Maarten Schmidt solves the quasar puzzle | Space-bar

In science today: On February 5, 1963, Dutch astronomer and Caltech professor Maarten Schmidt had a eureka moment when studying quasi-stellar radio source, or quasar, which had profound implications for the way scientists would look at the universe. Schmidt studied a quasar known as 3C273, which looked like stars by adding a mysterious jet. But even stranger was his spectrum. Astronomers examine the spectrum or range of wavelengths of light that a star emits to decipher the composition of the object. Except transmission lines from spectrum 3C273 did not match any known chemical element. Schmidt suddenly realized that 3C273 contains the very common element hydrogen. It was only difficult to identify because the hydrogen spectral lines did not appear where expected; instead, they were greatly shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Such a large redshift could occur if 3C273 were very far away, about 3 billion light-years away.

Dr. Schmidt recalled the enthusiasm of his revelation to EarthSky. He said:

This achievement came immediately: my wife still remembers walking up and down most of the evening.

The implications were just that: for the quasar to be so far away and still visible, the 3C273 must be intrinsically very bright and very strong. It is now thought to shine with the light of two trillion stars like our sun. This is hundreds of times the light of our entire Milky Way galaxy. However, the 3C273 appears to be less than a light-year, as opposed to 100,000 light-years for our Milky Way.

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Quasar 3C273 is not just removed. It is also extremely bright, involving powerful processes of producing unknown energy in 1963. Schmidt announced his revelation about quasar in the diary. The nature on March 16, 1963.

Hundreds of thousands of quasars are known today, and many are more distant and powerful than 3C273. It is no exaggeration to say that they put the science of astronomy in their ear. Why, for example, are these powerful quasars located so far in space? Light travels at a finite speed (186,000 miles per second) and we see quasars only in distant space and therefore in the distant past. These strange objects only existed in the early universe and no longer exist in the present universe. Why?

In the 1960s, 3C273 and other quasars like this were strong evidence against Fred Hoyle’s theory of steady state, which suggests that matter is created continuously as the universe expands, leading to a universe that is the same everywhere. Quasars have shown that the universe is not the same everywhere and thus helped introduce the Big Bang cosmology.

But the constant state theory lost ground even before 1963. The biggest change caused by Maarten Schmidt’s revelation about the 3C273 quasar was the way we think about it our universe.

In other words, the idea that the 3C273 was extremely bright and yet took up so little space suggests powerful energies that astronomers had never contemplated before. 3C273 gave astronomers one of their first clues that we live in a universe of colossal explosive events – and extreme temperatures and brightness – a place where mysterious black holes abound and play a major role.

According to a March 2013 email from Caltech:

In 1963, Schmidt’s discovery gave us an unprecedented look at how the universe behaved at a much younger time in its history, billions of years before the birth of the sun and its planets. Later, Schmidt, along with his colleague Donald Lynden-Bell, discovered that quasars are galaxies that harbor supermassive black holes billions of light-years away, not stars in our own galaxy, as was once thought. His seminal work has dramatically increased the scale of the observable universe and advanced our current vision of the violent nature of the universe in which massive black holes play a dominant role.

What are quasars? Astronomers today believe that a quasar is a compact region at the center of a galaxy in the early universe. The compact region is thought to surround a central supermassive black hole, just like the black hole that is believed to be at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy and many (or most) other galaxies. It is believed that the strong brightness of a quasar is the result of processes that take place in a storage disk, or disk of material surrounding the black hole, because these supermassive black holes consume stars that pass too close. This type of activity happens during galaxy mergers, which reached their peak in the early universe.

Chinese-born American astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu invented the name quasar in May 1964 in the publication Physics today. He wrote:

To date, the awkwardly long name “quasi-stellar radio sources” is used to describe these objects. As the nature of these objects is completely unknown, it is difficult to prepare a short and appropriate nomenclature for them, so that their essential properties are obvious from their names. For convenience, the abbreviated form “quasar” will be used throughout this work.

Currently, the farthest known quasar is ULAS J1342 + 0928, but it could be dethroned at any time. It has a red change of z = 7.54 and existed when the universe was about 690 million years old, only 5% of its current age.

Conclusion: Today, in science, on February 5, 1963, Maarten Schmidt revealed the mystery of the quasars and pushed back the edges of our cosmos. His understanding of the farthest and brightest known objects has changed the way scientists look at the universe.

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