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A team of astronomers, using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
have observed quasars behaving in a manner that completely upends conventional theory.
Using images from the Pan-STARRS survey, the scientists identified 1000 objects
that appear to vary in brightness over a period of just 10 years.
Among these objects were total of five galaxies that the team witnessed shape-shifting
into quasars in a seemingly impossibly short period of time.
The team also recorded a total of a dozen quasars
"shutting down in a period of hundreds of days"
rather than the hundreds of thousands of years required by standard theory.
A New Scientist report on these astonishing finding states:
"Astronomers expect quasars to use up their fuel and settle down into quiet galaxies
-- a process that should take hundreds of thousands of years.
So last year, when a dozen quasars were spotted
shutting down in just hundreds of days, it was a shock.
What's more, one quasar appear to turn on several years after turning off.
But it's not clear if the other four are turning on for the first time,
or if they are also flickering.
The real surprise is the timescale.
Previously, astronomers thought it should take thousands to millions of years
to funnel enough gas on to a supermassive black hole for it to spawn a quasar.
It definitely shouldn't take less than 10."
As one investigators states:
"This is a bit of an embarrassing moment for black hole and quasar scientists.
The conventional wisdom was found to be dramatically wrong."
However, on this series, Space News from the Electric Universe,
for nearly four years we have reported on dozens of similar discoveries
of so-called impossible celestial objects.
Yet real change in the theoretical sciences seem slow if not imperceptible.
Today, in the first of the series of Space News reports on this discovery,
Dr. Tom Wilson begins to explore some of the psychological reasons
why certain beliefs endure, even in the face of falsifying evidence.
This report relates to a topic I covered at the EU 2015 conference in the talk
"Siren Song of Certainty".
In it, I elaborated on the point that humans are essentially certainty junkies.
In the face of a dark and unknown cosmos we cling to certainties
to guide us and guard us from the fear of not knowing.
This is a critical psychological attribute of humans that we must recognize.
In our thousands of years of pondering the darkness that surrounds us and confronts us,
we have invented and elaborated on a myriad of certainties about the cosmos.
In all cases, thousands, millions of humans, just as smart and creative as we are now,
were certain that they were right.
But time passes and we move on to new certainties.
So, we must always be very cautious of being certain about anything.
After being so certain about so many things that were wrong,
really how can we not have gained some perspective
on this certainty dependency by this time?
Sciences, I've mentioned elsewhere, essentially are coping mechanism
to guard us against our weakness for certainty.
Replacing certainty with hypotheses, belief with falsifiable theory,
well, we are only human after all
and certainty creeps into science despite our best efforts.
Within cosmology, the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model is a very good example
of an idea that has attained a very high degree of certainty.
There are a couple key certainties that underpin
the elaborate mathematical superstructure of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model.
1, that gravity is the dominant force shaping the formation and evolution of the universe.
2, that redshift is the result of the expansion of the intervening space
between ourselves and distant objects,
i.e. redshift is a reliable indicator of cosmological distance.
Now the certainty surrounding these ideological underpinnings
is unassailable in the cosmological mainstream collective thought.
Now such certainty is an unhealthy force from a scientific perspective
and ultimately leads to surprise and consternation
when observations continue to contradict the strongly held beliefs.
Indeed, it is commonly known that humans
will continue to hold to strongly held certainties
in the face of any amount of contradictory observation,
and there's rather recent excellent book which is also excellently titled:
"On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not."
The neurologist Robert A. Burton states that certainty
arises from involuntary brain mechanisms
and like love or anger, functions independently of reason.
I find this a very fascinating insight that certainty
basically short-circuits rational thought processes,
clearly indicated in our behavior when it comes to trying to shake certainities.
So how does all this relate to the quasar observations?
I find quasars particularly interesting because we find in quasars
and the theory of how they evolve and function,
a phenomenon where the long-held certainties of the standard cosmological model
are most likely to completely break down.
Not just break down but lead to such obvious logical inconsistencies,
internal inconsistencies, that there is a glimmer of a hope
of shaking the dogmatic adherence to these certainties that I referred to.
So here is the essence of the breakdown that I'm alluding to.
As our observational techniques improve,
we are able to detect more and more quasars at high redshift.
Our sample size continues to increase dramatically.
The higher the redshift, the model requires it to be further and further away
and closer and closer to the time of the Big Bang.
But the further away they are, and are still detectable,
means they must be intensely energetic and ultraluminous.
X-ray and other wavelengths.
However, since gravity is the only tool in the cosmological toolbox,
it is now the consensus, and by consensus read certainty,
that these objects are powered by supermassive black holes
in association with an accretion disc.
Gas and matter from the accretion disk is mechanically heated
by gravitational forces generating the energy.
But the supermassive black holes,
we're talking about, are many billion solar masses.
Now the farther away quasars are, the closer they are to the time of the Big Bang
but how does such super massive objects
accrete so rapidly after the time of the Big Bang?
This leaves the natural logical inconsistencies between redshift,
gravity as the dominant force and Big Bang itself.
In essence, the certainties work against each other
to break the overall Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model.
And we see many reports of impossible quasars,
impossible by being too massive, that near to the Big Bang.
Impossible groups of quasars, impossible because
they constitute a group of objects too extensive.
That's violating the cosmological principle.
Impossible galaxies, impossible because they are too massive
and too fully formed after the Big Bang.
The word "impossible" isn't something applied by me but instead
appears in the actual reports of these objects in the science media.
These are all impossible based on our certainties
about how we think the universe works.
Now, like with the quasar that you mentioned,
opens a whole new line of impossible quasar attributes.
Quasars that turn on and off, far too rapidly according to the model.
Now that gravity is the only means to power quasars,
you need supermassive black holes and extensive accretion discs to power it.
But the accretion disk model comes with certain dynamical baggage.
The model demands that it takes hundreds of thousands of years
for quasars to quiet down to galaxies;
this is part of the evolution model that the Standard Model accepts.
Or indeed, thousands to millions of years for quasars to light up.
Here, the scientist Chelsea MacLeod and her colleagues
observed a dozen or so quasars shutting down on the scale of hundreds of days.
Indeed, some of these quasars essentially flickered
in very short order, in hundreds of days or years.
Now this is clearly inconsistent with the dynamics of an accretion disk model
and shake the related certainties about redshift and black holes.
As one person mentioned in the article, Eric Morganson of Harvard, said,
(just a quote):
"This is a bit of an embarrassing moment for black hole and quasar scientists.
The conventional wisdom was found to be dramatically wrong."
This is an example of the honest and genuine surprise
one all too often finds in association with quasar observations.
It's a measure of how the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter Model
certainties breakdown in the context of these particular objects.
And this is what I find fascinating about quasars.
It's the psychological aftermath of these impossible observations.
But the certainty persists, and this is a dramatic example
of a clear disproof of the accretion disk model.
But the inertia of belief in what quasars are and how they operate, remains.
Now, it is clear that absolutism is the enemy of reason.
Absolute certainty blocks rational thought processes.
Relying on our certainties with redshift and black holes
have clearly led to impossible interpretations.
As Arthur Conan Doyle wrote is his famous Sherlock Holmes books:
"Once you have eliminated the impossible,
what remains, however improbable, is likely the answer."
And I like that thought process.
So what is the improbable alternative
to the apparent impossible logical conclusions of black holes and red shift?
Well, possibly the idea of electrical currents following extensive plasma filaments.
The electrical behavior of plasma is well known in laboratories
and their behavior is associated with
the radiation of Gamma rays, X-rays, UV, down to the radio spectrum.
Now plasma behavior is also associated with sudden releases of tremendous energy.
This is energy that has been stored along the entire transmission line.
So, you get into electrical transmission line theory, which is also well known.
You would expect to see X-rays, UV and tremendous energy.
As a current density fluctuates, you would also see a variety of time constants,
faster to slow, in terms of the lighting up or extinguishing
of these various electrically driven objects.
We know there are current-carrying filaments extending from the Sun to the Earth
and from Jupiter to Io etcetera.
Current flow exists in space; it's been shown, and we accept that.
It's not as improbable as it was believed at the beginning of the 20th century.
What becomes improbable in mainstream thought
is the idea that there are massive current-carrying plasma filaments
operating at galactic and cosmological scales.
But this idea is actually rationally consistent with observations.
However improbable it might be relative to our certainties,
we must allow a rational reasoning mind to get past the unreasoning certainties
to follow the evidence and look for models that are consistent with observation,
wherever that might lead us.
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