Discovery of quasars

The term quasar derives from how these objects were originally discovered in the earliest radio surveys of the sky in the 1950s. Away from the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy, most radio sources were identified with otherwise normal-looking galaxies. Some radio sources, however, coincided with objects that appeared to be unusually blue stars, although photographs of some of these objects showed them to be embedded in faint, fuzzy halos. Because of their almost starlike appearance, they were dubbed “quasi-stellar radio sources,” which by 1964 had been shortened to “quasar.”

The optical spectra of the quasars presented a new mystery. Photographs taken of their spectra showed locations for emission lines at wavelengths that were at odds with all celestial sources then familiar to astronomers. The puzzle was solved by the Dutch American astronomer Maarten Schmidt, who in 1963 recognized that the pattern of emission lines in 3C 273, the brightest known quasar, could be understood as coming from hydrogen atoms that had a redshift (i.e., had their emission lines shifted toward longer, redder wavelengths by the expansion of the universe) of 0.158. In other words, the wavelength of each line was 1.158 times longer than the wavelength measured in the laboratory, where the source is at rest with respect to the observer. At a redshift of this magnitude, 3C 273 was placed by Hubble’s law at a distance of slightly more than two billion light-years. This was a large, though not unprecedented, distance (bright clusters of galaxies had been identified at similar distances), but 3C 273 is about 100 times more luminous than the brightest individual galaxies in those clusters, and nothing so bright had been seen so far away.

An even bigger surprise was that continuing observations of quasars revealed that their brightness can vary significantly on timescales as short as a few days, meaning that the total size of the quasar cannot be more than a few light-days across. Since the quasar is so compact and so luminous, the radiation pressure inside the quasar must be huge; indeed, the only way a quasar can keep from blowing itself up with its own radiation is if it is very massive, at least a million solar masses if it is not to exceed the Eddington limit—the minimum mass at which the outward radiation pressure is balanced by the inward pull of gravity (named after English astronomer Arthur Eddington). Astronomers were faced with a conundrum: how could an object about the size of the solar system have a mass of about a million stars and outshine by 100 times a galaxy of a hundred billion stars?

The right answer—accretion by gravity onto supermassive black holes—was proposed shortly after Schmidt’s discovery independently by Russian astronomersYakov Zel’dovich and Igor Novikov and Austrian American astronomer Edwin Salpeter. The combination of high luminosities and small sizes was sufficiently unpalatable to some astronomers that alternative explanations were posited that did not require the quasars to be at the large distances implied by their redshifts. These alternative interpretations have been discredited, although a few adherents remain. For most astronomers, the redshift controversy was settled definitively in the early 1980s when American astronomer Todd Boroson and Canadian American astronomer John Beverly Oke showed that the fuzzy halos surrounding some quasars are actually starlight from the galaxy hosting the quasar and that these galaxies are at high redshifts.

By 1965 it was recognized that quasars are part of a much larger population of unusually blue sources and that most of these are much weaker radio sources too faint to have been detected in the early radio surveys. This larger population, sharing all quasar properties except extreme radio luminosity, became known as “quasi-stellar objects” or simply QSOs. Since the early 1980s most astronomers have regarded QSOs as the high-luminosity variety of an even larger population of “active galactic nuclei,” or AGNs. (The lower-luminosity AGNs are known as “Seyfert galaxies,” named after the American astronomer Carl K. Seyfert, who first identified them in 1943.)

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