

Newly Discovered Quasar Defies Age of Universe - jjp9999
http://techzwn.com/2011/06/distant-quasar-marks-the-brightest-object-ever-found-video/

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scotty79
<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. ;-)

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

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scotty79
Thanks. Now to the hard part: Design an experiment. :-)

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VladRussian
"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.

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splat
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.)

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j2d2j2d2
Why does this defy the age of the universe?

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cynest
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.

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r00fus
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?

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hartror
IIRC lensing won't produce the red shift observed.

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nitrogen
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)?

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splat
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.

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nitrogen
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.

