On the counting of radio sources in the steady-state cosmology

Abstract

The problem of the number count of radio sources as a function of the incident flux is shown to depend on two curcial features: (i) the size and behaviour of condensations (ii) the dependence on age of the probability of a galaxy with ages from H^-1 to about 2.5H^-1, and provided the primary condensations of the steady-state theory possess initial dimensions of order 30 megaparsecs, the radio source count can rise more steeply than is the case for sources uniformly distributed in Euclidean space> Each primary condensation contains of the order of 10⁵ galaxies, which in the main expand apart from each other as the universe expands. It is shown that a luminosity function can be chosen for the radio sources giving results consistent with observatio, not only for the source count, but also with the data on angular diamerers and with experience in the problem of optical identifications.