In a paper,1 just published, that looked for an association between putative parent galaxies and pairs of quasars, the authors found many such quasar families, suggesting that the association is real, and not just coincidental. They used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data release 7 and the 2MASS (Two Micron All Sky Survey) Redshift Survey (2MRS) Ks ≤ 11.75 mag data release to test for the physical association of candidate companion quasars with putative parent galaxies by virtue of Karlsson periodicity in quasar redshifts.
Karlsson proposed that quasars have an intrinsic non-cosmological redshift component which comes in discrete values (zK = 0.060, 0.302, 0.598, 0.963, 1.410, …). However, to properly detect any physical association the candidate quasar redshift must be transformed into the rest frame of its putative parent galaxy’s redshift. (This assumes either the parent galaxy redshift is cosmological or if not that it is Hubble law related but not due to expansion of the universe.) Then the transformed redshift of the candidate companion quasar is associated with the closest Karlsson redshift, zK, so that the remaining redshift velocity component—the putative velocity of ejection away from the parent object—can be obtained. In this manner it is possible to detect a physical association, even in the case where parent galaxies have high redshift values. If this process is neglected no association may be found. Such was done in several papers, applied to large galaxy/quasar surveys, claiming to debunk the Arp hypothesis.
Figure 1: Detected families in a 4 square degree area centered at 09h00m00s+11d00m00s. The open circles are galaxies, the filled diamonds are quasars, with lines connecting each galaxy to its detected quasar family members. The object colours indicate stepped redshift increase from black to red over the redshift range 0.0 ≤ z ≤ 5.5. The central unshaded area shows the galaxies under examination and the entire area shows the candidate companion quasars.
In this new paper, the authors used the method described above, and the detected correlation was demonstrated to be much higher than just a random association. Many such associations were found. As an example in one instance, within one 4 degree area on the sky, 7 quasar families were found to be statistically correlated with parent galaxies. See Fig. 1 (right). The probability of this occurring by random chance was calculated as follows.
For a binomial distribution … the probability of 7 hits for one 4 square degree area is … = 1.089 × 10-9. Under these conditions, the detection of 7 families with this particular constraint set is extraordinary. [emphasis added]
Generally, the results of this paper are a confirmation of the quasar family detection algorithm described in Fulton and Arp (Astrophys. J. 754:134, 2012), which was used to analyze the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) and the 2dF Quasar Redshift Survey (2QZ) data sets. This means that using the SDSS and 2MRS data sets the correlation found in Fulton and Arp (2012) is further strengthened.
This means that to a very high probability, much higher than a random association, certain quasars are physically associated with lower redshift galaxies. The quasars are found in pairs or higher multiples of 2. The results further imply that these quasar redshifts indicate a real ejection velocity component and a large intrinsic non-velocity or non-cosmological redshift component. Continue reading
