Schmidt, Maarten (1929–)
Dutch-American astronomer who, in 1963, identified the first quasar,
showing that these starlike objects exhibit ordinary hydrogen lines, but
with extreme cosmological redshifts that
place them at distances of billions of light-years. A native of Gröningen,
Schmidt earned his Ph.D. under Jan Oort at
the University of Leiden in 1956. Three years later he went to the California
Institute of Technology, where at first he continued working on the mass
distribution and dynamics of the Galaxy. When Rudolph Minkowski
retired, Schmidt took over his project of taking spectra of objects that
had been found to be radio emitters. Thus he came to examine the puzzling
spectral lines of 3C273 and to realize that they were none other than the
familiar pattern of hydrogen lines but vastly redshifted. Returning home
that night, he commented to his wife, "Something really incredible happened
to me today." He went on to investigate the evolution and distribution of
quasars, discovering that they were more abundant when the universe was
younger. He has long sought to find the redshift above which there are no
quasars, and in recent years he has joined teams studying X-ray
and gamma ray sources.
Adapted
in part from the biographical
entry at The Bruce Medalists website
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