Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  In the 1950s, the American astronomer Karl Seyfert had discovered a class of energetic galaxies characterized by having a sharp, brilliant nucleus with an emission line spectrum signifying that large amounts of energy were being released there. Arp found their association with quasar pairs to be so strong that it could almost be said to be a predictable attribute of Seyfert galaxies. Spectroscopically, quasars look like pieces of Seyfert nuclei. One of the most active nearby spiral galaxies, known by the catalog reference NGC4258, has a Seyfert nucleus from which the French astronomer G. Courtès, in 1961, discovered a pair of proto-spiral arms emerging, consisting of glowing gaseous matter also emitting the "synchrotron" radiation of high-energy electrons spiraling in magnetic fields. An X-ray astronomer called Wolfgang Piestch established that the arms of gas led like rocket trails to a pair of X-ray sources coinciding perfectly with two Blue Stellar Objects. When the ritual of obstructionism to obtain the spectra of the BSOs ensued, Margaret Burbridge, a Briton with over fifty years of observational experience, bypassed the regular channels to make the measurement herself using the relatively small 3-meter reflector telescope on Mount Hamilton outside San Jose in California, and confirmed them to be quasars. Arp put the probability of such a chance pairing as being less than 1 in 2.5 million.

  His paper giving all the calculations deemed to be scientifically necessary, along with four other examples each with a chance of being coincidental that was less than one in a million, was not even rejected—just put on indefinite hold and never acted upon since. When the number of examples continued growing, as did Arp's persistence, his tenure was suddenly terminated and he was denied further access to the major American observatories. After facing censorship from the journals and ferocious personal attacks in public by prestigious figures at conferences, he left the U.S. in 1984 to join the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Germany, who he says have been cooperative and hospitable.

  Eyes Closed and Eyes Open: Professionals and Amateurs

  A new generation of high-resolution telescopes and more-sensitive instruments produced further examples of gaseous bridges emitting in the X-ray bands, connecting the quasars to their source galaxies. The configurations could be seen as a composite, physically connected object. But the response of those trained to the orthodox view was not to see them. They were dismissed as artifacts of random noise or instrument errors. I've witnessed this personally. On mentioning Arp's work to a recent astrophysics graduate I was cut off with, "Those are just background noise," although I hadn't mentioned bridges. I asked him if he'd seen any of the pictures. He replied stonily, "I haven't read anything of Arp's, but I have read the critics." Whence, knowing the approved answers is presumably all that is needed. Shades of the Scholastics.

  In 1990, the Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE) launched the X-ray telescope ROSAT (Röntgen Observatory Satellite Telescope), which was later used to look for a filament connecting the violently disrupted spiral galaxy NGC4319 to the quasarlike object Markarian 205, whose association had been disputed since 1971. Although the prime aim failed (Arp thinks the connection is probably too old now to show up at the energies searched for), it did reveal two new X-ray filaments coming out of Mark205 and leading to point-like X-ray sources. So the high redshift, quasarlike Seyfert ejected from the low redshift spiral was itself ejecting a pair of yet-higher-redshift sources, which turned out to be quasars.

  The NGC4319-Mark205 connection was subsequently established by a high-school teacher, when the NASA announced a program making 10 percent of the time on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope available to the community of amateur astronomers. It seems that the amateur community—for whom Halton Arp has an extremely high regard—had taken a great interest in his work and were arranging more investigations of nearby quasar connections, drawing their subject matter mainly from Arp's 1987 book, Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies, which the NASA committees that allocated observation time had been avoiding like the plague. After another amateur used his assigned time for a spectroscopic study of an Arp connecting filament, the Space Telescope Science Institute suspended the amateur program on the grounds that it was "too great a strain on its expert personnel." No doubt.

  Quasar Cascades: Redshifts as a Measure of Galaxy Age

  On this basis, quasars turn out to be young, energetic, high-redshift objects ejected recently, typically from Seyfert galaxies of lower-redshift—in fact, high-resolution X-ray images of the Seyfert galaxy NGC4151 show clearly proto-quasars forming in its nucleus prior to being ejected.

  The quasars are not very luminous but grow in brightness as they age and evolve. The enormous brightness that's conventionally attributed to them arises from incorrectly assigned distances that place them on the edge of the observable universe. Arp found that on charts showing quasar positions, pairing the quasars by redshift almost always leads to finding a cataloged Seyfert close to the center point between them.

  The process can be taken further. The Seyferts in turn usually occur in matched pairs about some larger, still-lower-redshift galaxy from which they appear to have been originally ejected. This yields a cascade in which large, older galaxies have ejected younger material that has formed into younger companion galaxies around it. The younger galaxies in turn eject material as quasars, which evolve through a sequences of stages eventually into regular galaxies. Corresponding to the age hierarchy at every step is the hierarchy of redshifts reducing as the associated objects become older. Such cascades lead back to massive central spiral galaxies whose advanced age is marked by their large populations of old, red stars. Typically they are found with smaller companion galaxies at the ends of the spiral arms. Companion galaxies are found to be systematically redshifted with respect to the central galaxy, indicating them to be first-generation descendants. The same pattern extends to groupings of galaxies in clusters and of clusters in superclusters.

  Our own Milky Way galaxy is a member of the Local Group, centered on the giant Sb spiral M31, known as the "Andromeda" galaxy, which is the most massive of the group. All members of the group, including our galaxy, are redshifted with respect to M31, indicating it to be the source from which the rest were ejected as young, high-energy objects at some time. So, when gazing at the immense disk of M31, now about a million light-years away, familiar from almost every astronomy book, we're looking back at our "parent" galaxy—and indeed, we see M31 as having a slight negative redshift, or "blueshift," indicating it to be older.

  The next nearest major group to us is the M81 group, again centered on the same kind of massive Sb spiral galaxy as M31. Once more, every major companion to M81 is redshifted with respect to it. In fact there are many clusters like the M31 and M81 groups, which together form the Local Supercluster. At its center one finds the Virgo Cluster, which consists of the full range of morphological galaxy types, the smaller ones showing a systematic redshift with respect to the giant spirals. Apart from M31, only six other major galaxies show a negative redshift. All six are in the Virgo Cluster and consist of giant spiral types of galaxy, marking them as the older and originally dominant members. It's quite possible, therefore, that these are the origin of M31 and our entire Local Group. So with Virgo we are looking back at our "grandparent."

  On a final note, all the way down, this hierarchy has exhibited the pattern of new objects being produced in pairs. The Virgo Supercluster itself, viewed in terms of the configuration of its dominant originating galaxies and the clusters of groups they have spawned, turns out to be a virtual twin of the Fornax Supercluster, seen from the Southern Hemisphere.

  What Happens to the Distances?

  If redshift isn't a measure of a recessional velocity at all, and hence not of distance either, what does this do to the scale of distances that has been constructed, mapping structures out to 10 billion or more light-years away? Although the observational evidence has been there for twenty years, conventional astronomy has never really accepted that the redshifts are quantized, and has tried
strenuously to find arguments to show that there is no quantization. Quantized means that the values are not continuous through the range like heights of points on a hill from bottom to top, but occur in a series of jumps like a staircase. Since, in general, an object can be moving in any direction relative to us, the radial components of the velocities, i.e., the part of the motion that is directly toward or directly away (which is what the Doppler effect measures) should, if redshift indicates velocity, come in all values. Hence, the conventional theory can't allow it not to.

  If redshift correlates with galaxy ages, then what quantization would imply is that the ejections of new generations of proto-galaxies in the form of quasars occur episodically in bursts, separated by periods of quiescence—rather like the generations of cell division in a biological culture. This fits with the kind of way we'd imagine a cascade model of the kind we've sketched would work. It also has the interesting implication that interpreting the redshift as distance instead of age would give the appearance of galaxies occurring in sheets separated by empty voids, which of course is what the conventional picture shows.

  So what happens to the immense distances? it appears that they largely go away. Arp's studies indicate that on an age interpretation basis, the Local Supercluster becomes a far more crowded place than is commonly supposed, with all of the quasars and other objects that we feel we know much about existing within it, and not very much at all beyond. So suddenly the universe shrinks back to something in the order of the size it was before Hubble (or, more correctly, the Hubble advocates who grabbed his constant and ran with it) detonated it. No wonder the Establishment puts Arp in the same league as the medieval Church did Giordano Bruno.

  What Causes Redshift? Machian Physics

  and the Generalization of GRT

  Through the last several pages we've been talking about a hierarchy in which redshift correlates inversely with the ages of galaxies and other cosmological objects—i.e., as redshift increases, they become younger. Is it possible, then, to say what, exactly, redshift is indicating? In short, what causes it?

  Isaac Newton performed an experiment in which he suspended a pail containing water on a twisted rope. When the pail is released it spins, and the centrifugal force causes the water to pile up toward the sides, changing the shape of the surface from flat to curved. The question is, in an otherwise empty universe, how would the water "know" whether to assume a flat surface or a curved one? In other words, what determines rotation—or for that matter, accelerations in general? Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist who lived around the turn of the twentieth century, argued that the only sense in which the term has meaning is with respect to the "fixed," or distant stars. So the property an object exhibits when it resists changes of motion—its "inertial mass"—arises from its interacting with the total mass of the universe. It "senses" that the rest of the universe is out there. Einstein believed that Mach was correct and set out with the intention of developing GRT on a fully Machian basis, but somewhere along the way it turned into a "local" theory.

  Jayant Narlikar is director of the Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, and has collaborated with Fred Hoyle and others in looking deeply at some of the fundamental issues confronting physics. In 1977 he rewrote the equations of GRT in a more general form, yielding solutions in which mass is not a constant but can take the form of a quantity that increases with time. 62 Now, the way mathematics is taught is that the proper way to solve an equation is to derive the general form first, and then make any simplifications or approximations that might be appropriate to a particular problem. The approximations that Aleksandr Friedmann used in 1922 in solving the GRT equations to produce the expanding universe solution were made in such a way as to force any changes in mass to be expressed in the geometry of the situation instead. This is what leads to the models involving the curved spacetime that helps give relativity its reputation for incomprehensibility, and which science-fiction writers have so much fun with. But with the full range of dynamical expressions that permit mass to vary, curved spacetime isn't needed.

  According to Narlikar's version, a newly created particle, new to the universe, begins its existence with zero mass. That's because it doesn't "know" yet of the existence of any other mass out there, which is necessary for it to begin exhibiting the properties of mass. Its "awareness" grows as an ever-widening sphere of interaction with other masses, and as it does so the particle's own mass proceeds to increase accordingly, rapidly at first and leveling off exponentially. Note, this isn't the same process as pair production in an accelerator, which is matter conversion from already existing (and hence "aged") energy. It represents the introduction of new mass-energy into the universe, induced in the vicinity of concentrations of existing matter—in the form of short-lived "Planck particles," which according to quantum mechanical dynamics rapidly decay into the more familiar forms.

  This, then, is what's going on in the nuclei of energetic galaxies like Seyferts. New matter is coming into existence and being ejected at high velocities because of its low initial mass. As the mass increases it slows to conserve momentum, forming the sequence of quasars, BL Lac Objects (highly variable radio and X-Ray sources transitional between quasars and more regular galaxies), BSOs, and the like, eventually evolving into the galaxy clusters that we see. The universe thus grows as a pattern of new generations appearing and maturing before giving rise to the next, unfolding from within itself. This is certainly no more bizarre than a Big Bang that has all the matter in the universe being created at once in a pinpoint. Furthermore, its fundamental process is one of continual production and ejection of material, which is what's seen everywhere we look, unlike exotic mechanisms built around black holes whose function is just the opposite. And to survive as a theory it doesn't have to depend on the burying and suppression of observational data.

  But here's the really interesting thing. Consider an electron in some remote part of the universe (in the Local Supercluster if that's all there is to it), that's still relatively new and therefore of low mass. If it has joined with a nucleus to become part of an atom, and if it makes a transition from one energy state to another, the energy of the transition will be less than that of the same transition measured in a laboratory here on Earth, because the mass involved is less. Thus the emitted or absorbed photon will be lower in energy, which means longer in wavelength, i.e., redder. So the correlation between the age hierarchy and the redshift hierarchy is explained. The reason why young objects like quasars have high redshifts is that high redshifts mean exactly that: recently created matter. Redshifts don't measure velocities; they measure youth, decreasing as matter ages. And for objects that are even older than the massive, luminous spiral that we inhabit, such as its parent, Andromeda, or the dominant galaxies in Virgo that are of the generation before that, it becomes a blueshift.

  The God of the Modern Creation Myth

  We've looked briefly at several alternatives that have been developed to the Big Bang model of cosmology that dominates the thinking of our culture at the present time. In many ways the alternatives seem better supported by the way reality is observed to work at both the laboratory and astronomical scale. Certainly, some of the alternatives might appear to be in conflict; yet in other ways they could turn out to be complementary. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I doubt if anyone has.

  The Alfvén-Lerner plasma universe builds larger structures up from small, while Arp-Narlikar's cascade of "mini-bangs" produces enlarging, maturing objects from compact, energetic ones. Conceivably they could work together, the magnetic fields and currents of the former shaping and ordering into coherent forms the violently ejected materials that would otherwise disperse chaotically.

  Paul Marmet's molecular hydrogen produces a redshift that increases with distance, preserving the conventional scale and structure without involving expansion velocities or a finite time. But this could be compatible with an age-related redshift too. Quasars appear to be enveloped i
n extremely fuzzy, gaseous clouds. If this comes with the matter-creation process, subsequent sweeping and "cleaning up" of the area by gravity could give an initially high absorption redshift that reduces with time. Nothing says that the redshift has to be the result of one single cause. It could be a composite effect, with several factors contributing.

  Some critics assert that Lerner's electrical forces simply wouldn't be strong enough to confine stars in their orbits and hold galaxies together. Marmet points out that the existence of ten times as much virtually undetectable molecular hydrogen as the measured amount of atomic hydrogen—readily attainable by his estimation—would provide all the gravity that's needed, without resorting to exotic forms of "missing mass." And another possibility is that the law of gravitation assumed to be universal but which has only been verified locally could turn out to be just an approximation to something more complex that deviates more with increasing distance.

  The point is that enormous opportunities surely exist for cross-fertilizations of ideas and a willingness to consider innovative answers that admit all the evidence, instead of a closed-minded adherence to sacred assumptions that heretics deny on pain of excommunication. Surely it's a time for eclecticism, not ecclesiasticism. Maybe the metaphor is more than superficial.

  We noted at the outset that there seems to be a historical correlation between creation-type cosmologies being favored at times when things seem in decline and gods are in vogue, and unguided, evolutionary cosmologies when humanity feels in control and materialism prevails. Well, the philosophy dominating the age we currently live in is probably about as reductionist and materialist as it gets. It seems curious that at a time when an ageless plasma universe or a self-regenerating matter-creation universe should, one would think, be eagerly embraced, what has to be the ultimate of creation stories should be so fiercely defended. An age that has disposed of its creator God probably more thoroughly than any in history produces a cosmology that demands one. The throne is there, but there's nobody to sit on it.