2023-04-18 17:07:59
Halton Arp was a brilliant American astronomer who thought his observations of exotic galaxies challenged the Big Bang theory. He thus compiled an atlas of hundreds of these objects on which the Hubble telescope had made several interesting zooms. It’s James-Webb’s turn to take over today and it begins with infrared observations of the Arp 220 galaxy.
It is numbered 220 in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and is more than 100 times brighter than the Milky Way in the infrared. Arp 220 is one of those irregular galaxies which are therefore neither spirals nor ellipticals in the Hubble galaxy classification. Located about 250 million light-years from the Milky Way in the direction of the constellation Serpens, Arp 220 is a typical example of what is called in English a ultra-luminous infrared galaxy (Ulirg) and it is even the closest known ultra-bright infrared galaxy.
It is therefore a target of choice for instruments Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri) of the James-Webb telescope which has just renewed the gaze that the noosphere already had on it today with the Hubble telescope. This had previously revealed what appears to be two galaxy cores about 1,200 light-years apart, suggesting that Arp 220 was the product of a collision followed by a merger of two galaxies that began there. about 700 million years ago. Observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory also revealed the presence of two supermassive black holes in these cores.
Arp 220, an example of Halton Arp’s catalog of exotic galaxies
This scenario is also perfectly compatible with the irregular character of Arp 220 with filamentary structures that can be interpreted as currents and star tails caused by the reciprocal tidal forces of the two galaxies during the collision. This collision causing shock waves, causing collapses of interstellar clouds, it is also understood why the galaxy has a large number of young stars shining brightly in the infrared dust. In addition, these collapses are the source of almost 200 huge open star clusters in a dense and dusty region about 5,000 light-years in diameter. The amount of gas in this tiny region is equal to the amount of gas in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
For the record, as previously indicated, Arp 220 is part of L’Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, also commonly called “Atlas Arp”, the astronomical catalog showing particular galaxies that we owe initially to the late American astronomer Halton Arp (1927-2013). He first published it in 1966, and when he died he listed 338 galaxies.
The pair of interacting galaxies collectively called Arp 143. The pair contains the star-forming distorted spiral galaxy NGC 2445 on the right, along with its minus companion, NGC 2444, on the left. © NASA, ESA, STScI, and J. Dalcanton (Center for Computational Astrophysics/Flatiron Inst., UWashington)
As Futura had already explained, Halton Arp, like Fred Hoyle, Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, remained an opponent of the Big Bang theory from the late 1960s (despite the discovery of cosmic radiation) until his death. He questioned, like Hoyle, the interpretation of the spectral shift according to the Hubble-Lemaître law in terms of the expansion of space.
This shift had to have another interpretation, for example within the framework of a theory of tired light, involving a continual loss of energy of the photons emitted by the stars with the distance they travel without this loss corresponding to a shift towards long wavelengths, therefore from blue to red, is due to the continual and accumulated dilation of the wavelengths of the photons due to the expansion of space during their journey.
Galaxies that do not invalidate the Big Bang theory
The tired light theory was however untenable, as the great Russian cosmologist Yakov Zeldovich quickly showed for the first time. According to the known laws of physics, any loss of energy according to the theory of tired light would imply a random loss of momentum for the photons by interaction with their environment, for example intergalactic dust, so that the images of the stars and galaxies would be more and more degraded with distance, which is absolutely not observed.
Moreover, as explained by cosmologiste Ned Wright, the relativistic expansion of space implies that the time of evolution of the light curve of the explosions of supernovae must appear dilated according to a very precise law, a dilation that cannot be predicted by any theory of tired light. However, not only has the phenomenon and the predicted law been observed, but the disagreement between the theory of tired light and the observations is 11 sigma, as the researchers say in their jargon. It is a colossal disagreement.
Arp was troubled by the fact that some of the objects in his catalog showed galaxies interacting or, at the very least, which appeared so probably because of their closeness on the celestial vault. But these galaxies had different spectral shifts, contradicting their seemingly close associations involving distances similar to the Milky Way. Quite logically, Harp deduced that this refuted the standard theory of spectral shifting. A well-known example is that of Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of 5 galaxies located in the constellation Pegasus and first observed by French astronomer Édouard Stephan in 1878. In fact, only 4 galaxies are truly interacting, and as in all the other cases which troubled Harp, it was possible to show that the differences in offset were indeed due to different spatial distances and the associations on the celestial vault were simple asterisms like the constellations.
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