![]() Reddest were among the quasars closest to us. Objects - these previously overlooked red quasars were putting out more energyĮach second than "normal" blue ones were. Unusually red quasars, but the five reddest were also the five most luminous The discovery this plot made clear was significant: not only had we found some Preparing to submit a revised version when Rick was inspired to make the plot After receiving the referee's comments, we were Included the table above, and sent it off to the Astrophysical Journal toīe refereed. ![]() Sunset when its light passes through more and more of the Earth's dusty Very red quasars which appeared to have had their blue light filtered out byĬlouds of dust in their host galaxies (much as the Sun gets redder near InĬompiling the table of our findings, it was clear we had indeed found some In their selection technique (see Chapter 7 on "selection effects"). Missed out on a putative population of red quasars because of the blue bias Our contrarian approach was designed to see if prior workers had Looking for red ones which distinguished themselves from normal stars byīeing bright sources of radio emission (just like Maarten Schmidt's original The one potentially interestingĪspect of our search was that, rather than looking for blue objects, we were Was hard, but because it was relatively boring.įinding a few dozen more quasars when 100,000 are known was just not the We had been working on our own search for four years - not because it These searches have found many more blue quasars - theĬurrent catalog is approaching 100,000 entries. Objects from among the millions of star-like points of light that dot the Most searches for additional sources have focused on selecting the bluest As noted above, the first quasars found were very blue in color, and They provide us with a wealth information about what the Universe was like The speed of light, marking them as among the most distant objects seen. Today we have found quasars rushing away at up to 96% Luminous, outshining the combined light of the hundreds of billions of stars "z" in Rick's note) implied that the quasar had to be intrinsically very The enormous distance inferred from this first "redshift" (the Were not stars at all, but the most distant objects yet observed whoseĪpparent flight from Earth was simply a result of the overall expansion of The object was rushing away from Earth at 13% the speed of light. Of all - hydrogen - but shifted to the red in such a way as to imply that One of those why-didn't-I-think-of-that-before moments, Maarten Schmidt atĬaltech realized the signature was in fact that of the most common element Showed signatures of elements apparently unlike any seen on Earth. At firstĪstronomers were extremely puzzled, since an analysis of the quasar light Quasars were discovered in the early 1960s as blue, star-like objectsĬoincident with powerful sources of cosmic radio emission. To very high temperatures and glows brightly. But as the gas rushes toward its doom, it is heated ![]() Swallowed a billion stars and now lurks in the heart of a galaxy, rippingĪpart any star that wanders too close and sucking up its gas. This enormous energy production is a supermassive black hole which has Trillion suns in a space no larger than the Solar System. Quasars are fascinating objects that generate the energy of a thousand It was immediately apparent to me that the exclamation points were warranted. On the right is a histogram (see para #35) Figure 2: A scatterplot (see para #38) showing the amount by which theīeen made to appear redder owing to intervening dust (see para #7) vs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |