On the Nature of the Quasi-stellar Sources

Abstract

In a recent paper, under the same title as this article, two of us have discussed both the usual cosmological interpretation of the red-shifts of the spectrum lines of the quasi-stellar objects and also the possibility that these objects are comparatively 'local' to our Galaxy, with distances of 1-10 Mpc. The work was begun with the conventional prejudice toward the cosmological interpretation, the initial aim being to disprove the local hypothesis. In the outcome, however, we were not able to satisfy ourselves that the local hypothesis must be discarded-in fact we arrived at a balanced position between the two hypotheses. In this communication we do not propose to repeat the former arguments but to put forward new considerations which seem to us to point toward the local hypothesis.