ANOMALOUS REDSHIFTS IN THE SPECTRA OF EXTRAGALACTIC OBJECTS

In this paper we show that strong statistical evidence has been availa ble for many years showing that QSO redshifts in at least some cases a re not caused by the expansion of the Universe. In a complicated world the number of unexpected associations that can be subjected to statis tical test is very large and somewhere among the entire ensemble of su ch associations a few may seem of significance, if taken separately, w hich are only chance effects, however, occasioned by the profusion of cases in the ensemble. False associations of this kind show up readily as new data become available, since the original chance effects are u nlikely to be repeated in the new data. An example was an algebraic fo rmula for the sunspot number which caused a considerable stir early in the present century, the formula agreeing with sunspot numbers over m any years with seemingly uncanny precision, only for the agreement to disappear as soon as new sunspot numbers came along. This well-known s tatistical trap cannot be claimed against the proposition that QSOs of high redshifts are sometimes physically associated with nearby galaxi es. This proposition has now been exposed to statistical test for almo st thirty years, and it survives in new data just as well as in old da ta. Additionally, a number of cases have come along with the years whe re actual physical connections have been detected between QSOs and nea rby galaxies. Six of these cases are discussed in detail in the presen t paper. It is consistent with standard physics for redshifts to arise from doppler motions and also in radiation emitted by matter in a gra vitational field, as well as from the cosmological expansion of the Un iverse. These other possibilities have been examined repeatedly over t he years but have never been found to give convincing explanations for the QSO-nearby galaxy associations described above. One is therefore left with the nonstandard possibility that different samples of matter can have different mass scales. No theory of how the QSO mass scale c ould be different from the usual galaxy mass scale has hitherto been f ound acceptable, with the consequence that most astrophysicists and co smologists have felt justified in ignoring the evidence for anomalous redshifts, the thought being that what is known to be impossible remai ns impossible no matter how strong the evidence for it may be. The mai n purpose of the present paper is to question this mode of thinking. W e show how, consistent with the quasi steady-state cosmological theory developed recently in a number of papers, it is possible for samples of material of different ages to have different mass scales.