Credit:ESO/M. Kornmesser
Monday February 5th, 1963 Mount Palomar
"Another long day on this project. Such slow work." Maarten thought as he glanced over at his desk and sighed closing the door behind him.
Plopping down in his chair he looked out his office window and ignored the sounds his stomach was making from the aftermath of his lunch break. It was a sunny day he thought to himself. A nice day, despite how damned cold it was outside. Snow covered the few conifers that grew perfusly around the observatory and he could see that some of the ice was finally beginning to melt much to his relief. The last few months he had spent his evenings stranded in a steel cage fifty feet in the air tediously keeping the state of the art 200 inch Hale telescope and the little spectrograph fixed at its aperature focused and tracking a faint little star name C3 273.
The winter nights over a mile up in elevation in the Palomar mountains outside San Diego had so far been cold and unrewarding. Maybe one or two spectrograph slides were taken a night, many of which were ruined during the development process. His only creature comforts in his nightly ordeal was a pair of hand me down world war two electrically heated coveralls somehow purloined from the air force.
A year earlier Cambridge had released its third catalogue of findings that were a collection of a few hundred radio sources discovered in the night sky. These radio sources warranted further examination and thats exactly what Maarten and his Caltech collegues were doing.
The process was an arduous one where Thomas Matthews up at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory would try and pinpoint the location of these radio sources using a pair of 90 foot wide dishes and then plot their locations on slide prints from the facilities modest 48 inch scouting scope. From there he would hand the precise coordinates off to Maarten who then used the impressive optics of the 200 inch Hale telescope in the hopes that an identification of the objects creating these radio sources could be finally made.
Just a few weeks earlier renowned astronomer John Bolton had asked Maarten and few of his Caltech collegues to help contribute to a article for Nature regarding the highly curious star C3 273. And so far, Maarten Schmidt had little to contribute.
C3 273 had gained the attention of astronomers because the latest endeavors in Radio Astronomy had detected this particularly bright radio source, which by the efforts of the Australians and their mammoth 210 foot wide Parks Radio Telescope dish was deduced to be a highly curious pair of very close radio signals streaming in long jets from some sort of novel star. Or at least everyone thought it was some new type of star. Schmidt wasn't sure since the latest imagery of the spectrum captured from the star was, to say the least, confounding.
Staring at the reading of light spectrum in the photos he had captured over the previous nights, it was obvious that nothing matched up to anything they could put a finger on.
Shrugging reflexively at his thoughts he decided to give the latest spectography he'd taken of the star a go and popped the slide into the viewer on his desk.
Like satori, or sudden enlightenment, he spotted a detail he hadn't noticed before. All of the four spectrum lines seemed to change uniformly in lockstep with each other. Staring at the first line he realized it resembled the Balmer series for the spectrum of hydrogen, but instead the first line which should have been H-alpha and solid red was redshifted 15.8 degrees into the infrared. Curious he thought, and looked at the next line and it too corresponded exactly where hydrogens H-beta line would appear if it too were also redshifted 15.8 percent.
This was one of those moments where your brain is instantly mind blown. He was most definitely looking at the Balmer series for hydrogen but that all of it was uniformly redshifted. The only things that could do that under these circumstances was light traveling long distances.... extremely long distances.
C3 273 was no star! It was the furthest and oldest object ever observed by mankind...and it wasn't dim either! Something a thousand times brighter than our galaxy. 40 times brighter than the brightest of any galaxy, but only a light year in size and was twinkling humbly from over 3,000,000,000 light years away. That's far. In context our nearest substantial galaxy, Andromeda, is only 2.5 million light years. This was several BILLION!
Maarten's heart started racing. " Whatever this is its, no 'radio star'! I've got to tell Jesse about this!" He stammered and darted out of his office running down the hall.
Jesse Greenstein, a peer of his worked just down the hall and had been spending his last few weeks boggled by a similar "radio star" recently found called C3 48. It too displayed unexplainable spectral emmissions and long gossimer jets of radio waves.
Like an overly excited child Maarten marched up and down the hallways pacing back and forth desperately trying to find Jesse. "Jessie! Jessie! You must look at this! " He flagged down and cornered Jessie explaining what he had found.
Within no more than five minutes of comparing notes the two had agreed that C3 48 was just like C3 273 but had an even more extreme redshift of 37 percent. Jessie's object was a jaw dropping 4,500,000,000 light years from Earth.
The two now both visibly excited soon attracted the attention of Bev Oke as he strolled down the hall. John Beverly Oke was another Caltech colleague working at mount Palomar and was an expert in photometry and spectrography. Curious he joined the two.
By the end of their shifts they had all agreed that whatever these things were they were a monumental discovery. Boy would Bolton be happy when he heard about this coming addition to his Nature article. The objects believed to be "radio stars" were really objects so old and far away they were some of the first to inhabit our universe. And, they were each over a trillion times more luminous than our sun!
None of them had any idea what they could really be at the moment. But that didnt matter, what mattered now was celebrating. All three of them went over to Jessie's house where Jessie joyful exclaimed to his very bewildered wife "Honey! Break out the booze!" They spent that night drinking to their discovery
Only question was what the heck had they discovered? What could be so small and yet pump out more energy than an entire galaxy?
A few months later John Bolton did publish that paper for Nature, only it wasn't one paper but FOUR! This was very big news indeed in the scientific community. The race was now on to understand just what these things were. But they did know one thing. They had a snazzy name for them. The catchy term "Quasi Stellar Radio Sources". Or, as coined by Astrophysicist Hong Yee Chiu during one of the press releases that year "Quasars."
This is the first part of what will be a mini series pertaining to Quasars, Seyfert Galaxies, and Active Galactic Nuclei.
This is my first post in the Hive Astronomy community and I'm excited to contribute more in the coming weeks. If you enjoyed this post you can check out prior posts I've made on Astronomy at the below links.
@steemydave/the-hunter-and-the-boy
@steemydave/a-surreal-nebular-safari-in-the-southern-skies
@steemydave/the-mystery-of-the-celestial-guest
@steemydave/the-leviathan-within
Wishing everyone the best and a thriving Astronomy and STEM community here on Hive that will capture many imaginations!
-hidave (formerly steemydave)
Image Credits:
https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1122a/
No changes made per CC4
Pixabay.com