QUASAR TON 202 IS WITHIN OUR GALAXY.

A careful search through Luyten's (1969) proper motion survey for quasars from the Hewitt and Burbidge (1993) catalog reveals that the bright quasar TON 202 (QSO 1425+267) has a proper motion of 0.053±0.016 arcsec/year, about the same motion as NGC 7293 or Helix. A previous search of this catalog by Varshni (1982) found 30 quasars, 3 of which had very large proper motions. A more recent search uncovered 10 more quasars, including TON 202. The proper motion of TON 202 is perpendicular to the orientation of its radio lobes (Rogora et al., 1986). If it is truly as far as its redshift implies (z=0.362) its tranverse velocity would be of the order of one thousand times the speed of light, a clear indication that the cosmological redshift hypothesis is completely untenable. Which leads us to conclude that this quasar is a star within our galaxy (Varshni, 1973, 1974a, 1974b, 1975, 1979, 1982, 1988) the strong optical emission lines are due to recombination laser action in a rapidly expanding stellar atmosphere. This is by no means an isolated case : Kron and Chiu (1981) have discovered QSOs with large proper motions one of them significant to 7 sigma. These facts explain the failure of HST to detect 'host galaxies' around many QSO. Considering the brightness of TON 202 (V=15.63), confirming the large proper motion should not present any particular observational difficulties with present day CCD equipment.

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