APPARENT 'SUPERRELATIVISTIC' EXPANSION
In recent years radio-astronomers have used very-long-baseline-interferometry
observations to probe the fine structure of quasars. For three of the quasars,
namely 3C 273, 3C 279 and 3C 245, it has been found that there are two
components very close to the quasar and that the angular separation of the two
components is increasing with time (Whitney et al.).
If this angular expansion in terms of the cosmological hypothesis, it
corresponds to an apparent speed of expansion, which is between 2 to 10 times
the speed of light. In other words an apparent 'superrelativistic'
expansion. It is, of course, a consequence of placing quasars billion's of
parsecs away. In our theory, quasars being stars, are only 5 kiloparsecs away,
and the corresponding speed of expansion assumes a very modest value. Recent
results (Wittels et al.)
show that for 3C 345 the rate of increase of angular separation of the two
components is about 0.00015 arcsec/yr. This value may be compared with the rate
of increase of the angular radius of Crab nebula (distance 1 kpc), which is
0.235 arcsec/yr (Shklovsky).
Next Section: Largest Angular Size - Redshift diagram