Word: maartens
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...much of the scientific community accepts Astronomer Maarten Schmidt's contention that the faint stars called quasars are the most distant objects ever observed (TIME cover, March 11). But challengers remain, and they have by no means given up. Schmidt's colleague, Halton Arp of the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, for example, believes that quasars were ejected from odd-looking galaxies that are, by cosmological standards, virtual neighbors to the earth...
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...
When Schmidt's interpretation and Oke's proof were published in Nature, the world of 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 Astronomer Greenstein promptly shelved his own unpublished quasar theory, admitting that "if it weren't for Maarten, I could have been caught with my scientific trousers down."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...
...time young Maarten had enrolled at the University of Groningen, where he studied mathematics, physics and astronomy, his dedication to astronomy had begun to alarm his father, a government accountant. "How can you earn your daily bread by looking at the stars?", the elder Schmidt asked repeatedly. He was placated only by a direct appeal from University Astronomy Professor Adriaan Blaauw, who saw in the eager young student the makings of an able professional. Upon graduation in 1949, Schmidt was offered a job at the University of Leiden Observatory as an assistant to Astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort, who is famous...
...evening, Maarten usually mixes work with relaxation. "If I'm doing difficult creative work," he explains, "I keep at it for only a quarter of an hour or so at a time." In between these sessions, he sometimes watches television with Corrie, easing his busy brain with such shows as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart! Another relaxing habit, imported from Holland like the Schmidts, is an occasional belt or two of volatile Dutch Bols...