Clearing Up a Cosmic Mystery: It's a Quasar

"Everybody relax and go back to your drinks." That may not be the way scientists usually talk to one another, but it was the punch line of Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski's e-mailed message to colleagues last week informing them that a cosmic mystery that had stumped astronomers for three years wasn't so mysterious after all. Slightly embarrassed by all the fuss, including at least one starstruck Page One account suggesting otherworldly possibilities, Djorgovski said the enigmatic speck of light that he had found in the constellation Serpens was what he had suspected it was all along — a "sub-sub-subspecies" of quasar, a bright object energized by a black hole in its center 8 billion light-years away. That became clear when astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii eyed Djorgovski's puzzle with infrared detectors. "A lot of noise over relatively little," he admitted — though he did see some good to the hoopla: It shows what a "fun science" astronomy is.