"Discovery that quasars don't show time dilation mystifies astronomers"

[Towlie]

http://www.physorg.com/news190027752.html

This article showed up three day ago and sounds profound and important, yet I've been searching and haven't seen it echoed on any other news site. Do you think there's anything to it?

[Dancing David]

Hm I know that the recession causes the redshift but I don't know about time dialation. the bright ones will elucidate I am sure.

[jasonpatterson]

Well, if the researcher mentioned becomes famous over this, the woos will be happy. They'll finally have someone ACTUALLY named Hawkins to prove wrong!

[Towlie]

Well, if the researcher mentioned becomes famous over this, the woos will be happy. They'll finally have someone ACTUALLY named Hawkins to prove wrong!Sorry, I didn't understand that at first but now I do.

[sol invictus]

This looks to me like something that's probably explained by some redshift-dependent physics of AGNs, which are quite poorly understood. I doubt anyone will take it very seriously until there's a good model that predicts the time dependence of these quasars, and specifically that says it's not z-dependent in the right way to cancel the time dilation. Otherwise there's way too much uncertainty.

Besides, there are much more reliable cosmological sources that do exhibit time dilation, like supernova lightcurves.

[godless dave]

Are you mixing up Hawkins and Hawking?

Jason isn't. He's talking about all the people who do.

[fuelair]

Are you mixing up Hawkins and Hawking?

No, (he's?) pointing out the dipso's do that - often.:D

[John Jones]

No, (he's?) pointing out the dipso's do that - often.:D

There's a crackpot test somewhere on the internet where you win Kook points for making appeals to Stephen Hawkins or Alfred Einstien.

[rjh01]

Here is the original article http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123345710/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

[r-j]

Speaking of crackpots, wasn't there an astronomer who claimed quasars aren't really that far away? Something about the red shift not being valid for quasars, because the quasar itself distorted space time or something, making them just seem to be far away?

[Dancing David]

Speaking of crackpots, wasn't there an astronomer who claimed quasars aren't really that far away? Something about the red shift not being valid for quasars, because the quasar itself distorted space time or something, making them just seem to be far away?

Yup a very respectable astronomer Halton Arp. (http://www.haltonarp.com/)

I don't know what he makes of microquazars.

[edd]

What sol said. It's also worth pointing out that the physorg article makes it sound like Hawkins is postulating all these oddball ideas and nothing conventional - like the possibilities sol wrote about, whereas in the paper the very first idea suggested is a conventional one - a discussion of how the black hole's growth could come into it.

[DeiRenDopa]

Does anyone know if there's a copy of Hawkins' paper available online? One that's not behind a paywall that is; I look for a preprint in arXiv, but came up empty handed. Also, Hawkins is not new to this topic (he has published several other papers on it, over the years).

[edd]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1824

[Unlike a Bull]

Speaking of crackpots, wasn't there an astronomer who claimed quasars aren't really that far away? Something about the red shift not being valid for quasars, because the quasar itself distorted space time or something, making them just seem to be far away?

Yea, they just appear to be far away because of the huge distances between them and us.:rolleyes:

[Kwalish Kid]

It should be clear that in this paper the time dilation is not directly measured. Rather a statistical technique is used to see if there is a statistical difference in the recorded fluctuations of quasars over time that varies with redshift. As mentioned in the paper, there are a number of different explanations that might set the nature of these fluctuations.

[Towlie]

The story finally showed up on a second news source recognized by Google News (http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=83752), but that doesn't mean much since they cite the first site as their source.