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Swedish Physicist Hannes Alvén has proposed an equally imaginative theory (TIME, Nov. 19). Elementary particles of matter, he says, have been proved in the laboratory to have their counterparts of antimatter. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other, with the release of tremendous amounts of energy. Though there may be no antimatter in the neighborhood of earth, the Swede argues, it is not unreasonable to assume that half of the stuff in the universe—including whole galaxies—is made of antimatter. The collision of matter and antimatter galaxies might produce the observed quasarlike energies.
Beyond Virgo. Whenever physicists or cosmologists simply cannot square their theories with Schmidt's claim that quasars exist at cosmological distances from earth, they are left with only one alternative: to offer some other explanation for the firmly established quasar red shift. Timeworn arguments that red shift is caused by light that has become "fatigued" or otherwise altered in long journeys through space—not by recessional velocity—were briefly resurrected and then dropped for want of any evidence. But another theory, proposed by Los Alamos Physicist James Terrell and supported by Hoyle and University of California Physicist Geoffrey Burbidge, was not so easily disposed of.
Quasars, they said, may well be "local" objects expelled from the Milky Way or a nearby galaxy by a recent stupendous explosion. While moving away from the earth at velocities approaching the speed of light, they would show a red shift but would be relatively close by. Thus, it would be easier to explain their brightness, and they would not present a threat to the steady-state theory.
There are convincing arguments against the local theory. Maarten Schmidt, for one, cannot believe that the Milky Way or any nearby galaxy could have produced an explosion great enough to impart such huge velocities to local objects. "There is just not enough energy to have shot them all out," he explains. If the explosion were recent enough so that the quasars were still quite close, adds Astronomer Greenstein, some of them would not yet have passed the earth and would be approaching it rapidly. Their light would therefore be moving toward the blue, not the red end of the spectrum. Though a search is on, no blue shifts have yet been detected in quasars.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence against the local theory has been presented by Astronomer J. A. Koehler, working with the 210-ft. radio telescope at Parkes. Koehler found evidence that he was picking up radio emission from quasar 3C 273 that had passed through a hydrogen cloud near the Virgo cluster of galaxies, which are about 40 million light-years from the earth—a strong argument that the quasar is even farther away than the galaxy. Admits Physicist Dennis W. Sciama of Cambridge University: "This result appears to dispose of the possibility that the quasi-stellar sources are close to our galaxy."