VCA 7.D. Quasars

Doubt has also been cast on the expanding universe theory by the study of quasars, or quasi-stellar radio sources. Quasars look like stars but have very big red shifts, and thus they are considered the most distant objects in the universe, more distant than the most distant galaxies. We have already seen that Halton Arp believes some quasars are cosmologically close to us, even though they have high red shifts. Arp has also noted that many quasars tend to be located in the same vicinity of the sky as a large group of galaxies relatively close to our own. This suggests to him that the quasars may be associated in some fashion with these local galaxies and thus be at the same distance.

This raises a question: If some quasars are actually close, and thus have large nonvelocity red shifts, why couldn't that be true of quasars in general? In fact it has long been observed that there are severe difficulties with the idea that quasars are at their cosmological distances, that is, that they are at the distance obtained by applying the Hubble constant to their extremely large red shifts.

The big problem is that quasars are very bright. If they are in fact extremely far away, that means that many quasars are putting out hundreds of times more energy than the brightest galaxies, which are composed of hundreds of billions of stars. If quasars were as big as galaxies, that might not be implausible. But it turns out that quasars can vary in their light intensity over periods as short as days. This observation suggests to astronomers that they are very small compared to galaxies. No one can understand how such a small object can generate so much energy, at least by presently known physical laws.

One interesting approach to the interpretation of quasars has been proposed by Y. P. Varshni, a physicist at the University of Ottawa in Canada (VR1-3). He supports Arp's contention that quasars have nonvelocity red shifts, citing as evidence certain patterns in the way these red shifts are distributed.

Normally one would expect celestial objects like quasars to have a wide variety of red shifts with no discernible pattern. But Varshni finds that these red shifts tend to fall into well-defined groups. Each red-shift group is represented by quasars distributed widely across the sky, and very few quasars have red shifts that would place them outside the major groupings. A similar phenomenon was also noted by the astronomer Geoffrey Burbidge, who observed that an unexpectedly large percentage of quasars have red shifts grouped closely around 1.95 (BR1). (The red shift of 1.95 is expressed in terms of shift in wavelength; it comes to about 238,160 km per sec, or 79 percent of the speed of light.)

This clustering of red shifts is a very difficult phenomenon to explain. Let us apply the standard cosmological interpretation to the distance of the quasars. All of the quasars with the same red shift should be at the same distance. Thus the quasars with a red shift of 1.95 should all lie close to a spherical shell with a radius corresponding to this red shift. The same should hold true of the other red shift groupings, each of which includes quasars in a wide variety of directions. This means that the quasars lie on a series of spherical shells centered on the earth.

This conclusion is unacceptable to modern cosmological thinking because it places the earth in a special central position in the universe. There is only one center in an array of concentric shells. In effect, the earth must be at the center of the universe.

The odds that this arrangement of shells could happen by chance are next to nothing, and Varshni argues that the conclusion that the earth really is at the center of concentric shells of quasars is not acceptable. Therefore the red shifts of the quasars must be due to something other than the Doppler effect, as described in the expanding-universe model. If they are not due to the Doppler effect, they do not represent distance, and if they do not represent distance, it is no longer necessary to suppose the quasars are arranged in shells.

Varshni believes that quasars generate light in an unexpected way, a way that gives the appearance of Doppler-shifted light. According to Varshni, laser effects in the quasars give light inherently different characteristics that have nothing to do with velocity. Varshni believes scientists have mistaken the spectral lines in this type of light for Doppler-shifted spectral lines in ordinary ionized gas. So according to Varshni, the quasars are close by, and the idea that they are far away results from misinterpreting their laser-generated light as Doppler-shifted ordinary light.

Varshni's theory may or may not be true, but his observation that the spectral lines of quasars fall into definite groupings does call into question the standard theory of cosmic distances-at least for quasars. If the spectral lines are taken to be displaced by Doppler shifts and one applies the standard theory, one gets the unacceptable result that the earth is the center of the universe. If this were accepted, scientists would have to return to an idea they have consistently rejected since the time of Galileo and Copernicus.