Are High-Redshift Quasars Blurry?

Abstract

It has been suggested that the fuzzy nature of spacetime at the Planck scale may cause lightwaves to lose phase coherence, and if severe enough this could blur images of distant point-like sources sufficiently that they do not form an Airy pattern at the focal plane of a telescope. Blurring this dramatic has already been observationally ruled out by images from Hubble Space Telescope (HST), but I show that the underlying phenomenon could still be stronger than previously considered. It is harder to detect, which may explain why it has gone unseen. A systematic search is made in archival HST images of among the highest known redshift quasars. Planck-scale induced blurring may be evident, but this could be confused with partially resolved sources.

8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in the ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (15)

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• Limits on Spacetime Foam
• New Constraints on Quantum Gravity from X-ray and Gamma-Ray Observations
• Alternative ideas in cosmology
• Phenomenology of Space-time Imperfection I: Nonlocal Defects
• Using Observations of Distant Quasars to Constrain Quantum Gravity
• Operational definition of (brane induced) space-time and constraints on the fundamental parameters
• Predictive description of Planck-scale-induced spacetime fuzziness
• Detectability of Planck-Scale-Induced Blurring with Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Light incoherence due to quantum-gravitational fluctuations of the background space
• A limit on Planck-scale froth with ESPRESSO
• Light incoherence due to background space fluctuations
• Limits to Seeing High-Redshift Galaxies Due to Planck-Scale-Induced Blurring