From: metares@well.sf.ca.us (Tom Van Flandern)
Newsgroups: sci.astro
Subject: Re: Quasars and Meta
Date: 27 Jul 92 05:24:48 GMT
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link


dgreisin@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Derek G. Reisinger) writes:

> I am curious about more quantitative aspects of Quasar phenomena [in the
> Meta model].  Such as...How you reconcile your Super-Massive star engine
> with observations... For instance in many cases the luminosity exceeds the
> limit for a supermassive stable star. In fact it may exceed it by up to 10
> or 15 times. Now if you require 10 to 15 stars to power a Quasar you now
> have to deal with variability time arguments.  In some objects these place
> limits (upper limits!) on the size of the emitting region. In most cases
> the region is relatively small, especially if it needs to hold 10-15
> super-massive stars, all at the very limit of stability....
>
> If I have missed anything that answers these questions I apologize, else
> please enlighten me...

     No problem, Derek.  I apologize for the delay in answering, but I am
trying to carry on more than a dozen simultaneous conversations about various
aspects of this model, and it is tough for me to keep up.  During July alone,
the following have posted more than one message in this big-bang-related set
of threads: Annis, Baalke, Buell, Clarke, Clements, Fischer, Flatters,
Hennessy, Lazio, Mathews, Mock, Perlman, Rust, Sheffer, Weiner, Wells.  So
please excuse my delays in responding, which are now running close to a week.

     This thread began with some in-depth criticisms of the big bang theory,
which is having its fair share of difficulties staying reconciled with the
rapid influx of new observations.  More and more things, such as the implied
regularity of "Great Wall"-type features seen in pencil-beam surveys out to a
few gigaparsecs (to name just one new, troublesome result), are having to be
wished away or explained ad hoc.  That is usually the sign of a model in
trouble.

     But the astronomers here have been responding with arguments which I
think can be fairly characterized as "Sure, the big bang has its problems;
but these are far less severe than in any existing alternative model."  But I
will be publishing a new alternative model in book form near year's end,
called the "Meta Model", which may not suffer quite so severely from this
objection.  It has the virtue of being the only existing cosmological model
derived from first principles, instead of induced from observations.  Most of
the currently active threads are discussing particular problem areas which
are often the specialties of the astronomers here, and how the Meta Model
might deal with these.

     Now to relate this to your question about supermassive stars:  Gravity
in the Meta Model is subtly but importantly different than in the standard
model in three ways.  One of these concerns the density of matter.  Gravity
in the Meta Model arises in an explicit, geometrical way from the action of
entities called "C-gravitons" ("C" for classical, to distinguish them from
the hypothetical spin-2 gravitons of quantum theory).  These produce the
gravitational field around masses.  But as matter density increases, the C-
gravitons eventually become unable to move about freely within a body.  The
result is that part of a dense or very large star's internal matter is not
represented in its external gravity field.  The gravitational mass and total
matter content no longer have a one-to-one relationship.

     For planets and dwarf stars like our Sun, this is of little account.
Some of the neutrinos we would otherwise see from the Sun do not get out, but
little else evidences the small excess internal matter content.  But in the
case of larger or denser masses, the excess internal matter can become
appreciable.  This effects stellar interior models for such massive objects
profoundly.  In particular, that well-known "instability" of large-mass stars
which you referred to practically vanishes due to the stabilizing influence
of the extra interior matter.

     So stable supermassive stars can exist in the Meta Model.  See some of
the other current posts about what these would look like for intermediate
cases, which are extensions of the normal H-R diagram.  The earliest
deviations would seemingly take the form of blue stragglers and Wolf-Rayet
stars, which are not easily explained in standard stellar evolution theory.
But when we get to much larger masses which eventually explode as supernovae,
the collapsed remnant will *not* be a black hole because the external gravity
field cannot build up without limit, as it can in the standard model. Natural
limits occur from the trapping of C-gravitons which prevent singularity
formation.  Instead we would get compact objects of high gravitational
redshift, often ejected from galaxies at high velocities.  These objects are
predicted to look very much the way quasars actually look, which raises again
the much-debated question of whether quasar redshifts are cosmological (from
the expansion of the universe) or mainly gravitational in origin.  I.e. are
quasars "far" or "near".

     I hope that overview brings you, and other new lurkers, up to speed in
at least this one thread.  -|Tom|-

-- 
Tom Van Flandern / Washington, DC / metares@well.sf.ca.us
Meta Research was founded to foster research into ideas not otherwise
supported because they conflict with mainstream theories in Astronomy.
Newsgroups: sci.astro