Word: greensteins
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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...
Soon after, he obtained a good spectrum from the quasar and, like his colleagues Sandage and Greenstein, he was puzzled by the sight of unfamilar spectral lines. But after staring at the spectrum for six weeks, Schmidt had a wild, almost desperate thought. Three closely spaced spectral lines on his photographic plate resembled hydrogen lines. But they were not in the blue segment of the spectrum where they belonged: they were superimposed on the red portion instead. Could they actually be hydrogen lines that had shifted to longer wave lengths...
...while, astronomers tried to explain how such ordinary-looking stars could produce large quantities of radio waves. But they made no progress, and two years ago Dr. Schmidt made things worse. With Dr. Jesse Greenstein, Schmidt photographed the spectra of four of the radio-loud "stars" with the 200-in. Palomar telescope and found evidence of ultraviolet light that had increased in wave length until it became visible light...
...Shift. Then Drs. Jesse L. Greenstein of Caltech and Maarten Schmidt of Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories decided to test a novel theory. When any object is moving away from the earth at a speed that is close to the speed of light, its light waves appear to slow down in frequency. Bright bands of the spectrum that are normally blue show up as yellow. Yellow bands become red. Stars have never been known to move fast enough to show such large light shifts, so Drs. Greenstein and Schmidt studied the strange spectra just as if they came from another...
...Greenstein and Schmidt turned to another one of the five bright radio stars. The spectrum of 3C-48, they discovered, is even more peculiar than 3C-273. Study showed that its brightly visible light has shifted so far it must come from a galaxy receding from the earth at one-third the speed of light. It must be 3.6 billion light-years away. To look like a bright star despite its enormous distance, 3C-48 must give off 100 times as much light as the entire Milky Way galaxy with its 100 billion stars...