A short while ago, the telephone brought sad news. Our friend and patron of many years, Dr Hamish Campbell, passed away peacefully in his bed at the old Caister. I had the privilege of meeting Hamish only once, though we corresponded quite often on matters of mutual concern. He had been a keen amateur astronomer for many years, and during that time became a firm friend of Patrick Moore. He was a guest at Farthings several times, and is remembered with great fondness by Patrick. I believe he was the squire of what is now ‘my” end room at Farthings, so I am honoured by my predecessor in that hallowed room. Hamish and I met over tea in Kloof one Sunday, the consequence of a robust email disagreement about the Big Bang. Our conversation that day didn’t stay long in the stars however, for we both had another passion—birds and bird watching. It was Hamish who explained to me that the yellow billed kites I feed in my garden every summer do not, as I had believed, migrate to Madagascar, but indeed to the Congo. They gather in my garden on a chosen day in March, and depart together, flying north-east. They go to the coast, Hamish told me, and then follow the coastline north as far as the Zambezi River. There, they turn inland and make their way eventually to the Congo. They follow the same route back in spring. I didn’t dare ask him how he knew all this! Rest in peace, Hamish. We will certainly miss you.

The fly in the ointment of modern redshift astrophysics is undoubtedly the inconsistent behaviour of Quasi Stellar Radio Objects. If seen without theoretical prejudice, quasars present an alarming challenge to orthodox cosmology, and were it not for the relentless courage of a few dedicated astronomers, we might never have known about it.

They were discovered in 1963, when Alan Sandage XE "Sandage, Alan"  and Thomas Matthews combined optical and radio astronomy to identify quasars for the first time. They initially confused them with massive stars, hence the intriguing name “quasi stellar object”. Right off the bat, these creatures of the cosmic night were noticeably peculiar, and moreover, were actually defined by their strangeness. Most importantly, they displayed redshifts significantly higher than other objects seen on the sky, and that led to some really far-fetched conclusions. Quasars created difficulties for physical theory because at their redshift-implied remoteness, they would by known physics be impossibly bright. Quasars are thought to be very compact objects, typically only about one light year across. If they really were that far away, they would be so energetic that their luminosity enters the realm of metaphysics.

Everything those pioneers thought they knew about quasars depended crucially upon distance. If they were highly redshifted (and that they were, no doubt) then they were spectacularly far away. There was nothing more remote ever seen on the whole wide sky, and that, in turn, meant they were astrophysical superpowers. Their extreme distance implied impossibly high levels of intrinsic brightness—by a factor of 10,000, no less! Astrophysicist Howard Yee XE "Yee, Howard"  computed in 1988 that the newly-discovered Einstein Cross would require for its projected redshift-indicated luminosity a staggering 100 billion solar masses within the small space occupied by the quasars. That’s 1,000 times more massive than the Milky Way’s nucleus. I’m not kidding! Even more onerous was the precision measurement of radial expansion rate by very long baseline radio interferometry. Quasars appeared to be expanding at up to ten times the speed of light, with obviously serious implications for underlying theory and Einsteinian physics. All these fantastic properties were a direct consequence of their being so incredibly far away, and that, of course was given indisputably by their redshift.

We can’t argue with one thing: Quasars are peculiar objects, whichever way we look at it. They have fearsome reputations (mostly undeserved), and behave strangely. So strangely, in fact, that they suggest by their very dissidence that they may hold secrets that could unravel some incredibly puzzling problems relating to where we all came from. They certainly deserve to be studied by every astronomer at some stage of his career.

Cosmology in the modern era is never slow to grasp a transient opportunity, even if it means adjusting the facts a wee bit. Quasars were quickly utilised to shore up the faltering theory, and rather ironically, soon became the regimental colours of the Big Bang brigade. Cambridge astrophysicist and Astronomer-Royal-to-be Martin Rees XE "Rees, Martin"  wove them into an intriguing theory about deep space, and the applause was resonant. Meanwhile, Halton Arp pointed the gargantuan 200-inch Palomar telescope at the night sky and took photographs. That, my friends, was when this whole sorry tale turned hostile.

Halton Arp is a gentleman and a scholar; an honourable man with clear ethics and firm principles. He is also one of the finest observational astronomers of our era. I hold him in the highest esteem. Surely, you will understand that I am not drowning in admiration for those pompous idiots who shut the door in his face, and attempted a heavy handed suppression of the photographs he had taken of celestial objects. There hangs a tale of intrigue and deception here, and I am going to tell it to anyone who cares to listen.

It would be fair to say that the controversy surrounding quasars and the implied phenomenon of intrinsic redshift may be attributed mainly to the early observational work of Dr Arp. His interest in the astronomical distance ladder, stemming from his doctoral work with Edwin Hubble and subsequent 2-year stint observing Cepheids in South Africa, brought redshift into focus.

In 1965, two oddities caught his interest: Galaxies appeared to be in turmoil, showing signs of great internal stress and presenting themselves in ways that could not neatly be accommodated on Hubble’s “Tuning Fork” galaxy scheme; and an unusual prevalence of quasars, in pairs or more, aligned closely across active (Seyfert-like) galaxies. Sandage XE "Sandage, Alan"  had collaborated with Gerard de Vaucouleurs in 1958 to try (unsuccessfully) to systematically accommodate the wildly varying structural types of galaxies, and in 1966, Arp published a collection of these images in his classic Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

Figure  SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 17: Hubble's "Tuning Fork" galaxy shape classification, as displayed in The Realm of the Nebulae.

The furore that followed split the astrophysical community, with most astronomers declaring that close alignment of quasars with AGN was just chance, line-of-sight coincidence with no statistical or physical significance. A small minority took an alternative view, however, amongst them (besides Arp) Margaret and Geoff Burbidge, Fred Hoyle, Jayant Narlikar XE "Narlikar, Jayant" , and Jack Sulentic XE "Sulentic, Jack" . Dr Arp found some rather odd angular associations on the sky between Seyfert (that is, active) galaxies and pairs of quasars aligned with their polar axes. He took photographs of these systems, collated them in a paper, and submitted it for publication. The editor of the Astrophysical Journal at that time was the eminent and often opaque theorist Subramanyan Chandrasekhar XE "Chandrasekhar, Subramanyan" , and he reacted with contempt.

In a brutal, scandalous crackdown that has tainted and besmirched the gentle art of astronomy to this day, the powers-that-be closed ranks. How dare an astronomer attempt to publish photographs of unorthodox objects? They forbade Dr Arp access to the major West Coast observatories, and put what they obviously hoped would be an unbreakable choke-hold on his career. Fortunately, not everyone in the world of astronomy was as myopic as those unfortunate individuals who then controlled telescope time and publication in the United States of America.

After his banning in the early 1980s, fate intervened. Dr Arp took up employment at the Max Planck Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik XE "Max Planck Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik"  (MPE) in Munich, where he was able to continue acquiring images in X-ray of objects he had previously observed optically. Ironically, the enforced migration from optical to X-ray dealt Arp an unexpected trump—previously unseen linking structures were thereby revealed, and the great value of composite images in various wavebands was obvious. The MPE’s cutting-edge X-ray telescope, says Arp, “picked out the most energetic objects with ease, and the telescope was still small enough so that it had sufficiently large field to include the crucial objects which were related to the central progenitor galaxies”.

Those seeking to suppress his research had shot themselves squarely in the foot.