Subj: Fwd: Mysterious Object in Northern Sky is Believed to be a Rare Quasar Date: 9/15/99 6:57:57 PM Pacific Daylight Time From: CChris6022 To: BARDSQUILL Kent - Just got this, Charlys ----------------- Forwarded Message: Subj: Mysterious Object in Northern Sky is Believed to be a Rare Quasar Date: 9/15/99 6:32:51 PM Pacific Daylight Time From: earthspirit@earthling.net (HJG) To: earth.spirit@listbot.com earthspirit... The Coming Times - http://www.angelfire.com/ny/earthspirit Mysterious object in northern sky is believed to be a rare quasar Tuesday, August 31, 1999 By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD THE NEW YORK TIMES Astronomers think they have solved the mystery of the strange object that has confounded them ever since its discovery three years ago. It is not any kind of star or galaxy. Nor is it some entirely new celestial phenomenon. As a few astronomers had suspected, the object is almost certainly an extremely rare type of quasar. Quasars, which have been known since the 1960s, are sources of tremendous energy found in the center of distant galaxies and thought to be powered by matter falling into massive gravitational sinks called black holes. But until 10 nights ago, quasar experts had been unable to find clear identifying clues in the object's spectrum of light. Then new observations were made by the powerful telescope at Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Looking at the object's faint light in near-infrared wavelengths, astronomers detected a distinct pattern of hydrogen emissions, a signature of quasars. The hydrogen peak on the graph of the object's light spectrum was at exactly the right place. After double-checking and analyzing the findings, astronomers at Keck and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena concluded last week that the object was a strange variation of a broad-absorptionline quasar, the like of which has probably been seen only three times before. "So we think the mystery is solved," S. George Djorgovski, the Cal Tech astronomer whose team made the original discovery, said in a telephone interview on Friday. "The object falls into the category of a curiosity, a puzzling one, rather than something truly new," he said. Because of rising scientific and public interest in the mystery, Frederic Chaffee, director of the Keck Observatory, personally conducted the new infrared observations at the telescope at Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. Chaffee's observations appeared to yield answers to other questions about the object: its distance and age. The new reading of the light spectrum produced an estimate of the object's red shift, indicating its receding velocity in an expanding universe. Astronomers use red shifts to figure out the distance of objects from Earth and thus their age. The mystery object's red shift of 1.2 translates to an age for the object that is about half the present age of the universe, or some 5 billion to 7 billion years old. Solving the mystery ended a frustrating period for astronomers, who are accustomed to identifying and describing just about anything they see in the same night they see it. The mystery object was detected in 1996 by a Cal Tech team conducting the Digital Palomar Sky Survey. The astronomers were observing the northern sky in three colors -- blue, red and near-infrared. When computers routinely scanned the data, the pinpoint of light in the constellation Serpens appeared to have unusual colors, but no clues pointing to any of the usual cosmic suspects. "When we studied it, we couldn't figure out what it was," Djorgovski's team reported on the Internet. "So we asked many other astronomers, and they didn't know, either." Finally, at the June meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago, Djorgovski challenged fellow astronomers to help explain the mystery. They came up with some good guesses, he said, but no definitive evidence. Others volunteered ideas after seeing an article about the mystery in The New York Times two weeks ago. While relieved to have the mystery solved, Djorgovski said astronomers would be faced with more and more puzzling phenomena as current sky surveys peer deeper into the universe with new telescopes and more efficient light-gathering instruments.