Maarten Schmidt identifies the first quasar

In February 1963 the Dutch-American astronomer Maarten Schmidt at the Palomar Observatory was studying the spectrum of 3C 273, a faint star-like source of radio waves, when he realised that the strange emission lines were hydrogen lines shifted toward the red by 16 per cent, which means that it was receding at 47,000 km/s and was 2.4 billion light years away. To be visible at that distance it had to be a hundred times brighter than a galaxy of stars. The 'quasi-stellar radio sources', quasars, are now known to be the cores of distant galaxies powered by supermassive black holes devouring matter. They were important evidence for an evolving universe.

Open on the timeline