Word: quasars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...analyzing faint quasar light that traveled billions of years before reaching telescope mirror and camera, Schmidt has uncovered clues to the ancient secrets of the universe. The remote and starlike objects he studies were born, and may have died, long before the earth existed. By decoding some of their signals that have been so long in transit, the Dutch-born astronomer has upset the familar pre-quasar universe of stars and galaxies. He has rocked the worlds of astronomy, physics and philosophy. He has undermined established theories and stimulated fantastic new ones, provoked scientists into bitter controversies and brilliant hypotheses...
Using the 200-in. giant at Palomar, Astronomers Allan Sandage and Jesse Greenstein channeled the faint light from a quasar through spectrographs, using exposures as long as six or seven hours to produce a usuable image on their film. Their painstaking labor produced tiny spectrograms that contained no color, only shadings of black and white, and were one-third of an inch long and a thousandth of an inch thick. Under the microscope, however, Sandage and Greenstein were barely able to discern strange patterns and spectral lines that had never before been observed in stellar spectra. Genuinely puzzled, Greenstein began...
When the Australian data reached Astronomer Maarten Schmidt late in 1962, he was able to locate 3C 273 in earlier photographs, which revealed it to be a round, fuzzy, starlike object with a faint, glowing jet protruding from it; he had discovered a quasar that was brighter than any yet recorded by his colleagues...
Soon after, he obtained a good spectrum from the quasar and, like his colleagues Sandage and Greenstein, he was puzzled by the sight of unfamilar spectral lines. But after staring at the spectrum for six weeks, Schmidt had a wild, almost desperate thought. Three closely spaced spectral lines on his photographic plate resembled hydrogen lines. But they were not in the blue segment of the spectrum where they belonged: they were superimposed on the red portion instead. Could they actually be hydrogen lines that had shifted to longer wave lengths...
...hunch, Schmidt assumed that the lines he saw were really hydrogen lines. He measured the shift and calculated that 3C 273 was moving away at 15% of the speed of light, or about 28,000 miles per second. This meant, according to Hubble's law, that the quasar must be about 1.5 billion light-years from the earth, instead of being a faint, nearby star - as most astronomers had assumed...