Bright, flickering galaxies called quasars were thought to pose a problem for our understanding of the cosmos – but new research shows Einstein was right yet again.
  • kender242@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 years ago

    But just how does a random walk turn a quasar into a standard candle?

    I’d like to understand the statistics behind the paper… But the article just waves a magic wand and glosses over what I consider would be the most interesting part.

    • TauZero
      2·
      2 years ago

      The article links to the “damped random walk” paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.3966.pdf I had the same question after reading a related article in an earlier thread: https://mander.xyz/post/984213 - wtf do quasars have to do with measuring the rate of flow of time? - but it seems by simply treating the luminosity graph of a quasar over several years as a random walk with some power spectrum (instead of trying to model the turbulence of the accretion disk directly) they were able to pull out best-fit parameters out of the random walk that also happen to be correlated with other physical properties.