Maarten Schmidt of the California Institute of Technology and Donald Lynden-Bell of Cambridge University in England will share the astrophysics prize for their work in identifying and explaining the powerful and distant objects known as quasars.
It was Dr. Schmidt who realized from studying the spectra of these mysterious objects — so-called radio stars — that they were very far away and, nonetheless capable of being seen, must be unimaginably powerful. Dr. Lynden-Bell suggested that they were in fact powered by massive black holes, now understood to be the case.
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