Using quasars as standard clocks for measuring cosmological redshift
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
2015-06-04 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
We report hitherto unnoticed patterns in quasar light curves. We characterize segments of quasars' light curves with the slopes of the straight lines fit through them. These slopes appear to be directly related to the quasars' redshifts. Alternatively, using only global shifts in time and flux, we are able to find significant overlaps between the light curves of different pairs of quasars by fitting the ratio of their redshifts. We are then able to reliably determine the redshift of one quasar from another. This implies that one can use quasars as standard clocks, as we explicitly demonstrate by constructing two independent methods of finding the redshift of a quasar from its light curve.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1204.5191,
title = {Using quasars as standard clocks for measuring cosmological redshift},
author = {De-Chang Dai and Glenn D. Starkman and Branislav Stojkovic and Dejan Stojkovic and Amanda Weltman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.5191},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
References added, Published in Phys. Rev. Lett