Word: quasars
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Matsushita (1989 revenues: $44 billion) commands an array of brands, like Panasonic, Pioneer, Technics, Quasar and JVC. The company makes products ranging from stereos to refrigerators to bicycles to semiconductors. It is twice Sony's size, and developed the VHS videocassette format, which prevailed over Sony's Beta in a bloody competitive battle...
...that theory received a jolt from another astronomical discovery announced this week. Scientists from Caltech, Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study have detected the most distant quasar (an exceptionally bright starlike object) ever spotted. It is billions of light-years away, and the researchers estimate that it existed when the universe was only 7% of its present age. It is hard to explain how a quasar could be formed that early, even under the influence of cold dark matter...
...Kitt Peak telescope had been aimed at what appeared to be two quasars, mysterious, intensely bright bodies so far away that the light they emit travels for billions of years before reaching the earth. Gathered by the telescope's parabolic mirror, the light from each of the quasars was converted into a spectrum, from which a quasar's characteristics and even its distance can be determined. Most scientists believe that each of the some 3,000 known quasars, and thus the spectrum of each, is unique. Says Charles Lawrence, a Caltech astronomer and a co-author of the Nature paper...
...Turner confirmed, the two spectra recorded at Kitt Peak were virtually identical. This meant that if each were from a different quasar, the two objects would not only have identical chemical properties and temperatures but also would be the same distance (about 5 billion light-years, in this case) away--a highly unlikely coincidence. "If you get matching fingerprints," Turner says, "you could have images from the same quasar...
...does one quasar produce two images? The answer, astronomers say, lies in a "gravitational lens," an immense object with a powerful gravitational field located somewhere between the quasar and the earth. As light from the quasar approaches the object, it is diverted from its original path by the intense field (see diagram) and produces what earthbound observers see as multiple images...