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Embarrassing Record. In the three years since Schmidt made his discovery, noted astronomers have spent long nights vying for the distinction of finding the quasar with the largest red shift. In December, University of California Astronomer Margaret Burbidge briefly held the record, with an observed red shift for quasar 0106 + 01, indicating that it was racing away from the earth at 81.2% of the speed erf light and was the farthermost object known. In January, however, Schmidt found another quasar (1116+12) with a red shift that is even greater and a correspondingly greater velocity. "I feel a little embarrassed about it," he says. "This thing had to be just 1% above Margaret's." So far, about 90 quasars have been identified and 30 analyzed for red shift, most of them by Schmidt, who believes that about a thousand quasars will eventually be found.
While strict interpretation of Hubble's law would place the farthermost quasars more than 8 billion light-years from the earth, Schmidt refuses to assign a specific distance for any beyond the closest: 3C 273. "We do not know that Hubble's law applies at cosmological distances," he explains. "All we can really say is that if the universe is 10 billion years old, then light from the farthermost quasars has been on the way to us for more than 8 billion years. When the light we see today left the farthermost quasars, the earth and the solar system had not yet been born. And we do not know with certainty what the quasar has done or where it has gone in the past 8 billion years. It may now be a galaxy or just some burned-out remnants."
Superb Work. Such grand, galactic thoughts come easily these days to the man who has been puzzling over the stars ever since he was twelve and his amateur astronomer uncle gave him a look through a telescope. Before he finished high school in the Dutch town of Groningen, where he was born, he had become so expert a student of the skies that his teacher exchanged chairs with him during astronomy lessons and allowed him to address the class. "You know that stuff better than I do," the teacher admitted.
By the time young Maarten had enrolled at the University of Groningen, where he studied mathematics, physics and astronomy, his dedication to astronomy had begun to alarm his father, a government accountant. "How can you earn your daily bread by looking at the stars?", the elder Schmidt asked repeatedly. He was placated only by a direct appeal from University Astronomy Professor Adriaan Blaauw, who saw in the eager young student the makings of an able professional. Upon graduation in 1949, Schmidt was offered a job at the University of Leiden Observatory as an assistant to Astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort, who is famous for determining the rotation of the Milky Way galaxy as well as for his pioneer role in the radio mapping of hydrogen clouds. "His work was superb," says Oort. Perhaps as important to Schmidt as the professor's good opinion was his hospitality. At a staff party at Oort's home, Schmidt met a strikingly attractive blonde kindergarten teacher named Cornelia Tom, whom he married in 1955.