Word: faintness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Just as Galileo set the stage for Sir Isaac Newton, who compiled the laws of planetary motion and gravitation, Schmidt and his colleagues are forcing their contemporaries to exercise their inventive imaginations merely to comprehend what the great observatories have seen, and the clues collected from faint spectrograms may lead science into a new era of understanding. If astronomers can find an explanation for the birth of quasars, they may yet be able to find the secrets of Creation itself; and if physicists become familiar with the mechanics of elemental reac tions far out at the boundaries of perception, they...
Intimate Secrets. Mystery remained. When optical astronomers turned their huge glass eyes on some of the areas of sky manned by radio astronomers as sources of powerful emissions, they found only assortments of faint, nondescript stars. Then, in 1960, aided by pinpoint data supplied by Cambridge University's radio astronomers, and Caltech's Owens Valley Observatory, Caltech astronomers discovered that one stream of powerful signals was coming from what appeared to be a small, faint star. During the next few years, as radio telescopes continued to supply increasingly precise data, the California astronomers discovered three more faint, mysterious...
Using the 200-in. giant at Palomar, Astronomers Allan Sandage and Jesse Greenstein channeled the faint light from a quasar through spectrographs, using exposures as long as six or seven hours to produce a usuable image on their film. Their painstaking labor produced tiny spectrograms that contained no color, only shadings of black and white, and were one-third of an inch long and a thousandth of an inch thick. Under the microscope, however, Sandage and Greenstein were barely able to discern strange patterns and spectral lines that had never before been observed in stellar spectra. Genuinely puzzled, Greenstein began...
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...
...shift and calculated that 3C 273 was moving away at 15% of the speed of light, or about 28,000 miles per second. This meant, according to Hubble's law, that the quasar must be about 1.5 billion light-years from the earth, instead of being a faint, nearby star - as most astronomers had assumed...