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Intrigued, the Caltech team turned a larger telescope on the object to analyze its light. They were confident that the resulting spectrum, not unlike the band of colors that appears when sunlight is passed through a prism, would tell them a lot. "Once you have a star's spectrum," says Djorgovski, "you can determine its temperature, its heavy elements and how fast it's moving with respect to Earth...
Ordinarily, astronomers can take the measure of a star within hours after obtaining its spectrum. But when the Caltech astronomers got their first look at this object's spectrum, displayed in the form of an EKG-like graph on a computer screen, they were shocked. "Our mouths fell open," says Djorgovski. "I suspect that what we said was not printable. But the gist of it was, 'What the heck is this...
...mark an ample presence of an as yet unidentified element, and many small dips that probably represent segments of the spectrum where light has been absorbed by other elements--perhaps those in the object's outer atmosphere or in gas clouds between the object and Earth. Bewildered, the Caltech team looked for other answers. Maybe the object was a supernova, an exploding star, which often projects what Djorgovski calls a "weird-looking" spectrum. But the team observed the target a number of times over several months and noted no change. That ruled out a supernova's light, which gradually fades...
Some of the astronomers then suggested that the spectrum resembled those of a particular category of quasars--fantastically bright and distant objects powered by black holes. Only one or two of them, known as iron broad-absorption quasars, have spectrums that bear a passing resemblance to that of the Caltech object. Could it be that a plethora of iron ions in the mystery object is distorting its spectrum...
Everhart has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the University of Illinois and Caltech and said he would like the University to maintain a balance between education and research...