Since the discovery of quasars in papers often appeared and appear the assertions that the redshift quasar distribution includes a periodic component with the period $\Delta z = 0.063$ or 0.11. A statement of such kind, if it is correct, may manifest the existence of a far order in quasar distribution in cosmological time, that might lead to a fundamental revision all the cosmological paradigm. In the present time there is a unique opportunity to check this statement with a high precision, using the rich statictics of 2dF and SDSS catalogues (about 85000 quasars). Our analysis indicates that the periodic component in distribution of quasar redshifts is absent at high confidence level.

AbstractAfter discovering microquasars – active stellar systems with relativistic outflows (Mirabel et al. 1992) – many papers bringing the observational arguments on similar nature of accreting systems with different BH masses (from stellar to galactic nuclei) have appeared. It became clear that a level of activity in such systems could depend on few parameters: BH mass and angular momentum; accretion rate and magnetization parameter of accretion disk (AD); relative orientation of BH and AD angular momentum. The bolometric luminosity and characteristic variation time in such systems is proportional to BH masses, which span an interval in 5–8 decades.

A scientific session of the Division of General Physics and Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences was held on April 23, 1997 at the P L Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems. The following reports were presented at the session: (1) Simonov V I (Institute of Crystallography, RAS, Moscow) 'Structural investigation of single crystals and the structure—properties correlation'; (2) Fridman A M (Institute for Astronomy, RAS, Moscow) 'Giant curls in galaxies'; (3) Balaev A D, Val'kov V V, Gavrichkov V A, Ivanova N B, Ovchinnikov S G, Chernov V K (Kirenskii Institute of Physics, RAS, Krasnoyarsk) 'Quantum oscillations of resistance and magnetization in magnetic semiconductors and semimetals; (4) Brazhkin V V, Lyapin A G, Popova S V, Voloshin R N (Institute of High Pressure Physics, RAS, Troitsk, Moscow Region), Lyapin S G (Institute of High Pressure Physics and University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford), Klyuev Yu A, Naletov A M (All-Russia Scientific-Research Institute of Diamonds), Mel'nik N N (P N Lebedev Physics Institute, RAS, Moscow) 'New crystalline and amorphous carbon modifications produced from fullerite at high pressure'; (5) Ragul'skii V V (Institute for Mechanical Problems, RAS, Moscow) 'An experimental study of the optical isotropy of space'; (6) Kravtsov A V, Komberg B V, Lukash V N (Astro-Space Centre of the P N Lebedev Physics Institute, RAS, Moscow) 'Large-scale structure of the Universe and quasars'. Summaries of the four (1, 3, 4, 5) reports are given below.