Most Distant Quasar
March 1, 2021
The
universe is a large place. As
astronomers have been able to examine its contained objects more closely with improved
imaging technologies, some of the discovered objects are so strange that they took a long time to explain. One such object is the
quasar, a
contraction of the term, "quasi-stellar object," so-called because these had features, such as compactness, similar to
stars, and other properties, such as
luminosity, quite unlike stars. The five year old
daughter of
husband and
wife astronomers and quasar observers,
Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) and
Geoffrey Burbidge (1925-2010), is said to have called these objects of her parents' studies,
crazy stellar objects, which is an apt naming.[1]
Margaret Burbidge receiving the 1983 National Medal of Science from US President, Ronald Reagan.
Burbidge is best known as an author of the 108 page "B2FH paper" in Reviews of Modern Physics, named after its authors, the two Burbidges, William A. Fowler (1911-1995), and Fred Hoyle (1915-2001).[2]
In 1976, Burbidge became the first female president of the American Astronomical Society. That was after her 1971 refusal of its Annie Jump Cannon Award, an award designated for women astronomers. Said Burbidge, "It is high time that discrimination in favor of, as well as against, women in professional life be removed."
(US government image, captured from a YouTube Video by the Women's Museum of California.[3] Click for larger image.)
Quasars were first detected by
radio astronomers shortly after
radio astronomy became an established
scientific discipline enabled by advancements in
microwave radar during
World War II. Radio astronomers detected a few objects emitting large amounts of
radio energy that did not seem to be matched with an
optical image. This was not surprising at first, since the pointing
accuracy of early
radio telescopes was not that good. In some cases, a match was found with a
point-like object that resembled a distant star.
Finally, in 1963,
Allan Sandage (1926-2010), a pioneer in optical imaging of distant
galaxies, and his
colleagues matched a faint
blue star with one such radio source,
3C 48. The
optical spectrum, which at first resisted interpretation, turned out to be the highly
redshifted spectrum of
hydrogen. This led to the further problem that the large distance associated with this, and similar, objects, as
calculated from the
cosmological redshift, made them much more luminous than any galaxy. Furthermore, they were found to be more compact than galaxies, since their
brightness varied on
yearly timescales. This meant that their light came from a region less than about a
light year in size. Our own
Milky Way galaxy is about 185,000 light years in
diameter.
The redshifted spectrum could not be denied, but there were immediate suggestions that, since the luminosity was so
intense, that the redshift was not cosmological, possibly arising from
light emission from a deep
gravitational well, so these objects were closer. It was also suggested that the
energy might derive from
antimatter annihilation, the emission was from the
white hole end of a
wormhole, or a
cascade of
supernovae in which each
explosion triggers others.
The Crab Nebula, a spectacular remnant of a supernova explosion.
The energy of such an explosion can exceed 1044 joules, which is why they were considered