Word: 3c
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...light-year is the distance that light, at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, travels in a year: about 6 trillion miles. * "3C" stands for the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources. The other numbers designated each source's position...
Strange Lines. In 1962, a group of radio astronomers led by Cyril Hazard tried a subtle tactic in an effort to pinpoint a strong radio source that searchers with optical telescopes could not identify. Pointing the Parkes, Australia, 210-ft. dish antenna toward the source, known only as 3C 273,* Hazard's group recorded the precise time that its signals were eclipsed, or blotted out, by the sharp leading edge of the passing moon and the time when they reappeared from behind its trailing rim. Because the position of the moon can be accurately calculated for any given time...
When the Australian data reached Astronomer Maarten Schmidt late in 1962, he was able to locate 3C 273 in earlier photographs, which revealed it to be a round, fuzzy, starlike object with a faint, glowing jet protruding from it; he had discovered a quasar that was brighter than any yet recorded by his colleagues...
...colleague, Sandage and Schmidt analyzed three of these objects, and found that they were moving away from the earth at tremendous speeds. One of them, BSO-1 (blue stellar object) seems to be speeding at the rate of 125,000 miles a second, making it second only to quasar 3C-9 (149,000 miles a second) as the most distant known object. The spectral patterns also showed a presence of ionized carbon atoms that have been detected previously only in the most distant quasars. The blue objects probably outnumber quasars 500 to 1 and are scattered throughout the universe...
Tripled Wave. Step by painful step Schmidt's search identified spectrogram lines and unlocked the spectral secrets of five new quasars. The most distant of them, 3C-9, showed signs of a kind of ultraviolet which comes from the sun in considerable quantities but is absorbed by the earth's atmosphere. It had never been photographed before by surface observatories. In the 3C-9's spectrum, its wave length had been more than tripled by shifting toward the red. It showed as an easily photographed blue and proved that the quasar's speed...