Word: palomar
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...tiny spot of light known as 3C-147 looked no different from the countless millions of dim stars that can be picked out by the giant, 200-in. telescope on top of Mount Palomar. But when astronomers from Caltech's radio observatory reported that their 90-ft. dish antennas were picking up powerful radio waves from 3C-147's faint gleam, Palomar's men decided to make a closer examination...
Astronomer Maarten Schmidt focused Palomar's big scope on the strange source of electromagnetic noise. By using very long exposures, he photographed 3C-147's spectrum-the rainbow of lines and hues that give away the chemical secrets of their source. The pictures brought out oxygen and neon lines that were shifted farther toward the red end of the spectrum than any such lines ever photographed before. Since red shift is caused by motion, 3C-147, Schmidt decided, must be speeding away from the earth at 76,000 miles per second, almost half the speed of light...
...most distant. Since the universe is expanding, its parts that are moving fastest must be farthest away. Measured by Hubble's constant, which translates speed into distance, 3C-147 is about 4 billion light-years away from the earth. But Dr. Ira Bowen, director of Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, prefers to say "several billion" lightyears; he suspects that Hubble's constant may not be accurate over such enormous distances...
...acres of community news. It goes even further and offers something special in the way of chatty, back-fence journalism. In a column called "On the Move," it covers all of Southern California as if it were Main Street, reporting the doings of beekeepers at the foot of Mount Palomar and lettuce growers in the Imperial Valley in a nostalgic reminder of a life that flows at an easier pace. "Across the street," wrote Columnist Ed Ainsworth after a Sunday service in little Escondido, "church was letting out, and friends lingered on the sidewalk in the bright sunshine to chat...
...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...