Critique of Bell and Fort's quasar model.

The quantitative local quasar model proposed by Bell and Fort (1973) has been subjected to a critical analysis. It is found that their quasar model requires a large number of sudden increases in the intrinsic luminosity of quasars, occurring in exactly 0.165-magnitude jumps. Such a requirement has no known physical basis. The standard error in the intrinsic redshift component being more than 0.05, no significance can be attached to the feature in the power spectrum of this component with a 0.1 periodicity. This conclusion has been tested by performing power-spectrum analyses on samples with perfect periodicity.