The universe is full of strange objects. Quasars are some of the most powerful. They are also some of the least understood. In 1960 Thomas Matthews was a graduate student. He worked with astronomer Allan Sandage. Together they found the first visible-light quasar. They saw a faint object in the sky. It was at the same position as a known radio source. They called it a quasi-stellar object (quasar for short). The object was unusual. It looked like a small point. But it gave off stronger radio waves and more UV radiation than any star. At the time, they couldn't explain it. Matthews said it might be a cloud of hydrogen. It would have to be very far away. No one believed him. They didn't think such a small object could be that powerful. Now we know that it's true. In 1963 the Dutch astronomer Maarten Schmidt took another look. He showed that the quasar was moving very fast -- about 30,000 miles per second! That meant it had to be extremely distant. He believed it was about 3 billion light-years away. Even so, it shown as brightly as hundreds of galaxies put together. Now we know quasars may be the highly active centers of galaxies.
