Enter the content which will be displayed in sticky bar


The Highly Collimated Jet Streams of Quasars

Cameron Y. Rebigsol
Year: 2017

Basic facts common to quasars:

  1. Highly compact both in mass and energy,
  2. Having a super massive material center,
  3. Excluding the material center, the general existence of mass is in a state of plasma,
  4. Rapidly spinning,
  5. Periodical variation in luminosity,
  6. Highly remotely located from Earth with high value of red shift.

In addition to the above common facts, a high percentage of quasars are also found containing jet streams. The strange thing is that the jet always comes in a set, with one from the set pointing in the opposite direction of the other, and both jets are highly collimated.

As far as we know on Earth, to create highly collimated beams of light or particles, technology must rely on lenses; be they optical, mechanical, or electrostatic. Beams that can travel even in the order of millions of light years and still retain their high collimation in many cases should be beyond what artificial lens can handle, let alone that the lens must be able to withstand the destructively high energy that the lens must let through.

As a thumb of rule, the higher the energy content is found in any physical entity, the higher chance of randomness is associated with this entity. Special filtering mechanism must be present for orderly output of anything to come out of this entity. Without a lens-like arrangement, how would the jet stream of a quasar stay highly collimated and remain in pair? Could this pairing have anything to do with the quality of collimation in our interest? In other words, must the collimation rely on some mechanism that produces the pairing? Or, if no pairing were to be present, would the jet stream not be formed at all? In nature, action and reaction always coexist, so do matter and anti-matter, as well as electric and magnetic poles. How should we relate the phenomenon shown by the jet pair of opposite directions from the philosophical aspect in terms of physical interaction?

In modern science, when high energy and high speed are involved, it has been so natural for a big number of science workers to apply Einstein's Theory of Relativity to explain many puzzles about which classic physics seems lead them to no solution. What is odd is that the jet streams from blazars, a special group of quasars, boldly present superluminal movement in our observation. To those who trust relativity, they say superluminal movement so detected is only a mirage, an illusion. Obviously, quasars, with their extraordinarily high energy content, have challenged us with this dilemma: Should this superluminal movement serve as physical evidence to topple the validity of relativity, or should we once again allow our mental work to contort what we observe as illusion? Are we sure we should forever let our mental work overpower the physical world?