In the News, and highly relevant to apparent measurement inaccuracies in the Redshifts of plasma
surrounding AGN/Quasars …
Physicists produce black hole plasma in the lab
Basically, scientists have recreated the plasma surrounding a black hole and bombarded it with X-rays to further ionise it. They then looked at the 'at rest' K-alpha line of iron, which appears in recent spectra taken by X-Ray observatories. The position of this line has been previously calculated from theoretical models ..
Quote:
It turns out that most of the theoretical calculation methods used do not predict the line positions accurately enough. This is a big problem for the astrophysicists, because without accurate knowledge of the wavelengths there is no accurate determination of the so-called Doppler effect of these lines.
..
The error bars in the frequency in a rest frame calculated with the aid of different theoretical models, led to such large uncertainties in the derived velocity of the emitting plasma, that reliable statements on the plasma flows were no longer possible.
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This news update is particularly relevant to the "Status of Plasma Physics" thread, presently running in the Science Forum.
I am not totally clear on whether this previous error would impact the redshift measurements of the quasars themselves or not. The subject matter seems to be specific to only the redshifts of the plasma
surrounding the AGN nucleus.
Cheers
PS: If it is relevant to quasar redshifts then it also impacts the variances presently being debated in 'Fine Structure Constant' issue.
