Baffling discovery seemingly defies laws of Physics

[Sanctus]

I saw this the other day and I still can't rap my head around it. Apparently, distant quasars show no time dilation despite the red shift the universe experiences. Here's more info:

http://news.discovery.com/space/no-t...t-quasars.html

[Limited]

I have absolutely no idea what you just said.

[Cojafoji]

gravitational folding of space. there's been discussion of using the corona of a star as a magnification unit in order to achieve ftl communication with other solar systems.

not really the same thing, but i figured i'd throw it out there.

[CN3089]

gravitational folding of space. there's been discussion of using the corona of a star as a magnification unit in order to achieve ftl communication with other solar systems.

not really the same thing, but i figured i'd throw it out there.

sending information faster than c is impossible hope this helps

[InnerGoat]

That's not totally true for gravity butt I'm not going to argue w/ u

[jcap]

That's not totally true for gravity butt I'm not going to argue w/ u

Huh? The "ripples" of gravity travel at approximately the speed of light.

[Inferno]

The universe uses a glitchy game engine or something?

[Rob Oplawar]

sending information faster than c is impossible hope this helps

That's not totally true for gravity butt I'm not going to argue w/ u

There seems to be indication of odd ftl "communication", eg entagled particles communicating state, but it has been proven that even with this sort of effect it is still impossible to send information faster than the speed of light (and that proof is unrelated to the proof below, otherwise it would be circular logic).
We know that the universe is both relativistic and causal. The possibility of faster than light communication of any sort would allow the possibility of sending information into one's own past which could potentially produce a paradox.
Most people say that is proof that ftl communication is impossible, but I'm going to say instead:
Either ftl communication is impossible OR there exists some basically omniscient, omnipotent, intelligent mechanism for preventing the formation of paradoxes while allowing ftl communication in other circumstances. I would call that mechanism God.
Fortunately for us atheists, there is so far no evidence for the possibility of ftl communication beyond pure speculation.

I'm not sure exactly what this discovery about quasars means, but I've had a certain suspicion about astronomy for a while.
How do we know the composition of a distant star? By its spectrum and luminosity. How do we know how far away it is? By how much lower its luminosity is than we expect it to be. How do we know how fast it's moving? By how much its light is redshifted from what we expect it to be.
The process has some sound principles behind it, but it makes so many assumptions and uses such circular reasoning (it's this far away because it's this bright and it has this composition, and it has this composition because it's this bright and it's this far away) that I call its accuracy into serious question.

The existence of faulty assumptions becomes clear to be with the whole "dark matter" issue. Their conclusion about the position and relative velocities of stars in our universe apparently defies the laws of physics in our universe. So of course they immediately assume that they have correctly measured this and our 'laws' of physics are correct on immense scales (something we have never verified) and therefore there must be some immense amount of matter out there that we just can't detect. See where I get suspicious of astronomy?

[Sanctus]

Discoveries like this always make me excited. Sure it only raises more questions, but that's the fun part. It allows for further advancement of science!

[Aerowyn]

I still don't get it (which is probably why I'm an artist rather than a rocket scientist).

Are there no simpler terms to put this thing in?