Word: quasars
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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 Astronomer Greenstein promptly shelved his own unpublished quasar theory, admitting that "if it weren't for Maarten, I could have been caught with my scientific trousers down."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...
...meet the challenges, the resilient Hoyle has proposed a steady-state variation. In his steadily expanding universe, there could be "bubbles" in which expansion or contraction sometimes takes place. The earth just happens to be in one of the expanding bubbles, he suggests, which accounts for the disturbing quasar observations...
...necessity of explaining the prodigious outpouring of energy from such small bodies has generated some fantastic intellectual inventions, some of which may yet turn out to be accurate. Fred Hoyle and a California Institute of Technology colleague, William Fowler, have suggested that quasars might well be massive superstars whose nuclear fires have died down because of the depletion of their hydrogen fuel. Such stars, they say, would begin to collapse, contracting under their own gravity. And the tremendous energy released by matter falling toward the star centers might well be of a magnitude that could explain a quasar...
While strict interpretation of Hubble's law would place the farthermost quasars more than 8 billion light-years from the earth, Schmidt refuses to assign a specific distance for any beyond the closest: 3C 273. "We do not know that Hubble's law applies at cosmological distances," he explains. "All we can really say is that if the universe is 10 billion years old, then light from the farthermost quasars has been on the way to us for more than 8 billion years. When the light we see today left the farthermost quasars, the earth and the solar...
Embarrassing Record. In the three years since Schmidt made his discovery, noted astronomers have spent long nights vying for the distinction of finding the quasar with the largest red shift. In December, University of California Astronomer Margaret Burbidge briefly held the record, with an observed red shift for quasar 0106 + 01, indicating that it was racing away from the earth at 81.2% of the speed erf light and was the farthermost object known. In January, however, Schmidt found another quasar (1116+12) with a red shift that is even greater and a correspondingly greater velocity. "I feel a little embarrassed...