Word: quasars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Although some 200 quasars (quasi-stellar sources) have been discovered since the first one was identified in 1960, scientists have been unable to agree on the nature, or even the size or distance of the mysterious starlike objects. Quasar controversies have so rocked the once stable world of astronomy that California Institute of Technology Astronomer Jesse Greenstein has been driven to poetic expression...
...Horrid quasar Near or far, This truth to you I must confess; My heart for you is full of hate O super star, Imploded gas, Exploded trash, You glowing speck upon a plate. Of Einstein's world you've made a mess...
...acknowledges that light from the quasars shows a substantially greater red shift than light from the galaxies that he thinks gave them birth. But he is not bothered by the problem; unlike most astronomers he does not believe that the red shift is caused by the speed with which quasars are receding from the earth-a speed that would indicate they are billions of light-years away. Instead, says Arp, the red shift could be caused by an immense quasar gravitational field, by the high velocity of material falling toward the center of quasars that are suffering catastrophic collapse...
Back to the Drawing Board. Such speculations have caused a stir among astronomers, who are impressed by Arp's statistics. But many are equally impressed by his failure to account for the energy needed to expel quasars and radio galaxies from his collection of "peculiar galaxies." And most point out that he has offered only informed guesses, no scientific evidence that the red shift of quasar light is caused by anything other than their speed of recession. "If Arp is right," says one astronomer, "we have to abandon most of our work of the past 30 years, drop...
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...