[SteveA]

Quote by: zynner My understanding of Arp's theory is that he asserts the primary cause of redshift is age, and there is also a secondary (minor) cause, such as distance/velocity. With regard to this planet/star combo, is it the case that: (a) one of them has a uniformly higher redshift than the other, (b) both have about the same, or (c) they fluctuate so that one is higher and then the other is?

The light from the planet isn't detectable as far as I know with current technology. It only reflects a very small amount of light from the star (likely less than 1/1000 the intenisty). So they're only measuring the red/blue fluctations of the star.

Also, if everything is supposed to be moving away from us, generally, do these two entities show an ever-increasing redshift over time? ~ zynner

This is a good question. It depends on how the expansion proceeds. Don't quote me but I believe under the current view, yes, they'd continually be seen as moving away faster and becoming dimmer/redder.

Here's a good link I found that seems to be very informative and addresses many conjectures (generally by showing why they are seen as discredited) but still seems to indicate where some of the potential conflicts lie.

Frequently Asked Questions in Cosmology
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#CC

Here's a wikipedia entry for some of these non-standard views:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology

Basically everything seems to hinge on whether or not these objects are truly gravitationally interacting (which would imply they are near each other), or whether the combination of gravitational lensing and statistical sampling can explain them.

Here's a quote from Arp:

"Mainstream astronomy is presently trying to explain away a large set of high redshift quasars that are closely associated with low redshift galaxies as being optical illusions caused by "gravitational lensing". Here, below, are ten examples of such groupings. The only way such an optical illusion could occur is if Earth, a nearby galaxy, and a distant quasar (all three) precisely fall on a single straight line. Could this happen once? Surely. But dozens of times?! Not likely. In fact the probability is vanishingly small."

and the link http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm

But if you look at the pictures, the objects aren't physically touching, but isolated and on top of it the object affected by gravitional lensing would necessarily be further away which would imply redshifted and that's exactly what's seen.

A way to prove the expanding universe theory wrong would be to find a blue system that was gravitationally lensed around a red shifted/closer system, but that doesn't appear to have been found by him or I'm certain he would have included it as a perfect example.

Of course there are new insights to be made on how the universe works, but my guess is he's seeing Kennedy when it's simply a shadow - http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9403/evidence.html (There's a shadow that looks like the face of J.F.K. but it's just coincidence, just like if you look at enough clouds you'll find something interesting). Mostly it seems like they need to do some detailed statistical analysis to see if things are more than simply pure coincidence but the impression seems to be that there aren't enough unbiased samples to do this.