Galactic Red Shifts May Be Quantized?

Maybe the whole universe is just a simulation. We're seeing the limits of the model.

Shhh! Not so loud, the High Programmers will see 'awareness of the simulation as a simulation' as an undesired bug and reboot the game.

It's known that galaxies are clustered. The 'Local Group', the Coma-Virgo cluster, and the M81 cluster are a few examples. So it makes sense that the redshift values would also be clustered. It seems odd to say they'd be quantized.

Of course it seems odd, but do go ahead and carefully read the entire texts on the links at your leisure. It appears that certain types of galaxies have the same red shift no matter where they are in the sky...really.

"Red shift differences between pairs group around 72, 144, and 216 km per second. Probability theory tells us that there are only a few chances in a thousand that such clumping is accidental. In 1982 an updated study of radio pairs and a review of close visible pairs demonstrated this same periodic pattern at similarly high significance levels."

http://cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/redshift.html

If you look at red shift differences between members of a galaxy pair, it would seem that, since they are the same distance from us, the difference in red shift is a doppler phenomenon due to their relative orbital motion. Overall expansion of the universe should have no effect.

Since we are not looking at a single pair, but a statistical average, possibly there is something in inter-galactic space that "comb filters" the signals we are looking at, thus giving the apparent effect of the shift being quantized.

Just my idea...

Your idea of a comb filter is I suppose plausible, but what exists that could present a comb filter in the 21 cm radio bandwidth?

Somehow the whole gist of the articles seems to have shifted to pairs that are in orbit with one another. That is not what I was getting at all, but that scattered around in space are galaxies not associated with each other that still have the same red shift, and the frequency shifts are clumped, not randomly variable (as would be with all these galaxies traveling at different speeds). And somewhere the case was made for a "static" universe once again.

I picked out the case of galaxy pairs because it removes a lot of variables such as universal expansion, hoping that the simplest case would shed some light on what is going on.

I still can't shake the idea of some kind of filtering action on the entire data set. I wonder if the entire data set was acquired with the same instrument, and were the values verified with independent measurements.

Possibly the sensitivity of the radio telescope could have variation with frequency due to something like an impedance mismatch. More measurements could be made at "peak" gain values, thus skewing results. (It wouldn't be the first time that a hardware problem produced unexpected results.) Or maybe the "comb filter" effect could be due to some unrecognized effect in the atmosphere.

I'm sure these factors and others would have been checked out by now. I was just throwing out some ideas. It's a very interesting problem.

"....I am not a cosmologist..." Neither am I. As anybody reading my previous posts on the subject will guess straightaway.

But I am not daunted by the lack of in-depth knowledge because I try to see things in terms of basic engineering principles in what I do know (or have a fair degree of confidence in knowing).

I think the Red Shift being due to an expanding universe is a 'nice' theory, but it could also be due to something in space that looks 'red'. It pervades space in the form a 'mist' but so thin that it is impossible to detect as a single unit, and hence completely invisible until the veil is millions of light year thick - where the deeper you go the more 'redder' it gets.

Dark Matter has been 'invented' to make existing theories work, and now introduced into the the equation to explain something missing. This could why space 'looks' red - and nothing to do with Doppler.

Thus it might provide an alternative explanation to the Red Shift. A Steady State universe would suit me - Personally I am not bothered either way - but it would be nice to hear my 'crank' theories of empty space have some substance after all.

In terms of C, I look upon it, not as a 'speed', but as a constant ratio of distance over time. C can't be 'exceeded' because it links with Einstein's 'space-time' concept, which means to go (apparently) faster than C you use distances measured from a different time scale.

Time itself is changing and in doing so gives rise to 'acceleration' (from t² in the presence of mass) that manifests itself as gravity.

The current day 'Einsteins' can do the sums.

Well, how does it "appear" red in visible light, infrared light, and in the microwave and RF spectrum? It does so by shifting the wavelength of known lines or pairs of lines in the atomic and molecular spectra. First, one must understand the discreet (non-continuous) natures of these lines as either emission spectra (in the case of some of the radio waves and other long wavelength radiation), or they appear as discreet absorption lines on a continuous background.

It is not the result of a whole band of the spectrum being absorbed that makes things appear "red". It is a wavelength shift in a carefully measured spectrum.

I appreciate your explanation but a bit out of my depth. I can't defend my novice view in terms finer points of your expert knowledge but we 'see' a shift that looks red, just as we 'see' a shift in the wavelength of lines - based on measurements that assumes time is constant everywhere - because that assumption supports the evidence of a red shift caused by expansion.

I simply suggest dark matter (invented to fill the 'gaps' to make established theory work) could be an 'invisible mist' that filters out (whatever) causing 'redness' - perhaps implying a steady state universe - leading to something changing (time say) to compensate for no expansion. That could help explain gravity.

I have no evidence to prove Steady or Expanding either way - but neither do the experts it seems.