Cool gas answers riddle of galaxy growth (possibly solving the mystery of galactic proportions)

PARIS (AFP) – European astrophysicists said on Wednesday they could settle a mystery about how galaxies crank up in size, developing from proto-structures in the early Universe to the billion-star behemoths of today.

Analysis of ancient light, known as redshift, indicates that the first galaxies were formed nearly 13 billion years ago, about a billion years after the "Big Bang" that created the Universe.

They then dramatically fattened up to become the giant systems we see today, and the question is why.

Until now, many experts believed that galaxies increased in size by colliding with others, in the same way that a company can grow by merging with a competitor.

A gentler, incremental approach also works, under which a youthful galaxy sucks in cool interstellar gas as the raw material for making new stars, according to this argument.

A team of astronomers, reporting in the British journal Nature, put the idea to the test using a light-analysing spectrograph on Europe's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile's Atacama desert.

The group chose three very distant galaxies -- smoothly rotating discs, similar to the Milky Way -- in order to ensure that any buildup was not the result of a collision with other galaxies.

What they were looking for was a chemical signature of so-called heavy elements, or elements that are formed from the primordial gases of hydrogen and helium.

In all three cases, the sky-gazers found a patch close to the galactic centre that was a breeding ground for stars and had markedly fewer heavy elements.

Found it...on a thread about the Sun....:

Oct 01, 2004 Quasar in Front of Galaxy

***********************************EXCERPT*******************************************

October 3, 2003: the big bang was proved wrong. Again. And here is the proof (image above). The galaxy, NGC 7319, is a Seyfert 2, which means it is a galaxy shrouded with such heavy dust clouds that they obscure most of the bright, active nucleus that defines a normal Seyfert galaxy. This galaxy has a redshift of 0.0225. The tiny white spot is a quasar either silhouetted in front of the opaque gas clouds or embedded in the topmost layers of the dust. The redshift of the quasar is 2.114.

Why does this prove the big bang wrong? One of the two major foundations of the big bang is that redshift is proportional to distance. That means the larger the redshift of an object, the farther away it must be. The other major foundation of the big bang is that all redshift is a measure of velocity. Again, the larger the redshift of an object, the faster it is moving away from us. Combined, these two foundations become the expanding universe, which can be traced backwards to the big bang.

Look at the picture again. By the big bang principles, this quasar must be billions of light years farther from us than the galaxy, because its redshift is so much larger. And yet the galaxy is opaque, so the quasar must be near the surface of the dust clouds or even in front of them.

63 posted on Sun 22 Mar 2009 01:24:24 AM PST by Fred Nerks (fair dinkum!)

Dropping this link on here...

Seeing Red: Intrinsic redshifts, stable universe

**************************************EXCERPT INTRO*******************************************

Halton Arp's Seeing Red will completely change your cosmological views, even if you don't think you have cosmological views! Working entirely from observation, Arp sketches a picture of an eternal, infinite, stable universe which continually "unfolds from many points within itself."

Arp is an observational astronomer. He won his spurs as a graduate student in the 1950s measuring thousands of images of the stars in globular clusters, work which helped lead to derivations of the ages of those stars and thus of our Milky Way galaxy. He went on to compile "Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies," which became a classic. His familiarity with extragalactic objects, those beyond our Milky Way, is probably unmatched.

For about 30 years Arp's most important observations have been under academic ban; they contradict cosmological orthodoxy. That orthodoxy has denied observing time on the big telescopes to Arp and others who make discordant observations. It has excluded their most important discoveries from major journals. As far as the popular press is concerned, this small heroic band of observers just don't exist; their observations go unreported.

If you thought that the hard sciences are immune to philosophical irrationalism, you thought wrong. Today's academic science is as wedded to obsolete dogma as the church of Galileo's time, and is equally willing to ignore observation.

About 10 years ago Arp wrote his first book: Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies. He hoped that a comprehensive presentation of the evidence would lead professional astronomers to turn their instruments on the many objects which contradict current theory. Arp's immediate purpose failed; his book became a list of topics and objects that professional astronomers avoided at all cost. Like the bishops of Galileo's time, professional astronomers refused to look through the telescopes. This, of course, was a major scientific scandal and (of course!) it escaped the notice of the establishment press.

Still, Arp's first book was a success in a surprising way: it brought the suppressed observations to an audience of independent thinkers. Arp started getting letters from them: "from scientists in small colleges, in different disciplines, from amateurs, students and lay people." These were people who really looked at pictures, and who formed judgments on the evidence. Arp's first book brought them the evidence which then existed.

In the past 10 years, and despite academic opposition, the body of evidence has continued to grow. Arp's latest book, "Seeing Red" brings these developments to an even larger group of independent thinkers, some of whom will be the astronomers of tomorrow.

"Seeing Red" bears comparison with Galileo's "Starry Messenger." Just as Galileo's report of the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter demolished the geocentric theory of the universe, Arp reports observations that demolish the expanding universe/Big Bang theory. Just as Galileo's observations pointed to radically new physics, so do the observations from extragalactic astronomy.

Redshift

The key point at issue between orthodoxy and observation is the interpretation of redshift.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.