Excuses, a pop video and a quasar anniversary

Oh my. I’ve just looked at this, our much-neglected blog, and realised that the last post here was in November. The first thing I feel I should do today therefore is wish you all a very belated Happy New Year! Maybe I should go with a slightly early Happy Chinese New Year! instead.

It may sound like a weak excuse for the lack of activity around here, but we’ve all been really busy this past year. Three quarters of us have changed jobs and moved country, half of us have got married (though not to each other), and Niall’s taken the first steps on the road to pop stardom (though, and possibly in tribute to Beyonce, I’m pretty sure he’s miming):

This week is actually a very good time for me to write something here as last Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of astronomer Maarten Schmidt’s discovery that the apparently star-like object 3C273 was actually located far outside our own galaxy – several billion light years away in fact – and was, at the time, the most distant thing ever observed (thanks to Jen Gupta for the tip off). It came to be known as a quasi-stellar object or quasar, and we now know that it’s a galaxy with an active central massive black hole, which is sucking material down onto it at a voracious rate. It’s star-like appearance is because the light coming from this nucleus outshines the combined light from all the stars within it (as I’ve written about here before). Here’s Maarten Schmidt explaining the significance of this discovery in an interview from 1975:

…I would say that indeed it was, in a sense, the birth of the present era of exotic phenomena, exotic and explosive phenomena in astronomy, with the quasars, the pulsars, the x-ray binaries, the black hole, the 3 deg. background radiation. I mean all these things were yet to come. The quasars suddenly started it and since then just about every two years there has been a major development of another discovery. Astronomy in an accelerated development that is just unbelievable. I mean before 1963 things were so unlike after 1963, there was no way to compare it. So in a sense the agony and the pressure of making a good on-the-spot scientific judgment just in one day essentially, the fifth of February, was a very interesting one. Because we had not been subjected to this yet. Later on it was much easier for people to accept extraordinary things in astronomy because we’ve seen it as I said every two years we’ve seen them. This has come on with about five to six, even with seven different types of phenomena including the gamma ray bursts that you may have heard about. Fantastic things. You never heard things like it in astronomy! And if they came, it was one a lifetime… So it was the beginning of an era that, of course we didn’t know at that time, we couldn’t help but realize that the quasars would play a very important role from then on, it was clear enough.

SCHMIDT, M. (1963). 3C 273 : A Star-Like Object with Large Red-Shift Nature, 197 (4872), 1040-1040 DOI: 10.1038/1971040a0