Word: 3c
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...possibility that they may have been ejected from our galaxy. Reports on the death of this idea have been greatly exaggerated. The energy problem is considerably simpler on this basis than on the conventional basis of immense distance. The receding hydrogen cloud discovered by Koehler in front of 3C 273 can more plausibly be interpreted as ejected from our galaxy, in the same manner as in other galaxies, than as part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The local model of quasars also has the advantage of accounting for the far-out locations of radio sources associated with other galaxies...
...more Schmidt calculated, the more problems he raised. Even a very bright galaxy consisting of billions of stars would be much dimmer at this distance, but starlike 3C 273 can be seen easily with a 6-in. telescope. Clearly, more study was needed...
...strongest of hydrogen's lines, called H-alpha, seemed to be missing entirely from 3C 273's spectrum. If Schmidt's theory was right, the line was not missing but had shifted into the infar-red region of the spectrum, where it would not register on an ordinary photographic plate. Schmidt remembered Astronomer Beverley Oke had already studied the spectrum with an electronic gadget sensitive to invisible infrared. Oke had found a prominent line precisely where Schmidt thought that H-alpha should be, shifted into the infrared. 3C 273 was moving faster than seemed possible...
...science also went into a state of shock. Astronomer Greenstein promptly shelved his own unpublished quasar theory, admitting that "if it weren't for Maarten, I could have been caught with my scientific trousers down." Instead, he turned to a spectrogram that he had taken from quasar 3C 48 and - using Schmidt's redshift key - discovered that 3C 48 was re ceding even faster than 3C 273. By Hubble's law it appeared to be some 4 billion light-years away...
While strict interpretation of Hubble's law would place the farthermost quasars more than 8 billion light-years from the earth, Schmidt refuses to assign a specific distance for any beyond the closest: 3C 273. "We do not know that Hubble's law applies at cosmological distances," he explains. "All we can really say is that if the universe is 10 billion years old, then light from the farthermost quasars has been on the way to us for more than 8 billion years. When the light we see today left the farthermost quasars, the earth and the solar...