According to the president of the Norwegian Academy, Schmidt (right) and Lynden-Bell (left) were awarded the Kavli Prize in astrophysics for their “seminal contribution to our understanding of the nature of quasars,” or quasi-stellar radio sources, which are now known to be the intensely energetic cores of far-off galaxies.

Studying what appeared to be invisible stars that emitted radio waves, Schmidt first identified quasars in the early sixties and then, in 1963, captured their light spectra. The data was like nothing he had ever seen. The objects’ starlike appearances suggested they were relatively nearby, but the spectral light patterns suggested that they, instead, lay far beyond our galaxy and that they were some of the most distant objects in the universe.

For this to be true, though, quasars had to give off extraordinarily large amounts of energy, each emitting more than the combined radiance of 100 normal galaxies. Each quasar is, in fact, trillions of times brighter than the Sun, but, at first, that energy output puzzled scientists. Eventually, in 1969, Lynden-Bell developed a model of how these celestial beasts work. A massive black hole sits at the center of each quasar, he reasoned, and it acts as a huge gravity well. More and more gas and dust particles are sucked in by the bottomless pits of black holes and the frictional forces of the colliding matter fuels quasars as everything swirls about the holes and slams together.

But “the giant black holes that power quasars are nothing to be frightened of,” Lynden-Bell said. “Space is very empty, and they are far away.”

Early this morning, Lynden-Bell found out he received the Kavli Prize and said he is especially delighted to share it with Schmidt, who was Lynden-Bell's mentor while he was a postdoctoral researcher at CalTech in the early sixties.

- Ashley Yeager

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