Скачать или смотреть Probing the laws of nature with distant quasars and galaxies - graph

Multiple resolution downloads of this video are available here: http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/producti...

This video illustrates the quasar absorption line experiment we have conducted to study the laws of nature in distant galaxies. In a paper submitted to, and still under peer review at, Physical Review Letters, and available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907, we have found evidence that suggest the laws of physics vary throughout the universe.

This video shows the quasar light path as a beam as it travels from a quasar, through an intervening galaxy and then to the Earth where we capture it with our telescopes. A quasar -- a billion-solar-mass black hole sucking in the surrounding material (gas, stars) from its host galaxy, superheating it in the process -- acts as a background, bright, point-like source of light. We split up the quasar light into its spectrum of colours at the telescope. The inset graph shows the quasar spectrum as the light traverses the intervening universe. The quasar spectrum is slowly redshifted due to the expansion of the universe during its flight time to the Earth. The intervening galaxy imprints a series of absorption lines onto the spectrum, a signature that is characteristic of the contents of the distant galaxy, its distance from the Earth and, crucially for us, the laws of physics at work in that particular galaxy. We read this "barcode" of absorption lines from the spectrum to determine the whether the values of the fundamental constants have changed throughout the history of the universe or whether they vary throughout the vast reaches of space.