Modern day Galileo who refuted Big Bang theory Die

Modern day Galileo who refuted Big Bang theory Dies at 86

* Halton C. Arp in 2005. His dogged promotion of an unorthodox theory led to exile from his peers. Jean-Pierre Jans

This rare and surprising mention of a true hero of science in a mainstream outlet like NY Times shows you that the real pioneers are recognized only after their death. Halton Arp will go down in history as Galileo of the 20th century, the man who was blacklisted by Mainstream establishment after empirically refuting the ‘Big Bang’ delusion. As Arp’s homepage states: “Arp discovered, from photographs and spectra with the big telescopes, that many pairs of quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which have extremely high redshift z values (and are therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly – and thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically connected to galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by. Because of Arp’s observations, the assumption that high red shift objects have to be very far away – on which theBig Bang theory and all of “accepted cosmology” is based - has to be fundamentally reexamined.!“

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NY Times

Halton C. Arp, a provocative son of American astronomy whose dogged insistence that astronomers had misread the distances to quasars cast doubt on the Big Bang theory of the universe and led to his exile from his peers and the telescopes he loved, died on Dec. 28 in Munich. He was 86.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Kristana Arp, who said he also had Parkinson’s disease.

As a staff astronomer for 29 years at Hale Observatories, which included the Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories in Southern California, Dr. Arp was part of their most romantic era, when astronomers were peeling back the sky and making discovery after discovery that laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the expansion of the universe.

But Dr. Arp, an artist’s son with a swashbuckling air, was no friend of orthodoxy. A skilled observer with regular access to a 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, he sought out unusual galaxies and collected them in “The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies” (1966), showing them interacting and merging with loops, swirls and streamers that revealed the diversity and beauty of nature.

But these galaxies also revealed something puzzling and controversial. In the expanding universe, as discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929, everything is moving away from us. The farther away it is, the faster it is going, as revealed by its redshift, a stretching of light waves — like the changing tone of an ambulance siren as it goes past — known as a Doppler shift.

Dr. Arp found that galaxies with radically different redshifts, and thus at vastly different distances from us, often appeared connected by filaments and bridges of gas. This suggested, he said, that redshift was not always an indication of distance but could be caused by other, unknown physics.

The biggest redshifts belonged to quasars — brilliant, pointlike objects that are presumably at the edge of the universe. Dr. Arp found, however, that they were often suspiciously close in the sky to relatively nearby spiral galaxies. This suggested to him that quasars were not so far away after all, and that they might have shot out of the nearby galaxies.

If he was right, the whole picture of cosmic evolution given by the Big Bang — of a universe that began in a blaze of fire and gas 14 billion years ago and slowly condensed into stars, galaxies and creatures over the eons — would have to go out the window.

A vast majority of astronomers dismissed Dr. Arp’s results as coincidences or optical illusions. But his data appealed to a small, articulate band of astronomers who supported a rival theory of the universe called Steady State and had criticized the Big Bang over the decades. Among them were Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University, who had invented the theory, and Geoffrey Burbidge, a witty and acerbic astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Arp survived both of them.

“When he died, he took a whole cosmology with him,” said Barry F. Madore, a senior research associate at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.