QUEASAR
Astronomer Maarten Schmidt, the first to identify quasars, has vanished into the black hole aged 92. One obituary called him “the father of quasars”, which seems a bit misleading for a phenomena that predated him by billions of years. A protége of Jan Oort, Schmidt entered the space scene while radio astronomers were perplexed by waves that clearly weren’t galaxies or stars. It was Schmidt who visually identified these mysterious waves, locating the quasar 3C 273. From there he determined that quasars were, in essence, extremely luminous galaxy nuclei that were only present in the earliest (and by proxy, furthest) galaxies. Their status as remnants of the early universe gave credence to the Big Bang theory, and they confirmed the existence of black holes. In subsequent decades thousands of quasars have been discovered and Schmidt received over a dozen awards. My space theme Decaying Orbit-uaries goes quasy with a unique hit.
Maarten Schmidt
28 December 1929 – 17 September 2022, aged 92
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