Word: quasars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...