Astronomy Picture of the Day 5-20-03

Explanation: What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to be supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though, with even the nature of the surrounding gas still unknown. Above, an artist's impression shows a primordial quasar as it might have been, surrounded by sheets of gas, dust, stars, and early star clusters. Exacting observations of three distant quasars now indicate emission of very specific colors of the element iron. These Hubble Space Telescope observations, which bolster recent results from the WMAP mission, indicate that a whole complete cycle of stars was born, created this iron, and died within the first few hundred million years of the universe.

It is sooo ironic that the artist/astronomer Wolfram Freudling works at ST-ECF's Munich facility; it's on Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse (Karl Schwarzschild Street). Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Karl Schwarzschild (October 9, 1873 - May 11, 1916) was a noted German physicist and astronomer.

He was born in Frankfurt am Main. Something of a child prodigy he had a paper on orbits published when he was only sixteen. He studied at Strasbourg and Munich, obtaining his doctorate in 1896 for a work on Jules Henri Poincaré's theories.

From 1901 until 1909 he was a professor at the prestigious institute at Göttingen, where he had the opportunity to work with some significant figures including David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. He moved to a post at the Astrophysical Observatory in Potsdam in 1909. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he joined the German army serving on both the western and eastern fronts, rising to the rank of lieutenant in the artillery.

While serving in Russia in 1915, he wrote two main papers, one on relativity theory and one on quantum theory. His work on relativity produced the first exact solutions to the general gravitational equations - one for non-rotating spherically symmetric bodies and one for static isotropic empty space surrounding any massive body. From the second he undertook some pioneering work on classical black holes. Two properties of black holes have been given his name - the Schwarzschild metric and the Schwarzschild radius. The papers were sent to Einstein and were later published in the Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

In astronomy he undertook measurements of variable stars, using photography. He also worked on improving optical systems, devising a perturbation equation to investigate geometrical aberrations.

He died of an illness contracted while serving in Russia.

Here is a link to the definition of the Schwarzschild radius: Schwarzschild Radius

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