Word: quasars
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...bounce radar signals off the comet's nucleus (those echoes may tell scientists more about the size and character of the nucleus). M.I.T.'s Haystack Radio Observatory will try a similar experiment in reverse: it will study radio waves from a far-off radio source (possibly a quasar) after they pass through the comet's tail, in hopes of finding the spectral "signatures" of water or ammonia. If they succeed, the M.I.T. astronomers will have gone a long way toward confirming Whipple's icy-snowball theory...
...argument goes like this: quasars, which are small, starlike objects, apparently shine more brightly than any other celestial bodies; the most distant quasar known to man, more than 12 billion light years away, appears so luminous to the astronomer's telescope that even more distant quasars, though less bright, should also be visible. Because astronomers do not see anything further, Sandage argues that the universe must be finite rather than infinite. And beyond that edge astronomers say there is nothing at all because, in the Delphic tongue of science, space at that distance falls back on itself...
...Eastern mind. Yet it seems a peculiarly Western need to determine the indeterminable. Scottish Essayist Thomas Carlyle once noted that man must "always worship something−always see the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite." At the moment, the something worshiped is science, and the something finite is quasar OH471, the blaze marking the edge of the universe. But before the poetic notion of infinity is crushed between the calipers of science, it is best to remember that quasars were discovered only a decade ago. More probably, what astronomers are really viewing is precisely what they have always viewed...
...most scientists, there are already enough mysteries to contemplate without such conjecturing. Indeed, recent discoveries in astronomy alone seem to have turned scientists into what Koestler calls "Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity." Many of them, for example, believe that those incredibly bright objects known as quasars (for quasi-stellar) sit at the very "edge" of the universe; that possibility got renewed support only last week when astronomers reported finding a quasar that may be as distant as 12 billion light-years from earth. A dissenting minority, including Fred Hoyle, offers another startling view: quasars are nearby objects, possibly...
...were later presumed to be emanating from a secret U.S. radar experiment. In the mid-1960s, a Russian astronomer detected varying signals from a mysteri ous radio source; Tass breathlessly reported that the signals were a beacon from a supercivilization. The source was later identified as a distant, starlike quasar. When Cambridge Astronomer Anthony Hewish and his assistant Jocelyn Bell in 1967 recorded blips coming from space at precise intervals, they playfully named the sources LGMs (for Little Green Men) on the chance that they had detected the beacon of an advanced civilization. The LGMs were later named pulsars...