Red‐shift problem intensifies, says Burbidge

Since the discovery of quasistellar objects people have debated whether their large redshifts are of cosmological origin or not. Last year a report by Irwin Shapiro and his collaborators implied that quasar 3C 279 was a comparatively local object, while a report by James Gunn suggested that PKS 2251‐11 was at a cosmological distance corresponding to a red shift of 0.32 (PHYSICS TODAY, July 1971, page 13).