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Since nothing can travel faster than light, any object that changes in brilliance cannot be larger than the distance light would travel during the period of fluctuation. Even the crowded nuclei of normal galaxies are many thousand light-years in diameter, so no known influence could cross them quickly enough to make them flicker on a monthly tempo. An object that flickers so fast would have to be less than one light-year in diameter, unless it follows physical laws that are wholly unsuspected by human scientists.
Blue Birth. The confusion has increased steadily. Dr. Allen R. Sandage of Mt. Wilson and Palomar reported that a radio source, 3C-2, which was photographed as a dim reddish object only two years ago by the University of Minnesota observatory, has shown up in recent Palomar pictures four times as brilliant as before, but rich in blue light. It seems as if 3C-2 has turned into a quasar, giving a vast increase in shortwave radiation. But no one can imagine a process that could kindle such an outburst in so short a time.
Another unsettling bit of news is that quasars may not be scattered like galaxies—at random around the universe. Instead, the 34 quasars that are now known seem to favor a plane that is tilted slightly away from the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. It is almost unthinkable, however, that the most distant observable objects may have a plan of arrangement. Can the universe itself, the astronomers ask, have a definite shape? Or is the region that they have been in the habit of calling the universe merely a detail of a larger and still unimagined structure? Clearly, the questions raised by quasars open a new chapter in astronomy.