Word: objectives
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That insight might merely confirm that the Caltech astronomers have found an oddball quasar. Or it could herald the discovery of an entirely new and remarkable celestial object...
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...
...Society in Chicago this spring, they showed their prize spectrum to other scientists and asked for their opinion. No one had seen anything like it, and few would hazard a guess about what message it might convey. Stymied at every turn, Djorgovski is pinning his hopes on investigating the object's invisible infrared emissions, which have wavelengths slightly longer than the red light at one end of the visible spectrum. Within the next few weeks, astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii will train a telescope equipped with an experimental infrared spectrograph on the quarry. What it captures could...
Astronomers looking for black holes have long known that the deck is stacked against them. In order to find a heavenly body, sky gazers ordinarily take a straightforward approach, hoping simply to eyeball the object through a telescope. But black holes, which are formed by collapsed stars or compressed matter at the center of galaxies, are so dense that nothing--not even light--can escape their gravity. Last week, however, investigators at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., announced that they had at last seen direct evidence of a black hole in action...
...Slightly embarrassed by all the fuss, including at least one starstruck Page One account suggesting otherworldly possibilities, Djorgovski said the enigmatic speck of light that he had found in the constellation Serpens was what he had suspected it was all along - a "sub-sub-subspecies" of quasar, a bright object energized by a black hole in its center 8 billion light-years away. That became clear when astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii eyed Djorgovski's puzzle with infrared detectors. "A lot of noise over relatively little," he admitted - though he did see some good to the hoopla...