Quasars!

[eustacetilley]

"First I had a chemistry lab at home and then, of course, the usual small explosions,"

I can't resist anybody's life story that starts with this.

TheRegister has gotten a lot of criticism lately for being superficial, and slanted towards the political beliefs of those that control it. But sometimes, they do produce a well-written gem, and this is one of them:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/15/...niversary/

Note: I'm not a cosmologist, and the best that I could ever do on TV is playing the corpse of a cosmologist.
Badly.

[space-time]

I enjoyed reading this, thanks!

[GeneH]

Thanks for posting this item, eustacetilley! That issue's publication of Dr. Schmidt's findings was a memorable moment for me. It revived an old, first "love".

I was an undergraduate at the U of Ill in Chicago at Navy Pier browsing through the open stacks of the periodical library one day when I stumbled across Dr. Maarten Schmidt's article in that issue of the journal Nature.

His discovery was truly mind-blowing! As I recall and as was indicated in the forward to the journal, Nature had already gone to press with that month's publication when they received Dr. Schmidt's submitted manuscript. When they read his paper, they were so staggered by his findings that for the first time in their almost 100 year history, they STOPPED THE PRESSES, trashed the already printed journals, re-edited that month's issue of the publication to include Dr. Schmidt's manuscript, and resumed printing.

Wow! That really stunned me and re-ignited a long-dormant interest in Astronomy I once had as a boy. What in the hell are quasars? Within a short time, I began devouring books on astronomy.

To give you an idea of the intensity of the light output of that object, YOU CAN SEE IT'S LIGHT IN A SIX INCH TELESCOPE - if you know where to look! It'll be very faint flicker, but it'll be there. It's the most distant object amateur astronomers can see. That's just the nature of the "beast".

The quasar 3C273 appeared to be a point-source of light in the sky with a jet which suggested it was in our galaxy. But astronomers couldn't initially decipher its spectrograph to be certain. When Dr. Schmidt eventually did, they discovered that based on its velocity of recession, it's distance was somewhere between 2.5 and 3 billion light-years distant!

His findings opened up the scale of our universe immensely!