Halton Arp’s Universe

A lighthearted stroll through an alternative cosmology

GAAC, Spring 2010

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

“There is now a fashionable set of beliefs regarding the workings of the universe, greatly publicized as the Big Bang, which I believe is wildly incorrect”.

“But in order to enable people to make their own judgments about this question, we need to examine a large number of observations. Observations in science are the primary and final authority.”

Arp, Seeing Red

A quasi-stellar radio source (quasar) is a very energetic and distant galaxy with an active galactic nucleus. They are the most luminous objects in the universe.

Quasars were first identified as high- redshift point sources. This means that they are very distant.

Arp has photographs of many pairs of high redshift quasars that are symmetrically located on either side of what he insists are their parent, low redshift galaxies. 

He claims that these pairings occur much more often than the probabilities of random placement would allow. 

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

Continuous Spectrum

Absorption Lines

The relativistic Doppler formula (where v is expressed as a fraction of the speed of light, v/c) is expressed as-

                   z = ,/ 1 + v/c  - 1         1 -  v/c  which provides this equation-   v/c = (z + 1)^2  - 1         (z + 1)^2 + 1      therefore if z = 0.05   v/c = (0.05 + 1)^2  - 1 = 0.04875 of c        (0.05 + 1)^2 + 1

NGC3516 – Seyfert Galaxy

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift• Seeing is Believing• Gravitational

Lensing• Point Spread

Function

Tonight’s Program:

1) “Objects which appear young are aligned on either side of eruptive objects. This implies ejection of protogalaxies.”

2)  ”The youngest objects appear to have the highest redshifts. This implies that intrinsic redshift decreases as the object ages.”

3) “As distance from the ejecting central object increases, the quasars increase in brightness and decrease in redshift. This implies that the ejected objects evolve as they travel outward.” 

* Arp, Seeing Red

Arp 92

The Hubble Space Telescope photographs of NGC 4319 and Markarian 205 posted by NASA have always looked suspiciously underexposed to me, especially compared to those made in the past by other telescopes.  But I have demonstrated that using some basic image editing tools it is very easy to make these dim pixels highly visible, thus exposing the connecting bridge of matter.

NASA photo of NGC4319 & Mark 205

NGC 4319 is 80 million light-years from Earth. Markarian 205 is more than 14 times farther away, residing 1 billion light-years from Earth.

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

“Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate One thing at least is certain, light has weightOne thing is certain and the rest debateLight rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight.”

-- Arthur Eddington

Einstein with Eddington, 1919

Distant Object Galaxy Cluster Image

Unexceptional 15th magnitude galaxy (with a redshift z=0.0394) whose nucleus shows the spectrum of a high-redshift quasar (z=1.695). 

• Introducing Halton Arp

• Redshift

• Seeing is Believing

• Gravitational Lensing

• Point Spread Function

Tonight’s Program:

 An overlay of a false-color optical image and the X-ray intensity contours of a typical cluster, Abell 426. The presence of many galaxies and the extended nature of the X-ray emission can be seen.

Galaxy NGC 4319

Putative bridge

Quasar Markarian 205