Newly Discovered Quasar Defies Age of Universe | Hacker News Reader

Newly Discovered Quasar Defies Age of Universe

techzwn.com

57 pointsjjp999923 comments

http://www.szot.eu/

tl;dr Big bangs are fueled by annihilation. Matter-antimatter asymmetry is local. Most of the matter always existed as blackholes. Existence, space and time didn't start at Big Bang. Observable universe is extremely small part of whole space.

Awaiting to have a crackpot index assigned. ;-)

Nah, you are no crackpot. That is as good as any other theory I have heard. :)

Thanks. Now to the hard part: Design an experiment. :-)

> Observable universe is extremely small part of whole space.

Inflation theories actually make this very statement and have good reasons behind it.

I am not a physicist, but...

Does the matter/antimatter distinction have any relevance to black holes? I though that they erased all features of the mass that they swallowed.

What does it mean for an object to be composed "mainly of antimatter" as opposed to "completely of antimatter"? Surely an object that is "mainly antimatter" will rapidly turn into an object that is entirely antimatter plus some photons.

"The quasar was found after five years of searching through databases containing images of millions of objects."

sounds intriguing... How available is the survey data? Last time i checked for example - the GRB observatory in South America - that one publishes only small percent of the data.

while not the same project, Google 'sdss casjobs', register, and start doing some cosmic sql queries!

It's mostly public. The data used for this discovery was taken from UKIDSS, an IR sky survey (you can get data here: http://surveys.roe.ac.uk:8080/wsa/SQL_form.jsp) and SDSS, an optical survey (you can get data here: http://www.sdss3.org/dr8/data_access.php). All SDSS data is available to the public. UKIDSS data can only be accessed by ESO member countries for the first year, but after that becomes public. (I worked on a similar project to discover a high-z quasar as a summer research project in college, though unfortunately with less success.)

Why does this defy the age of the universe?

There wasn't enough time for the black hole to grow as large as this one is (was). If X is how much material it would consume per billion years, it is sitting 4X when you universe is only two billion years old and should have only been 2X (note: I don't know the actual magnitude of the numbers, but am basing my numbers off the six-foot kindergartner comment).

In this case I'd wager that our model of how quickly quasars can form is probably what needs revising, rather than the age of the universe.

But, y'know, standard-issue overly-dramatic science-journalism headline.

Yeah. The age of the universe is known pretty solidly. Galaxy formation theories on the other hand are still pretty shaky.

I'm not sure that's at all true. The amount of time since the big bang is certainly well known, but who's to say that actually was the beginning.

Who's to say? It's by definition - the "Big Bang" was the moment when the universe,time and space, came into existence. Neither existed before that. To talk about "before" the Big Bang isn't even correct - there is no "Before".

No, the big bang was an event that we know happened, but we don't know that it's when time, space, or the universe came into existence nor is it defined as such. Big bangs could happen over and over. Don't confused the known event, for the theory that it was the beginning, they are different things.

It doesn't necessarily. It is an object that due to current models of quasar formation should not exist at that point in time. This means that there is something wrong with those or current estimations of the age of the universe. The latter is less likely.

yes, we are trying to estimate the behavior, mass, luminocity, etc... of the objects in the Universe that was several times smaller than it is now, ie. the space itself was much more "dense" (for lack of a better word) and the matter "warmer" - was the Universe behaving like it does today? We know that the fundamental forces behave differently ( at least quantitatively-wise ) when the matter is "hot". So our estimations may be several orders of magnitude wrong, and finds such as this help to adjust our theories and estimates.

Are we sure that these large objects aren't being "lensed" into looking further than they are?

Isn't the third possibility that these quasars are illusory?

IIRC lensing won't produce the red shift observed.

If lensing (through one or more lenses) resulted in a significantly longer path for the light, would it not make sense for an object to seem older than it is (i.e. have greater redshift)?

Lensing will make light travel through only a very slightly longer path. At most the difference will only be a few light-weeks. (This is seen in objects which have multiple images. Occasionally you will see one of the images flare up for some reason, and a few days later the other image will flare up.) It won't be anywhere near long enough for cosmological effects like redshift to be important. The main effect of gravitational lensing is just to increase the apparent luminosity of the lensed object.

Thanks for the clarification. I was imagining a situation that would require tens of degrees of deflection, with two or three lenses zig-zagging light across a cosmologically significant distance.

That's correct, lensing won't affect the observed redshift. It will, however, affect the observed luminosity of the quasar and make us perceive it to be more luminous than it really is. This would lead us to calculate a larger black hole mass. The lensing effect only goes as the square root of the magnification though, so you would need an extremely strongly lensed quasar to be able to explain the black hole mass. If that were the case, the lensing body would also be visible, which it is not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com