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In the Big Bang model in the early universe, young galaxies were incredibly active
and their centers produce fast plasma jets that stretch for incredible distances.
When the jets point towards Earth, these are called blazars.
Within the jets, the plasma travels at relativistic speed.
This, combined with the fact that the beams point towards us,
makes the blazars appear much brighter. They are very variable as well
and can undergo rapid changes in brightness in short timescales of
hours to days. These should be very common in the early universe.
But astronomers have struggled to find these objects,
suggesting that they are not as common as they thought they were.
In new research published, astronomers have managed to find a blazar at a very
high redshift, which they think makes it a whopping 13 billion years old.
This is a mere 800,000 years after the supposed Big Bang event.
They were able to image the jets that were moving away from the blazar,
using the VLBA, which is a system of 10 radio telescopes. This radio image revealed a broken
object, emitting brightly in radio, stretching out about 1,600 light years.
When they analyzed the data, they discovered that the plasma was traveling
at 75 percent of the speed of light. In the mainstream
model, these powerful jets are powered by supermassive black holes.
Material is drawn in towards this and forms what they term as an accretion disk. The exact process
whereby the jets are created, is still open to debate. But some
speculate that the intense magnetic fields twist in around the poles, and cause material
that is falling in to be ejected along these confined magnetic fields.
So, why are these blazars predicted to be more common than they are?
In the Big Bang model, the early universe needs to become ionized.
This is achieved through star formation and by the jets from these
active galactic nuclei. Early galaxies would have to create stars at a rapid rate,
in order to achieve this ionization. The center of these galaxies would also be
growing at an extraordinary rate. The masses of the detected active
galactic nuclei, at these high redshifts, would indeed indicate
a fast and efficient growth of these supermassive black holes. The problem is that this challenges the
standard formation model of supermassive black holes, and does not seem to be supported
by the lack of these high redshift blazars. So, how do they explain this then? They
speculate that there could be a mismatch, meaning that the more distant blazars
have different properties compared to the more local ones, and this could mean that the jets may be
moving slower. This in turn, may be due to a lower angular momentum of the gas in the accretion disk,
which in turn, allows the black hole to grow at a more rapid rate,
leading to more rapid star formation. So, is there a different way of looking at this?
Once more we must consider the question of distance and age. We have discussed many times that the
notion that redshift is only related to recessional velocity, and hence distance,
is wrong. Redshift can be caused by many additional factors. Halton Arp was an astronomer who spent
many years cataloging quasars and galaxies. He published many books on his finds and showed
clear evidence of a discrepancy between the measured distance, using the Tully- Fisher measure,
and the associated redshift of these galaxies. The Tully-Fisher relationship is a way
of relating luminosity of the galaxy with its distance. The further away these galaxies were, the
greater the difference between these two measures became. We also see this appear in the
quantization of this redshift, which has been interpreted as a great wall of galaxies,
which seem to stretch out in a great big sphere, away from us. He also drew a clear relationship
between quasars and the host galaxy, and showed that the redshift of these ejected objects
appears to reduce as they got further from the parent galaxy,
and their brightness increased. This means that we should be open to the idea
that redshift might indeed tell us something about the age of the object, but in the
opposite way. The higher the redshift, the younger the object might be,
or the more electrically active it is. As the redshift slowly decreases,
so the brightness will increase. The Big Bang postulates that all matter came into existence
at a specific point and that the universe itself has expanded from this point onwards.
The Electric Universe model, based on plasma cosmology, instead holds that there was no Big Bang
and that the universe is not expanding. The universe is filled with plasma that
has different types of charges and these tend to separate themselves via double layers,
or conform into large filaments, called Birkeland currents. These can carry vast amounts of plasma
from one area of high charge, to another area with a lower charge.
Along these filaments, a pinching effect can cause the material to become compressed.
These can form highly energetic plasmoids. This pinching will cause more material
to be drawn inwards, eventually forming what we see as a quasar.
These plasmoids are characteristic in having a toroidal structure
and having two beams of material ejected from the center along the axis.
This is confirmed by experiments carried out by Eric Lerner, and the papers written by him on how his
laboratory experiments could be scaled up, and may in fact be what mainstream calls
black holes or quasars. In this model, these beams would not be
continuous, but would be pulsed. This is exactly what we are seeing in these images.
The periodic ejection of blobs from the quasar are initially in the form of neutrons,
which decay into electrons and protons. These electrons get slowed more than the
protons in the galactic magnetic field. This means that the strong non-thermal
emission across the whole spectrum that they observe for this blazar,
is due to this process. This means the young quasar is electron-deficient,
so has a low mass and high redshift and a low brightness due to its diffuseness.
So why do we not see more high redshift blazars, if they are young newly formed objects? There are a
number of aspects to consider. When we see active jets from galaxies,
these tend to be from galaxies with a lower redshift compared to this blazar.
Halton Arp considered the majority of galaxies we observe were part of what he termed our local
supercluster, of which the Virgo cluster was the most distant part.
He thought that there may well be large areas of void in between these
large clusters, and it may not be possible to see objects from other parts of the universe.
He also speculated that the intrinsic redshift would step with distance
and he demonstrated this with our local group and the Virgo cluster.
So, is it possible that this blazar has a high redshift compared to local blazars,
because it is not from our supercluster? The reason these high redshift blazars
may be so rare, is because we can only just see the edge of the next supercluster.
Another option to consider is that there may well be a difference between a
quasar that was ejected from an active galaxy, and one that formed in the pinch of an
intergalactic Birkeland current. Could it be that one formed in the
latter, would be far more energetic, and have a much higher redshift,
and also be much rarer? There are many questions still to be answered and only
by keeping an open mind can we hope to start unraveling the mysteries of our universe.
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