Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2017
In recent years much attention has been focussed on the environments of low redshift QSOs. In particular, Yee and Green (1987) have found that the average environment of radio-loud QSOs at z ≃ 0.6, as measured by the QSO-galaxy spatial covarience function, is over three times richer than that of radio-loud QSOs at z ≃ 0.4. This strongly indicates that there has been a steep evolution in the numbers of QSOs in rich clusters over a period of 109 years. This observation is therefore inconsistent with pure luminosity evolution models, which preserves QSO number with epoch, currently employed by a number of authors (see e.g. Boyle et al. 1987) to explain the observed redshift dependence of the QSO luminosity function. However, since over 90% of QSOs are radio-quiet, the main test concerning the validity of pure luminosity evolution is to look for similar evolutionary effects in the preferred environments of optically-selected QSOs.