CharlesChandler wrote: But I don't understand the conclusion that quasars are galactic seeds, just on the basis of what information is available.
This is Halton Arp's discovery, first theorized by Armbartsumian. A quasar is like an acorn that falls off an oak tree. It becomes a tree itself.
In Arp's own words:
"Synchrotron emission coming from a filament that you would expect to find, maybe scattering polarization, that’s what I expected. But in any case I later came to the conclusion that magnetic fields are not so important and began to gradually realize the importance of explosive and ejecta, ejection phenomena in the galaxies and gradually led into the present, my consuming interest. Which is what goes on in the nuclei of the galaxies and the ideas that I had about galaxies, being ejected, protogalaxies, quasars being ejected to form galaxies and whole deep developmental, the cosmogony of where galaxies come from. And just at about that time I got the scent of the suspicion that the orthodox, conventional viewpoint of the galaxy formation was not correct. That seemed so big and so interesting that I followed it ever since. I started studying these peculiar interacting galaxies. I came independently to the conclusion that Ambartsumian came to in 1957, I came to, I don’t know, 1965 somewhere in there, 1964-1965, just by studying the galaxies the photography Ambartsumian had done, beginning to get into the classification of looking up and trying to figure out. I came to the conclusion in fact that we were erupting and throwing out material and stuff like that. And then when I read the Solvay Conference in 1957 in which Ambartsumian spoke, then it was just an enormous revelation that Ambartsumian had seen the same thing prior, independently. Do you know the story of the Solvay Conference?"
"Yeah, I was just in Jodrell Bank giving a talk there and Sir Bernard Lovell was there. He was at that Solvay Conference 1957, he reminded me of that situation which I already knew. The situation again, the Solvay Conference is a very top level conference, where in the past they have had Einstein, Planck, Bohr and all these people down through the years. So they’d run it in astronomy down through the years also. They’d invited the top people at the Solvay Conference, also there were Oort, and Lovell and Hoyle, all the top astronomers. And they decided for some reason that they had to get a representative from the Soviet Union and they figured well, they heard about this Ambartsumian. They invited him from the Soviet Union and he came, nobody knew him. He came and gave this paper which nobody understood. What they thought was complete trash and they thought it was so crazy. Bernard Lovell was telling me that they were embarrassed because it was so bad. They didn’t want to be rude to this representative of the Soviet Union, so they didn’t say much but they were really embarrassed by the paper."
"But then they went on about the important business and this paper was published in the proceedings. That was in 1957. Well, about eight, nine, ten years later it began to appear that the things Ambartsumian had said in his paper, that far from being crazy, were, in fact, quite true and as time goes on his paper got more and more prophetic, more and more far reaching and insightful. When I was with him at the Brighton IAU, the IAU before Australia, six years ago, and I was sitting next to Oort, and Oort said to me, “it turned out that Ambartsumian was right.” And so it was generally concluded, I still don’t think they realized how right he was. I mean, I still, I’m sure, my opinion, contemporary astronomers really have not grasped the extent to which he is right. "
"Well, he just looked at galaxies on the Palomar Sky Survey. He said, well, galaxies eject other galaxies, free galactic material and they form other galaxies. And you see that the implication of that was to rock the whole foundation of our ideas of where galaxies come from. The whole idea is just the Big Bang, diffuse medium, galaxies condensed, clouds form, that’s how galaxies are formed. Ambartsumian was saying something completely different. He was saying that the material comes from inside of galaxies, goes out and forms other galaxies. And if you carry forward the implications, if you believe that, then you begin asking yourself questions like, was the Big Bang really like this generally assumed or maybe started out with one body which had successive fragmentation, or maybe the universe is turning itself inside out from inside. You see this way raises really unsettling questions which contemporary astronomers are not prepared or willing to face at all, despite what I think is the beginning of an enormous amount of evidence piling up in this direction. That’s where it is nowadays. "