{"id":137,"date":"2023-01-04T02:11:12","date_gmt":"2023-01-04T02:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/experimentalfrontiers.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=137"},"modified":"2023-01-04T02:11:12","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T02:11:12","slug":"halton-arp-looking-at-the-sky-with-an-open-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/experimentalfrontiers\/2023\/01\/04\/halton-arp-looking-at-the-sky-with-an-open-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Halton Arp: Looking at the sky with an open mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been 25 years since astronomical data was reported that threw the Big Bang theory into turmoil. To patch up the standard model of the universe, astrophysicists were forced to introduce dark matter and dark energy as completely unknown, undetectable substances that dominate the dynamics of the universe. All of the stars and galaxies, the gas and dust and plasma, the quasars and black holes\u2014everything that we see is just going along for the ride, 5% of the gravitating matter that dominates the universe\u2019s evolution. Even for scientists who have devoted their careers to developing Big Bang theory, this is an uncomfortable situation.<\/span><\/p>\n

But 25 years before that, there was already a scientific gadfly with impeccable credentials who was warning that there were anomalies in the sky, observations that could not be squared with the assumptions that everyone was taking as foundational. This was Halton Arp. In 1966 he published his <\/span>Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies<\/span><\/a>. By 1978, he had established a connection that couldn\u2019t be ignored between quasars (which are supposed to be the most distant objects in the universe, billions of light years away from us) and Seyfert galaxies, a class of ordinary galaxies that are supposed to be at least ten times closer to us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Galaxy on the left appears very close to quasar on the right. Coincidence?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In <\/span>1982<\/span><\/a>, he showed that in almost all cases where a large galaxy had smaller companions, the smaller companion galaxies had higher redshift than the central galaxy. (If redshift comes only from velocity, why should all these companion galaxies be ejected in a direction that happened to be away from planet earth?) In 1984, the astronomy establishment shot the messenger. Arp was relieved of his post as director of Caltech\u2019s Palomar Observatory, where Arp had been taking the pictures that showed the cosmology theorists that they had some explaining to do.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arp then had to compete for telescope time with more mainstream projects; but until the end of his life (2013), he continued to collect thousands of cases of quasars that are not only close to galaxies in the sky but sometimes are (apparently?) connected to those galaxies by plumes of plasma. If a few quasars line up so they happen to appear in the same part of the sky as a nearby galaxy, that might be a coincidence. But with thousands of examples, it just didn\u2019t make sense that these are all accidental alignments.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a radical challenge to a paradigm that has become entrenched over the last sixty years. How might we understand these anomalies? Arp is very clear that his primary message is observational: we need a new story. He offers one such story, but encourages others to make creative proposals; we shouldn\u2019t confine ourselves either to the traditional story (redshift = distance) or to Arp\u2019s suggested alternative.<\/span><\/p>\n