Word: schmidts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...engineering and mathematics, kept the story as unboggling for laymen as possible, but did not hesitate to make it fairly technical where necessary. He wrote the article from his own 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...
...cover painting, Artist Robert Vickrey studied about 100 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...
Some 30 evenings a year, Astronomer Maarten Schmidt, 36, struggles with an electrically heated flight suit and enters the great, silvery dome of California's Mount Palomar Observatory. There, his tall, gangling frame seems suddenly reduced to Lilliputian proportions by the mammoth, 200-in. telescope that towers above him. An elevator hauls him slowly to a cylindrical observer's cage inside the telescope itself, and the dome's curved doors slide open to the cold mountain air. Perched high above the observatory floor, with classical music from an all-night Los Angeles radio station in the background...
...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...
Signals from Space. The distant starlike objects not only pose the questions, they promise the answers. Merely finding them in the first place - detecting their radio voices and photographing their odd and telltale light- was a cooperative triumph of radio and optical astronomy. It was Schmidt who discovered the enigmatic properties of the quasars...