Word: quasars
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...Schmidt story was not an easy one to report or to write. The world of quasar astronomy is one of nigh-incredible reaches in time, space and imagination. It involves unheard-of distances, temperatures and energy. It has its own logic and language, and it takes astronomy to the edge of theology, physics to the edge of metaphysics. It raises such questions as whether the universe came into being suddenly, or whether it existed forever-and in that case, what is "forever"? What is eternity? "The subject," says Science Writer Leon Jaroff, "makes the mind boggle, especially when...
...notes, with the help of Researcher Fortunata Sydnor Trapnell and major contributions from TIME bureaus. During an interview with Schmidt at Caltech, Jaroff was especially pleased when the astronomer let TIME in on a secret. "I looked through the microscope at the photo plate showing the latest quasar he discovered," says Jaroff. It is the newest and most dis tant, and our cover story is the first published account of this discovery...
...detailed photographs of the skies to work out the background for his portrait of Schmidt. The whirling mass in the upper righthand corner is a spiral galaxy. To the left is a very bright star as seen through an optical telescope. In the right foreground, Vickrey renders a quasar, which may be recognized by the small jet stream spilling out from it at right. In showing Schmidt's head with its reflections receding into space, the artist tried to "give the feeling of infinity, the impression of an echo or radio waves being transmitted. The echo of the head...
...Caltech colleague, Sandage and Schmidt analyzed three of these objects, and found that they were moving away from the earth at tremendous speeds. One of them, BSO-1 (blue stellar object) seems to be speeding at the rate of 125,000 miles a second, making it second only to quasar 3C-9 (149,000 miles a second) as the most distant known object. The spectral patterns also showed a presence of ionized carbon atoms that have been detected previously only in the most distant quasars. The blue objects probably outnumber quasars 500 to 1 and are scattered throughout the universe...
Tripled Wave. Step by painful step Schmidt's search identified spectrogram lines and unlocked the spectral secrets of five new quasars. The most distant of them, 3C-9, showed signs of a kind of ultraviolet which comes from the sun in considerable quantities but is absorbed by the earth's atmosphere. It had never been photographed before by surface observatories. In the 3C-9's spectrum, its wave length had been more than tripled by shifting toward the red. It showed as an easily photographed blue and proved that the quasar's speed...