Regarding the quasar "in" NGC7319 - read here for a discussion on the stellar object.
Needless to say, the reason it is ignored isn't because it contradicts mainstream cosmological theory, it's because it coincides with it pretty much perfectly given the state of our observational technology.
When judging articles like this, a simple, lazy estimate of probabilities is very helpful. For example, which do you think is more likely, 100 years of highly successful physics and cosmology is flat wrong (which is required for the quasar to be inside NGC7319, everything from what quasars are made of to the physics behind how they emit EM radiation must be wrong), or that a handful of researchers jumped to conclusions in their excitement? My vote goes to the latter until some pretty extraordinary evidence is found confirming their claims. Modern telescopes aren't precise enough to rule their claims out completely, but the quasar doesn't deviate from known cosmological effects which fit the current theory of the cosmos.
I'd wager a similar story for comets, I didn't look that up though as they don't interest me nearly as much as quasars do.
There is also a fairly significant amount of rather difficult to refute evidence for the existence of dark energy and dark matter. Matter that both has mass (and therefore gravity) and also does not interact with ordinary matter certainly exists - the best example is the neutrino. There just isn't a known mechanism to produce enough of this type of matter to account for the amount observed in the universe. Hence the "dark" in the name (which, incidentally, many physicists don't approve of precisely because it sounds too much like "magic").
The existence of dark energy is even more definitive. Simply put, the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace. This is undeniable. The only way for acceleration to occur is for energy to be expended (unless you are willing to throw away thermodynamics' otherwise perfect record). There are a couple of potential sources for dark energy (like vacuum energy) but nothing close to definitive.
Again, which is more likely? That hundreds of years of science is completely wrong (with nothing even sensible to take its place, I might add) or a hitherto unknown aspect of the universe has been discovered? Honestly, given the amount of evidence supporting the current models used in physics "something new" is by far the simplest and most likely explanation.
Dark matter and dark energy aren't stop signs to cosmologists and physicists, they are basically shorthand for "we don't know yet what this stuff is or how it got here, we are still trying to figure that out, but whatever it is should look something like this".
And if you think scientists have been ignoring these problems, especially dark matter, then you haven't been paying enough attention to theoretical and experimental physics over the past decade, particularly the past 5 years or so. One of the driving forces behind the LHC (certainly not the only, of course) was dark matter.
Prerequisite: Evolutionary Psychology
Years ago, before I left my parents' nest, I was standing in front of a refrigerator, looking inside. My mother approached and said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Looking for the ketchup. I don't see it."
My mother reached behind a couple of bottles and took out the ketchup.
She said, "If you don't see the ketchup, why don't you move things around and look behind them, instead of just standing and staring into the refrigerator? Do you think the ketchup is magically going to appear if you stare into the refrigerator long enough?"
And lo, the light went on over my head, and I said: "Men are hunters, so if we can't find our prey, we instinctively freeze motionless and wait for it to wander into our field of vision. Women are gatherers, so they move things around and look behind them."
Now this sort of thing is not scientifically respectable; it is called a "just-so story", after Kipling's "Just-So Stories" like "How the Camel Got His Hump". The implication being that you can make up anything you like for an evolutionary story, but the difficult thing is finding a way to prove it.
Well, fine, but I bet it's still true.
The sexual division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies - "Men hunt, women gather" - is a human universal among hunter-gatherers, like it or not; and it has experimentally tested cognitive consequences: Men are better at throwing spears; women are better at remembering where things are. So that part is pretty much nailed down - the controversial thing is saying, "This is why men stand motionless and stare into the refrigerator."
But even the Refrigerator Hypothesis is not as untestable as one might think. For a start, you have to verify that this is a cross-cultural universal - you have to check to see if men and women in China and South Africa exhibit the same stereotypical behavior as in the US. And you also have to verify that hunters who don't see prey where they expect it, do indeed freeze motionless and wait for the prey to wander across their vision.
But that doesn't prove that the same psychology is at work in a man staring into a refrigerator, does it?
Well, you could install an eye-tracker on a hunter; look for a characteristic pattern of eye movements when they're frozen waiting for prey; and use simulations or game theory to show that the gaze pattern is efficient. Then you could put an eye-tracker on a man looking into a refrigerator, and see if they show the same gaze pattern. Then you would have demonstrated a detailed correspondence which enables you to say, "He is frozen, waiting for the ketchup to come into sight."
Here is an odd thing: There are some people who will, if you just tell them the Refrigerator Hypothesis, snort and say "That's an untestable just-so story" and dismiss it out of hand; but if you start by telling them about the idea of the gaze-tracking experiment and then explain the evolutionary motivation, they will say, "Huh, that might be right." Because then, you see, you are proposing a Scientific hypothesis; but in the earlier case, you are just making up a story without testing it, which is very Unscientific. We all know that Scientific hypotheses are more likely to be true than Unscientific ones.
This pattern of belief is very hard to justify from a Bayesian perspective. It is just the same hypothesis in both cases. Even if, in the second case, I announce an experimental method and my intent to actually test it, I have not yet experimented and I have not yet received any observational evidence in favor of the hypothesis. So in either case, my current estimate should equal my prior probability, estimated the degree to which the "just-so story" seems "just" versus "so". You can't revise your beliefs based on an expected experimental success, by Conservation of Expected Evidence; if you expect the experiment to succeed, then it was a rationally convincing just-so story.
People confuse the distinction between rationality and science. Science is a special kind of strong evidence, a subset of rational evidence; if I say that my socks are currently white, you have a rational reason to believe, but it is not Science, because there is no experiment people can perform to independently verify the belief.
If you have a hypothesis you have not figured out how to test with an organized, rigorous experiment, then your hypothesis is not very scientific. When you figure out how to do an experiment, and more importantly, set out to do the experiment, then your hypothesis becomes very scientific indeed. If you are judging probabilities using the affect heuristic, and you know that science is a Good Thing, then making the jump from "merely rational" to "scientific" might seem to raise the probability.
But this itself is not normative. Figuring out a way to test a belief with an organized, rigorous, repeatable experiment is certainly a Good Thing - but it should not raise the belief's rational probability in advance of the experiment succeeding! A hypothesis may become "more scientific" because you are going to test it, but it doesn't get any of the power of scientific confirmation until the experiment succeeds. To whatever degree you guess that the experiment might work - that it's likely enough to be worth performing - you must have arrived at a probabilistic belief in the hypothesis being true, in advance of any scientific confirmation of it.
I conclude that an evolutionary just-so story, whose predictions you cannot figure out how to test in any organized, rigorous, repeatable way, may nonetheless have a substantial rational credibility - equalling the degree to which you would expect a rigorous experiment to succeed, if you could only figure one out.