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”Sometimes it's better not to know one wrong thing than to know a hundred things that are right.”
That was a favorite saying of Halton Arp, an astronomer who pioneered the study of
discordant redshift galaxies. Stephan's Quintet is a good illustration of this.
The Quintet is a closed group of five distorted galaxies that on first sight
appear to be interacting. Their arms are stretched and twisted and in some places
they appear to be intertwined. The two galaxies closest to each other seem to
be mashed together. They're often said to be colliding. The apparently larger galaxy at the
southeast side of the group has a spectrally measured redshift z=0.0026. Under the consensus conjecture that
redshift is a Doppler effect of the hypothetical expansion of the universe, this translates into a recessional index
velocity of around 800 kilometers per second. Three of the other four galaxies have
index velocities of 6,700 kilometers per second and red shifts of 0.0225. One of the two that appear mashed
together has an index velocity of 5,700 kilometers per second, a thousand
kilometers per second less, redshift of 0.019. Under the additional consensus conjecture that the index velocity
represents distance, the apparently larger galaxy is 250 million light years closer than the others. The two that
appear mashed together would be about 50 million light years apart, farther than
the larger appearing galaxy is from us. They appear together only by coincidence,
yet the consensus opinion is that they are in fact colliding. Another fact that's consistently
overlooked is that the bright H2 ionized hydrogen regions in the background
galaxies are about the same angular size as those in the foreground galaxy. Since
it's also believed that H2 regions tend to be of similar linear size, the consensus has simply ignored this fact.
Perhaps the assumed dark matter in the foreground galaxy can be assumed to be
positioned exactly right to magnify the H2 regions beyond, through selective gravitational lensing.
Long tails on both the foreground galaxy and the one immediately north of it, are
occasionally mentioned and then dismissed as due to complex interactions in the past.
The interactions must have been complex in the extreme to have affected the
foreground galaxy over a distance of 250 million light years. Knowing the one thing, that redshift can
only be a measure of distance, overrides all observations indicating that it's something else.
A seldom noticed bias of astronomy, perhaps caused by the tunnel effect of
its primary instrument, is a flight into tunnel vision. Attention is narrowed to
single objects, or even to parts of objects, and larger connections and contexts are overlooked.
So with the long tails. On deep images both tails trail off in parallel, far
toward an active large galaxy NGC 7331. Radio observations reveal a bridge of
radiation that follows the path of the tails and connects Stephan's Quintet with
the active galaxy. The bridge continues on the opposite side of NGC 7331 to a
cluster of quasars, which coincidentally have similar redshifts to the high redshift members of the Quintet. The
bridge also appears on X-ray images. This is obviously another instance of paired ejection from an active galaxy
and plasma astronomers would call the bridge an intergalactic Birkeland current.
Of course, what's obvious to one eye is not to another, because eyes tend to see
what they believe. It's no shock that consensus eyes refuse to see ejection pairs and their connections. To
acknowledge those connections, would be to falsify the belief in redshift as an
indicator of distance and by extension to falsify the Big Bang hypothesis. That would cause job losses for the
consensus of astronomers. A universe of quasars, ejected from active galaxies and
growing into companion galaxies, replaces the exploding Big Bang universe with a
birthing maternal universe of pregnant galaxies and their children. A similar consensus blind spot obscures
a high-redshift quasar that lies in front of that northern galaxy. According to its redshift, the quasar
should be billions of light years behind the galaxy. The galaxy is full of dust,
completely opaque, and therefore the quasar should be as invisible as dark matter.
The consensus opinion, is that the galaxy has a small tube of empty space through
it, that coincidentally aligns with the quasar along our line of sight. The galaxy also displays an energized
region, another Birkeland current, from its core to the quasar. When looking at this galaxy, consensus
astronomers blink in unison. A ridge of X-ray radiation is located between the background galaxies and the
foreground one. Consensus astronomers ascribe it to gas, heated by shock waves from the collision,
and one can't help but wonder what's colliding if the foreground galaxy is 250 million light years in front,
but at 70 million Kelvin the heating is truly shocking. Overlooked is the fact
that long before such a temperature is reached, gas has been fully ionized into
plasma in which electric and magnetic forces dominate. That then the ridge would be due to
double layers, and gas astronomers would be out of work. The 70 million figure is, like the
redshift velocity an index figure, an artifact of uncritical extrapolation
from gas theory. With a recognition of plasma behavior, the X-rays are
synchrotron radiation from high-speed electrons, accelerated across the strong
electric fields of double layers, and spiraling in magnetic fields. Since temperature is based on random
motions, and the electrons are not random, but aligned in a magnetic field, the concept of temperature is not even
relevant. A final consideration that appears not to have been mentioned before, concerns
this X-ray ridge. Stephan's Quintet is considered to be a compact cluster of
which several thousand are known. George Abel cataloged many of them before X-ray observations were possible.
A review of several of them shows similar ridges of X-ray radiation across their cores. Others show simply a spot.
If these compact clusters are fragmenting quasars, on their way to becoming companion galaxies around the
parent active galaxy from which they were ejected, the X-rays delineate a central pinch in the parent’s ejection
circuits. Ridges of radiation show up in clusters whose ejection circuits are inclined to
our line of sight. The spots result from our looking down the barrel of the discharge.
Arp commented in the book he wrote in 1987 about the discordant redshift controversy ‘Quasars, Redshifts and
Controversies’, ”What happened in the present case was typical in that more detailed
observations with new and advanced instruments were selectively interpreted
with old assumptions; the net result was loss of perspective and an actual
retrogression in scientific knowledge.” The loss of perspective with which
images from the new and advanced James Webb Space Telescope are being interpreted, confirm Arp's judgment.
The new images reveal connections between galaxies that ‘surprise’ astronomers and send them back to the
drawing board. But instead of finding new and advanced assumptions with which to draw a new and
advanced cosmology from a new and advanced perspective, they trace over the palimpsest of the old and obsolete.
The Electric Universe model is a step in the direction of recognizing a new universe of plasma connections.
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