Present day explanations for the beginnings of the universe have several progenitors which include Einstein. However, Edwin Hubble an astronomer who noted the red shift in light of certain galaxies and stars was given the credit, and hence present day Big Bang Cosmology is nearly synonymous with the phrase Hubble’s Law that describes an expanding universe. His key observation was that the observed redshift of certain objects implied their rapid acceleration away from the observer.
Redshift is a doppler effect as it is applied to light. The shift in light’s frequencies are presumed to shift red when it is accelerating away from us. This idea took the astronomic community by storm and 90 plus years since that observation it is now firmly established as the bedrock of current Cosmology.
This post is about the mentioning the increasingly political lengths proponents of the Hubble Law go to in order to denigrate or suppress observations of others that might conflict with their orthodoxy, as well as highlight a key astronomical phenomenon that appears to directly conflict with Hubble’s Law. This note is also dedicated to the memory of Halton Arp whose observations not only inspired many to question the Big Bang, but got him banned from many U.S. based astronomical circles and positions. He died in 2013, but lived long enough to get some good punches in! It is also interesting to note that even Edwin Hubble, after whom Hubble’s Law is named, said near the end of his career that perhaps red shift isn’t the main indicator of acceleration away from us. Despite that Big Bang remains as orthodoxy. Until recently I also thought the Big Bang was gospel. I’m having to seriously rethink that.
One of the key things that aggravated Alton Arp, and Hilton Ratcliffe, another astronomer critical of the orthodoxy of Hubble’s Law is that real life observations of astronomical phenomenon take a secondary, even tertiary place in their defense of orthodoxy. We’ll illustrate this in the observation of quasars in nearby space (as opposed to deep space where quasars are supposed to proliferate).
Arp photographed hundreds of galaxies and began to wonder why so many of them appeared to have companion quasars associated with them. He began to postulate that these active galaxies might have ejected the quasars. (AGN, active galaxy nuclei is a real technical term!). What is so ground shaking about that surmise is that here are two close by objects that have vastly different redshifts with the quasar’s redshift many many times that of it’s nearby galaxy. Geoffrey Burbridge noted “If you see two objects close together with very different redshifts, you have one of two explanations. One is that a large part of the redshift has nothing to do with its distance. The other is that it is an accident.”
Guess which explanation was offered up to explain away Arp’s observations? Yup, it is an accident of juxtaposition and Arp’s supposition is false. With that many of his papers were denied publication in astronomy journals. He was denied further access to telescope time to make further observations. Even when his photographs seeming showed a connection between the objects, they were either published with out the interconnection showing, or not published at all.
These findings bring so many things into re-consideration: Age of the universe, distance to furthest objects, integrity of the astronomical powers that be. We have literally lost what was a key measuring stick of distance.
Arp eventually moved to Leipzig, Germany where he was given access to equipment that specialized in Xray photography. In a strange twist of fate, photographs taken this way showed the interconnection even clearer exacerbating the difficulty in explaining away this oddity from the Big Bang’s point of view.
Books by Halton Arp and Hilton Ratcliffe flesh out this story without using too many technical terms. In fact Arp insists if the terminology gets too confusing, don't get lost in it, just LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPHs.
