Word: quasar
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...announcement said that Astronomer Maarten Schmidt of Caltech had discovered a quasar (quasi-stellar radio source) racing away from earth at 80% of the speed of light. That brief observation last week surely marks a significant milestone in the expanding reach of modern astronomy. Since speed is related to distance, the speed of Schmidt's quasar makes it by far the most distant object ever identified. Even more important, discovering the quasar meant that Dr. Schmidt had refined a delicate technique that will almost certainly find still more distant objects and lead man close to the edge (if there...
...With every new observation, the mystery deepened. Quasars turned out to be by far the most brilliant objects in the universe, shining with the light of from 50 to 100 galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars as bright as the sun. Where did all the energy come from? Searching for answers, Dr. Schmidt and his colleagues pored over spectrograms which showed quasar light separated into its various wave lengths. They knew that the most distant fast-moving bodies should show spectrogram lines of far ultraviolet light whose waves had been lengthened so much in their shift toward the red that...
What is a quasar? Answers were almost as numerous as the astronomers who turned up at the Montreal meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. New theories about the nature of "quasi-stellar sources" have only generated new arguments; new observations have only enlarged the uncertainty. About all that the assembled scientists could agree on with confidence was that Dr. Maarten Schmidt of Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories was the proper choice for astronomy's prestigious Helen B. Warner prize...
...source, 3C-2, which was photographed as a dim reddish object only two years ago by the University of Minnesota observatory, has shown up in recent Palomar pictures four times as brilliant as before, but rich in blue light. It seems as if 3C-2 has turned into a quasar, giving a vast increase in shortwave radiation. But no one can imagine a process that could kindle such an outburst in so short a time...
...astronomers have developed several theories to explain why galaxies can explode, but the 13-year pulsation of Quasar 3C-273 has them stumped. If the thing is really a galaxy, it must be many thousand light-years in diameter; light must take at least 1,000 years to cross a minor section of it, and according to relativity theory, nothing can move faster than light...