I don't think that quasars (or BL Lacs) grow into galaxies. I think that they are exotic stars, in the same category as black holes, pulsars, and white dwarfs.Lloyd wrote:I didn't notice you mention anything about quasars accreting matter and growing into galaxies until now.
My understanding of this is that when scientists first observed quasars, they naively misinterpreted the power output as being greater than that of a typical giant galaxy (because they didn't consider that the energy was mostly in a tight beam, and they assumed that all of the recessional velocity was from the Big Bang, where redshift = distance). So they called them quasi-stellar objects, with the properties of a star, but at a scale that exceeds all of the limits of stellar theory. Better telescopes revealed smaller stars clustered around the quasars, forming elliptical galaxies. So the quasars got demoted to "active galactic nuclei". Then Arp said that he had found quasars associated with ellipticals (despite the redshift differences), but the quasars were not in the centers of the ellipticals. If we let quasars retain their galactic status, then if they are not in the centers of ellipticals, they must be proto-galaxies. The mainstream still considers quasars to be pretty much synonymous with AGNs, while Arp et al. call them proto-galaxies. But I'm further demoting quasars, all of the way down to just individual stars. If there are other stars in the vicinity, that doesn't mean that they came out of the quasar, or even that the quasar scavenged them from the intergalactic medium. It just means that other stars condensed in the general vicinity, for roughly the same reasons, but perhaps on a smaller scale.
I dunno.Lloyd wrote:Your idea that quasars are tokamak stars on highly elliptical orbits around ellipsoid AGNs seems to make some sense, but I wouldn't think that an orbit could extend 2 million lightyears away. Do you think so?
A large electrostatic/gravitational source, such as a quasar, could pull in stuff from its surroundings, some of which could contribute to the size of the quasar itself, while other stuff could persist in orbit around the quasar, forming a stellar cluster. But going from a stellar cluster to a galaxy will take a long time!Lloyd wrote:By the way, if you're right about other stars being on elliptical orbits too, why couldn't the quasars collect them into galaxies?
"Pairs" might be reading too much into it, as if they were created together, and then each went its own way. I have a different concept of it. In a giant elliptical galaxy, there are billions of stars in elliptical orbits around the center. A very small percentage of these are exotic stars, with their beams pointed straight at us. The most powerful of these are called quasars. Some of them are coming toward us, and are blueshifted, while others are going away, and are therefore redshifted. For a given distance from the center, the -shifting is the same, whether it's blue or red, while the greatest -shifting is nearest to the center, and the least -shifting is furthest from the center. If the quasars are in elliptical orbits, the velocities are the greatest nearest the center, and the least out at the far end of the orbit. This will produce -shifting that will vary with distance from the center. In a large enough sampling, there will be roughly equal quantities of stars coming toward us and going away from us. But that doesn't mean that they are "created in pairs".Lloyd wrote:You don't seem to have accounted yet for the fact that quasars tend to exist in pairs on opposite sides of central galaxies and the pairs tend to have the same redshifts.
I think that we just know where they are now, and whether they getting closer or further away, by the -shifting. But the Doppler effect doesn't give us any information on lateral movement, and I think that in our lifetimes, these things won't move far enough to plot the trajectories.Lloyd wrote:Are they able to tell which direction each quasar is moving with respect to each other?
The evidence is that the Universe is full of filaments, and stars tend to be found... guess what... in filaments. So it isn't necessarily that stars "manage to get within such filaments". It could be just that stars tend to form wherever matter is found. The real question is, "What forms the filaments?" Gravity doesn't prefer filaments, and hydrostatics hates them. So this is definitely evidence of electromagnetism. One hypothesis is that it's electrodynamics (i.e., z-pinches). But I don't think that this isn't correct. If both positive and negative charges are traveling in the same direction, like charges get pushed together, and opposite charges get pushed apart. This doesn't cause condensation. Rather, it causes the reduction of condensed matter to plasma. If positive and negative charges are traveling in opposite directions, they'll both get pinched together. But the combined relativistic velocities will result in extremely violent collisions, producing extreme temperatures that will preclude condensed matter. Either way, I don't see how z-pinches will do the job. So I'm going with electrostatics, because that looks like it's going to work, and because it appears to be the only remaining possibility. The "like-likes-like" force can pull matter together. If there is also a tensile force acting on the matter, the matter will be drawn into filaments. Within the filaments, the same LLL force can then finish what it started, and create stars that look like beads on a string.Lloyd wrote:They're promoting the EU theory that stars form within Birkeland current filaments due to magnetic z-pinches of the filaments.