanding. As astronomer Halton Arp remarks in Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science, "one side must be completely and catastrophically wrong" [1].G. de Purucker rejected the theory of an expanding universe or expanding space as "little short of being a scientific pipe-dream or fairy-tale," and suggested that the redshift might be caused by light losing energy during its long voyage through space [2]. This is known as the tired-light theory, and is supported by several astronomers. Paul LaViolette and Tom Van Flandern, for example, have reviewed several observational tests of the different interpretations of the redshift, and conclude that the tired-light, non-expanding-universe model explains the data much better than the expanding-universe hypothesis [3]. To bring the big bang model into line with observations, constant adjustments have to be made to its "free parameters" (i.e. fudge factors).
According to the big bang theory, a galaxy's redshift is proportional to its recession velocity, which increases with its distance from earth. In the tired-light model, too, we would expect redshift to be proportional to distance. The fact that this is not always the case shows that other factors must be involved. Numerous examples of galaxies at the same distance having very different redshifts are given in the landmark book Seeing Red by Halton Arp, who works at the Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik in Germany. He also gives many examples of how, for over 30 years, establishment astronomers and cosmologists have systematically tried to ignore, dismiss, ridicule, and suppress this evidence -- for it is fatal to the hypothesis of an expanding universe. Like other opponents of the big bang, he has encountered great difficulties getting articles published in mainstream journals, and his requests for time on ground-based and space telescopes are frequently rejected.
Arp argues that redshift is primarily a function of age, and that tired light plays no more than a secondary role. He presents abundant observational evidence to show that low-redshift galaxies sometimes eject high-redshift quasars in opposite directions, which then evolve into progressively lower-redshift objects and finally into normal galaxies. Ejected galaxies can, in turn, eject or fission into smaller objects, in a cascading process. Within galaxies, the youngest, brightest stars also have excess redshifts. The reason all distant galaxies are redshifted is because we see them as they were when light left them, i.e. when they were much younger. About seven local galaxies are blueshifted. The orthodox view is that they must be moving towards us even faster than the universe is expanding, but in Arp's theory, they are simply older than our own galaxy as we see them.
To explain how redshift might be related to age, Arp and Jayant Narlikar suggest that instead of elementary particles having constant mass, as orthodox science assumes, they come into being with zero mass, which then increases, in steps, as they age. When electrons in younger atoms jump from one orbit to another, the light they emit is weaker, and therefore more highly redshifted, than the light emitted by electrons in older atoms. To put it another way: as particle mass grows, frequency (clock rate) increases and therefore redshift decreases.
When astronomers first saw active, disturbed galaxies neighboring each other, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that they were in the process of colliding. Arp comments: "By ignoring the empirical evidence for ejection from galaxies, they illustrated an unfortunate tendency in science, namely that when presented with two possibilities, scientists tend to choose the wrong one" (p. 104). Despite the modern mania for galaxy mergers and black holes, it is ejection processes that are the most ubiquitous, and may provide a key to redshift anomalies.
In the 1950s, after some initial reluctance, astronomers came to accept the evidence that jets of radio-wave-emitting material could be ejected in opposite directions from the nuclei of active galaxies. Further examples of ejection are provided by spiral galaxies: large knots are sometimes seen along spiral arms, and companion galaxies on the ends of the arms. There is fierce resistance, however, to the idea that high-redshift objects can be ejected by low-redshift galaxies, because this would demolish the fundamental assumption on which the big bang is built -- that the redshift is caused entirely by recession velocities. Nevertheless, the evidence is compelling. Pairs of ejected objects often line up on either side of active galaxies and are connected to their parent galaxy by luminous filaments ("umbilical cords"). However, establishment scientists insist that all cases where low-redshift and high-redshift objects appear to be physically associated are merely chance combinations of foreground and background objects, and they attribute the connecting filaments to "noise" or "instrument defects."
Mainstream astronomers believe that the normally very high redshifts of quasars indicate that they are situated near the edge of the visible universe, and are rushing away from us at velocities approaching the speed of light. To explain why many quasars lie very close to low-redshift galaxies, it is fashionable nowadays to invoke the theory of gravitational lensing: the image of a background quasar is supposedly split into multiple bright images by the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy with a large mass. The Einstein Cross, for example, consists of four quasars aligned across a central galaxy of lower redshift, and is regarded as a prime example of gravitational lensing -- despite the fact that Fred Hoyle calculated the probability of such a lensing event as less than two chances in a million, and despite the presence of connecting material between the quasars and the galaxy nucleus! The assumption that redshift equals velocity has led to galaxy masses being overestimated, and more reasonable estimates indicate that genuine gravitational lens effects are probably very rare.
If the universe is expanding, redshifts should show a continuous range of values. Instead, however, they are "quantized," i.e. they tend to be multiples of certain basic units, the main ones (expressed as velocities) being 72.4 km/s and 37.5 km/s. This phenomenon, says Arp, "is so unexpected that conventional astronomy has never been able to accept it, in spite of the overwhelming observational evidence" (p. 195). He suggests that redshift quantization could be due to episodes of matter creation taking place at regular intervals.
The redshift-equals-velocity assumption has led big bangers to conclude that galaxies in groups and clusters are moving much faster than they really are, and since the galaxies' visible mass cannot account for these rapid motions, this has given rise to the current obsession with "dark matter." Some 90% of the matter in the universe supposedly consists of this hypothetical, never-detected stuff. Arp, however, shows that in every group of galaxies investigated, companion galaxies always have systematically higher redshifts than the central galaxy they are orbiting. The only reasonable explanation for this is that companion galaxies have intrinsic, excess redshifts arising from their younger age; they are born from the central galaxy and expelled into its near neighborhood. In galaxy clusters, too, smaller, younger galaxies have been found to have excess redshifts. Redshift quantization indicates that the orbital velocities of galaxies must be less than 20 km/s, otherwise the periodicity would be washed out. Once this is accepted, the need for immense quantities of dark matter vanishes.
In addition to the redshift, another important piece of "evidence" for the big bang is said to be the cosmic microwave background radiation of 2.7 kelvins, which is supposedly the afterglow of the primordial explosion. Arp, however, argues that the extraordinary smoothness of the background radiation provides strong evidence against an expanding universe. A much simpler explanation is that we are seeing the temperature of the intergalactic medium.
Current expanding-universe theory seems headed for oblivion, but the large number of professionals with vested interests in its preservation means that its demise is likely to take a very long time. Even some mystically or theosophically minded writers have tended to jump on the big bang bandwagon, believing that the theory is essentially correct, provided we recognize the workings of divine intelligence going on behind the scenes. But even divine intelligence would not be able to save the big bang!
The idea that space can expand like elastic is one of the many illogical features of the standard big bang model. Space must be infinite, for if it is finite, where does it end and what lies beyond? It's true that big bangers have concocted a theory which allows space to curve round upon itself so that it is both finite and boundless -- but this merely indicates the extent to which they have abandoned reality in favor of abstract mathematical theorizing. If space is infinite, then clearly it cannot expand for, as H. P. Blavatsky says, "infinite extension admits of no enlargement." She also indicates that the "outbreathing" of Brahmâ (the cosmic divinity), as described in Hindu philosophy, refers not to a physical increase in size but to a "change of condition" -- "the development of limitless subjectivity into as limitless objectivity" (The Secret Doctrine 1:62-3). In other words, outbreathing and inbreathing can refer to the unfoldment of the One (the spiritual summit of a world-system) into the many (the lower, material realms), and the subsequent reabsorption of the many into the One, in a never-ending cycle, or cosmic heartbeat, of evolution and involution.
Arp is one of a growing number of scientists who are returning to the idea of an infinite, eternal universe, subject to constant transformations [4]. He believes that matter is created continually -- not from nothing, but from the materialization of mass-energy existing in a diffuse state, in the form of the all-pervading "quantum sea" or "zero-point field." The universe, he says, is constantly unfolding from many different points within itself. He also believes that after a certain interval elementary particles may decay, so that matter merges back into the quantum sea. This closely corresponds to the theosophical notion of periodical materialization and etherealization, except that in theosophy the process is not confined to our physical plane but embraces higher worlds of consciousness-substance as well -- worlds whose existence is pointed to by a wide variety of physical phenomena [5].
Our Milky Way galaxy is a member of the Local Group of galaxies, which belongs to the Virgo Supercluster, and our nearest neighbor is the Fornax Supercluster. What do we know about what lies beyond? Mainstream cosmologists insist that we know a great deal. Powerful telescopes reveal many faint, fuzzy objects with high redshifts that are assumed to represent distant clusters and superclusters, which form immense sheets of galaxies, separated by huge voids. Arp writes:
An enormous amount of modern telescope time and staff is devoted to measuring redshifts of faint smudges on the sky. It is called "probing the universe." So much time is consumed, in fact, that there is no time at all available to investigate the many crucial objects which disprove the assumption that redshift measures distance. (p. 69)He says that, given the misinterpretation of the redshift, distances may be wrong by factors of 10 to 100, and luminosities and masses may be wrong by factors up to 10,000: "We would have a totally erroneous picture of extragalactic space, and be faced with one of the most embarrassing boondoggles in our intellectual history" (p. 1). He presents many pieces of evidence indicating that some faint "galaxy clusters" actually consist of young objects ejected from nearby active galaxies. The same applies to most of the rather peculiar-looking objects to be seen in the "Hubble Deep Field," a famous image of very high-redshift and supposedly extremely distant galaxies.
We have no reliable way of knowing how far the local Virgo and Fornax Superclusters are from the next superclusters, and there is therefore no certainty that any of the objects we observe lies outside them. In other words, we may be seeing far less of the universe than is generally believed. Even some of Arp's closest allies are very reluctant to contemplate the possibility that the cosmic distance scale as a whole is seriously wrong. Whether Arp's radical views will be confirmed remains to be seen, but he is undoubtedly right when he says: "We are certainly not at the end of science. Most probably we are just at the beginning!" (p. 249).
References:
- Apeiron (http://redshift.vif.com), 1998, p. ii.
- G. de Purucker, Fountain Source of Occultism, Theosophical University Press (TUP), 1974, pp. 80-1; Esoteric Teachings, Point Loma Publications, 1987, 3:28-30; The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., TUP, 1973, pp. 435-8n.
- Paul LaViolette, Genesis of the Cosmos: The ancient science of continuous creation, Rochester, VE: Bear and Company, 2004, pp. 280-3, 288-95 (http://etheric.com); Tom Van Flandern, "Did the Universe Have a Beginning?," Meta Research Bulletin, 3:3, 1994, www.metaresearch.org.
- See Halton C. Arp, C. Roy Keys and Konrad Rudnicki, eds., Progress in New Cosmologies: Beyond the Big Bang, Plenum, 1993.
- See "Worlds within worlds", http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5/worlds.htm.
Published in Sunrise, December 1998/January 1999.
Big bang, black holes, and common sense
Black holes, redshifts, and bad science
Monday, April 23, 2007
Exploding the Big Bang
Concerning the Morphology of Galactic Evolution
Current Controversies
The Arp Controversy Revisited
Concerning the Morphology of Galactic Evolution
Nick Kollerstrom
Unpublished Review of
Halton Arp Catalogue of Discordant Redshift Associations 2003,
Seldom can so much theory have hinged upon an observation.
Halton Arp's new book, reviewed here by
The photograph was taken by David Strange, a
Does this picture reveal the secret of the universe, that galaxies bud to form quasars of higher redshift?
A recent Astronomy & Astrophysics report, based on observations at
If one views the form of a spiral galaxy, it can appear more as having unfolded out from a centre, rather than having condensed inwards from homogeneous matter in space. That antithesis does quite well express the contrast between Arp's views, and current cosmological theories. We have become conditioned to the idea of black holes at galactic centres, as a logical consequence and end-result of the Big Bang. Let's try instead to envisage Arp's view, of galactic centres as white holes, from which the matter of galaxies has emerged. Creation, out of nothing?
A long-term study of galactic morphology, using at times the most powerful telescopes available, over four decades, has lead Arp to his beyond-the-pale conclusion, that galaxies bud, fission, and grow in ways they are definitely not supposed to do. Much of his book Seeing Red was an account of how his papers have been rejected or marginalized - and, not one single astronomy journal reviewed it! Galaxies grow, Arp theorises, from quasars. Arp argues that, repeatedly, filaments are seen to connect quasars with their parent galaxies. That is the crux of his argument. Far from being the gigantic entities they are cracked up to be, out on the very edge of the universe, quasars are generally ejected in equal and opposite pairs along the galactic axis, the hub of its rotation. They have their high-redshifts because they are newly-formed. That's the shock! The great error of 20th century cosmology, claims Arp, was to infer an immense distance because of their very high redshift. There are too many instances of their appearing adjacent to galaxies in equal and opposite pairs on either side of the galaxy, and with visible connecting filaments. This is especially the case for galaxies having high-energy centres (called, 'Seyfert' galaxies): these tend to have quasar-pairs ejected along or somewhere near to their rotation axis.
Arp presents a wealth of data indicating that redshifts vary both between galaxies and within stars of our own galaxy in ways that cannot really be interpreted as recessional velocity - as Hubble proposed in 1930. This book argues against the Big Bang, by undermining the Hubble logic which 'sees' the universe as expanding. Personally, I have always found that the notion of an expanding universe, with recessional velocity proportional to distance from us, but with no centre to this expansion, to be a thing which causes rational logic to disintegrate. Admittedly, one may well feel that this sort of behaviour of budding and ejection, is more appropriate for small things in a fishpond, than for galaxies in the depths of space.
Let's have some quotes from Mr Arp on the matter. Concerning the mid-twentieth century discovery that radio sources were being ejected from galaxies in pairs with filaments connecting them: "This fundamentally changed our view of galaxies: rather than vast, placid aggregates of majestically orbiting stars, dust and gas, it became clear that their centres were the sites of enormous, variable outpourings of energy 4. Some of the radio sources turned out to be quasars: "... The quasars are at much higher redshift than the galaxies from which they originate ... The redshifts, which are very high as the newly created matter emerges from its zero-mass state, continue to diminish as the mass of the matter grows 5." Arp has argued that redshifts are quantised, ie appear in discrete increments, rather than being continuous as one would predict if they expressed recessional velocity.
The startling part of Arp's cosmology has to be matter-creation at galactic centres: "A further advantage of this white hole scheme is that the new matter is created at the very centre of mass concentrations where the spin axis represents the direction of least resistance and can channel it out in opposite directions ... the new matter must initially emerge with the speed of light because, being at zero mass, it is essentially an energy wave and travelling at signal velocity. It will slow down as it gains mass as calculated by Narlikar and Das.." 6.
The 'cosmic background radiation' was discovered in 1965 and widely hyped as decisive evidence of the Big Bang, a sort of tone left over from that distant singularity. I never quite experienced the force of this argument, so was quite relieved to find Mr Arp explaining that, "In the non-expanding universe an obvious and much simpler explanation for the CBR is that we are simply seeing the temperature of the underlying extragalactic medium." He commented that its "extraordinary smoothness ... seems to me to be a very strong argument for a non-expanding universe."
Back in 1911 it was discovered that bright, blue stars had higher redshifts. As an undergraduate, Arp corresponded with the discoverer of this effect (W.Campbell) as to whether it could imply that such blue stars (in our galaxy) were streaming away from us, but clearly that was unfeasible. His explanation is that the blue stars tend to be younger and therefore have the greater redshifts. Thus he arrived at his heretical concept of "intrinsic redshifts in stars."
Two galaxies were found apparently in the act of merging (NGC2775 and NGC2777), which Arp views in reverse, as a galaxy caught in the act of budding! The younger one was almost totally devoid of metal-indicating spectral lines, "marking the galaxy as so young that successive generations of stellar evolution have not had time to enrich the metal content 7." This pair of galaxies, whether merging or budding, offered "a powerful example of a companion with a higher redshift than its parent." One cannot have one of the galaxies at a greater distance to account for their redshifts, because the two galaxies are manifestly interacting. "The companion even has an umbilical cord, a streamer of neutral hydrogen (H1) leading back toward the larger galaxy." Against the notion that these two galaxies are merging, Arp argues reasonably that "The H1 from NGC2777 leads directly back towards the center of NGC 2775, implying the companion originated directly from that nucleus. Two galaxies falling together would have some transverse component of velocity and, therefore, not fall directly together but have a parabolic encounter." He added, "Companions around a main galaxy would have to orbit for the order of 15 billion years and only fall in for an encounter."
Paradigm Shift?
It was always unlikely that quasars should be thousands of times brighter than any previously known extragalactic source - it was a hint that the axioms had gone wildly wrong. The topic offers a fascinating study of how observation and theory are intertwined. For decades, astronomers have refused to 'see' a close proximity of quasars to parent galaxies. I suggest that the astronomical community is facing a paradigm-shift, as Thomas Kuhn described years ago in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, whereby a definition gets to be widened. At present astronomers are 'guarding' the simple identity redshift=distance which is the Hubble paradigm, and 'beyond the pale' cosmologists like Hoyle, Burbidge and Arp have wanted to assign to redshift also a second meaning, one alarmingly different in terms of traditional concepts. The question revolves around what we wish to permit matter to do. I suggest that if and when the switchover occurs it will permit us for the first time to have a real experience of how galaxies form.
Two generations of astronomers have now been probing the 'edge' of the universe under the impression that redshift must indicate distance. Much academic prestige is invested in this concept, in terms of viewing time on the world's most powerful telescopes. It may be time for astronomers to take a step back, and review the axioms which they wish to rely upon. For example, is 90% of the universe 'missing?' Cosmologists continue not to find this 'dark matter', and may eventually wish to consider Arp's view that this is a spurious problem resulting from scale-factor errors, generated by illusory redshift-inferred distances (p.188). on Arp's view the Andromeda galaxy has a blue-shift (a negative red-shift) because it is older than our Milky Way (p69). A more usual view would be that the Andromeda nebula is hurtling towards us, for no known reason, and so appears with a 'doppler' blue-shift.
Seeing Red Arp's master-work has many reviews up on the web, but they have all been printed in alternative-type journals, none astronomy. It is written in a personal and passionate style and its author is respected by his opponents as having been in the thick of the 20th-century cosmological debate. The UK Government department 'PIPARC' brackets subatomic physics and astronomy under the same aegis, and Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy and the Cavendish 'particle-physics' Laboratory face each other across the Madingley Road: one suspects that further debates are going to be required between these departments, as and when Mr Arp's theories start to be taken seriously.
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Hoyle's View
Hoyle always supported Arp - as Dr Jane Gregory, who is composing a biography of Fred Hoyle, explained to me. Jane works in the same department as me (the STS Dept at UCL) and told me how she had an interview with Sir Fred before he died: he kept showing her images of the filaments linking galaxies to adjacent quasars). This was clearly expressed in his 1983 The Quasar Controversy Resolved as well as in his last (posthumous) book co-authored with the eminent cosmologists Burbidge and Narlikar: A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality. Hoyle coined the term 'Big Bang' in 1950, in a derisive and skeptical sense, and his last title politely informs the reader of its erroneous nature. Through this book Arp is cast as the heroic pioneer, e.g. concerning how astronomers terminated his profession of astronomy in America in the early 1980s: 'Thus, Arp was the subject of one of the most clear-cut and successful attempts in modern times to block research which it was felt, correctly, would be revolutionary in its impact if it were to be adopted 8'. The authors endorses Arp's argument, e.g.: 'It is clear that over the past 20 years a great deal of evidence has been found which shows that many QSOs [quasi-stellar objects = quasars] with large redshifts are physically associated with galaxies having much smaller redshifts 9. The closure of his US career was surely beneficial, inasmuch as it resulted in Arp moving to Berlin's Max Plank Astrophysics Institute, with its new, X-ray telescope. He could re-examine objects he had earlier viewed through an optical telescope at the X-ray wavelength, as revealed their most energetic parts.
Recent controversy
A NASA website put up a Hubble image of the NGC 4319 galaxy and the quasar 'Merkarian 205' that Arp (and Hoyle) had claimed were connected by a filament, but its image seemed to show them as quite separate. "An overwhelming abundance of evidence long ago convinced virtually all astronomers that quasars are indeed at the vast distances indicated by their redshifts" it explained 10. Why, how reassuring, to hear that 'virtually all astronomers' agree on this fundamental issue. In fact a billion light-years separated the apparently conjoined objects, the NASA site explained. Concurrently, an article in the MNRAS dismissed Arp's concept of redshift quantisation. 11 Does this mean that Arp's views are now yesterday's news? A rebuttal of these charges swiftly appeared in Science 12 with comments by astronomer Geoffrey Burbidge describing the MNRAS article as "a real piece of dishonesty." It alluded to the NASA website of the Hubble image and showed a picture in colour, indicating a filament connection between the quasar and galaxy. Burbidge's reply in the MNRAS soon followed 13. Seldom can so much theory have hinged upon an observation. Arp's new book features a paradigm-shattering colour photo of this galaxy plus quasar, taken by a Dorset amateur astronomer, clearly showing (See Figure) the 'luminous bridge' between them 14. Does this picture reveal the secret of the universe, that galaxies bud to form quasars of higher redshift.
The above-mentioned Spanish paper described the luminous filaments connecting NGC 7603 and its 'daughter' companion and in addition discerned that two small objects in the luminous bridge have much higher redshifts than either of the objects which it connects. There is a long tradition in science of the notion of a 'crucial experiment,' around which debate is supposed to hinge, and it is hard to see how an observation could get much more crucial than this one.
Recent books by Halton Arp:
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science Apeiron, Quebec, 1998
Catalogue of Discordant Redshift Associations Apeiron, Quebec, 2003
Footnotes
1 M.Lopez-Corredoira & C.Gutierrez, A&A 2002 390, L15-18
2 Hoyle, F., J.V.Narlikar, 'On the Nature of Mass' Nature 1971 233, 41-44, 41
3 Hoyle, F. The Quasar Controversy Resolved, 1983, Cardiff, p.26
4 Arp, Halton Seeing Red Apeiron Montreal 1998 p.4
5 Ibid, p.7
6 Ibid, p.231
7 Ibid, p103
8 F.Hoyle, G.Burbidge & J.Narlikar, A Different Approach to Cosmology From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards reality. CUP 2000, p.134.
9 Ibid. p.140
10 http://heritage.stsci.edu/2002/23/table.html
11 Hawkins E. et. al., MNRAS 2002 336 L13-L16. 12 G.Schilling, 'New Results reawaken quasar Distance Dispute' Science 2002 298, 11 Oct., p.345
13 W.Napier & G.Burbidge, MNRAS 2003, 342, 601-604
14 Taken by amateur astronomer David Strange with a 50 cm. Telescope in