"such resolution would allow one to see a coin floating in space 13 times as far away as the Moon"

Maybe we could find a galaxy that acts as a mirror on the other side of the galactic lense? Or if space is truly curved, a big succession of them that loops back round on itself to get a hugely magnified view of your bum?

1. The consensus believes quasars lie at the fringes of the universe. A minority believes they are mostly much closer. There are some photos of quasars in the arms of galaxies. Swoon.

2. They are assumed to squirt out unfeasibly massive amounts of energy only because of their assumed remote distance.

3. Therefore you have to invoke incredibly mega-huge black holes only if they are very away, as there seems no other way to explain the energy requirement. And not everyone believes in black holes. In space anyway.

4. It's not because they are so very far away that it's difficult to get a proper look at them, but because they are point-like objects and morphologically undifferentiated.

5. They also have weird spectra which makes it difficult to work out exactly what's going on. Also astronomers get easily lost in the Lyman Forest. Lol.

6. Gravitational lensing was predicted to cause a ring of light, not discrete blobs, so it is not evidently gravitational lensing.

6. Any fule kno this story is years old. By fules for fules. I can only imagine the reason for it is the Fule Moon this last weekend.

What we want from Reg is jellyfish stories. Jellyfish the size of buses. Jellyfish the size of barn doors. Jellyfish the size of a planet. Jellyfish in Paris. Jellyfish getting up to no good. Especially in Paris. From under-sea-dogs who can thrill us with stories of live first-hand encounters, and have the missing bits to prove it. And a parrot on the shoulder. Dead or alive. Yay.

@Luther Bissett

"6. Gravitational lensing was predicted to cause a ring of light, not discrete blobs, so it is not evidently gravitational lensing."

That would depend on the relative location of the gravitational body and the paths of the photons involved, and the amount of lensing occurring.

Now, if you've got a distorted image, guess what? You can refocus it through an appropriate lens.

You are a poor copy of amanAtMars or dare I say it Drashek...

YOU IS THE FULE AND YOU KNOW IT.

Accept that people better than you know what is going on and SHUT THE FECK UP...

That is all

"such resolution would allow one to see a coin floating in space 13 times as far away as the Moon"

From media reports, this is a one-sided coin. Luther merely points out there is at least one obverse side to every coin. Every narrative has several obverses. And Dark Matter dozens and dozens, last time I looked. Parallel Obverses all. (Lol - optional for Bryce).

@AC 16:18 >>>

> "6. Gravitational lensing was predicted to cause a ring of light, not discrete blobs, so it is not evidently gravitational lensing." <

That would depend on the relative location of the gravitational body and the paths of the photons involved, and the amount of lensing occurring. <<<

The blobs are dispersed symmetrically with respect to the putative black hole embedded presumably in the centre of the lensing galaxy.

@Mark >>> Now the quasars have a redshift of ~10. This puts them a LOONG way away unless you have a theory <<<

Correct but only if you assume red shift always signifies recessional velocity, and so remoteness. But can you prove a negative - that there is no other mechanism for red-shifting light? I have not seen any such proof. Alternate mechanism have been tendered.

@AC 17:24 >>> I understand that it's redshifted because it's moving away from us, and also that the further away it is, the more it's redshifted.<<<

Put like that it's circular logic that begs the question. That's not science.

>>> BUT you surely only know how much redshifting has taken place if you know what 'colour' it used to be? Have we got some dude out by a quasar shouting "it's blue" but we say, "hang on, it's red"? <<<

We start from the evidence of the observed spectrum, with often lots of lines in it. The lines can in many cases be patten-matched with the lines of spectra derived in controlled lab conditions, e.g known spectra of single elements in an incandescent state. The observed lines are in many cases noted to be displaced towards the red end of the spectrum. This displacement is compatible with Doppler's account of frequency shifting. Doppler's account is then a putative cause. It appears to be preferred because it was historically prior to other mechanisms for frequency shifting. Accepting the Doppler casual explanation commits you to huge recessional velocities and distances. Once you accept them, you need a Big Bang which caused them. The Big Bang is the idea of a Catholic priest (Lemaitre) - which is almightily suspicious. Thus we start from scientific observation and arrive by bandwagon at an entailed, but not necessarily entailed, metaphysics. I say - bring back proper scientific research. (Not computer modeling FFS).

But Doppler shift itself accounts for only some features of the spectral evidence. Other features, such as Zeeman splitting of lines, fuzzing of lines, and the chaotic plethora of lines known as the Lyman Forest, can only be explained by Doppler plus supposing very weird behaviour in the objects - weird enough to preclude consensus. Also, lines have been found corresponding to atoms in states and combinations which should not, if the narrative is supposed to be consistent, be Out There (so-called "forbidden" lines). Don't watch the hand, because the hand-waving is there to gloss over the "awkward" facts.

@AC 18:57 >>>You are a poor copy of amanAtMars<<<

Only by metaphorical logic - nothing scientific follows. AFAIK amfM is at least twice as big as any known troll and AIot Beta fun.

First we have to accept some assumptions:

The velocity of light is constant.

Short wavelength light has more energy than long wavelength light.

I posit that light is affected by gravity (hence the bending of light around a massive object) and also by friction (forcing its way through dark matter and even not dark matter). The only way that this could show is if the light loses energy, but as the velocity is constant then the energy change would show as a red shift. Note that this would be a function of distance only, not of the velocity of the originating source.

Could this shown experimentally, the essence of good science? Possibly, in the case of friction. Create a long, straight, level pressure vessel. At one end place a laser and at the other a very accurate spectrophotometer. Evacuate the vessel, fire the laser and measure the wavelength of the light. Next fill the vessel with a mixture of hydrogen and helium, which I understand to be the main gases present in the universe. (There is a weakness here as the interstellar hydrogen is nascent hydrogen, not molecular hydrogen as we have on Earth.) Fire the laser again at increasing pressures to mimic greater and greater interstellar distances, and measure the wavelength of the incident light at each firing. If (big if) the wavelength lengthens (red shifts/loses energy) it would indicate that velocity of the originating source is not the only possible explanation of red shifting. Instead we would have a repeatable experimental indication that distance and not velocity is the/a cause of red shifting. The Doppler shift theory has, to my knowledge, never been experimentally verified, merely accepted as being the "thing".

Disclaimer:

I (not an astronomer) have never been happy with the "Big Bang" theory. It goes against the concepts of eternal and infinite. What was there before the big bang? What is there beyond the limits of the big bang? If the universe was relatively compacted at the time of the big bang was it small enough to create the mother of all black holes enclosing the entire universe, and as such are we still inside it?

>the chaotic plethora of lines known as the Lyman Forest

A) It's not chaotic.

B) That word "plethora", I don't think it means what you think it means.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Plethora

C) It's called the "Lyman alpha forest".

I'd be surprised that you didn't manage to work in the Gunn-Peterson trough, but it's obvious that you have a fairly limited perspective of the subject matter. Did you take a 2 unit astronomy class once? Or do you just frequent some of the more paranoid anti-science web sites?

I too have a problem with the big bang. I also have a problem with relative time, quantum physics and the north pole. What is north of the north pole? It goes against the concepts of cartesian co-ordinates, and I understand those so they must be correct.

Frankly I think it's a whitewash. Something must be done.