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The Palomar-Quest Survey's nightly snapshots of huge regions of the sky might help answer the question of exactly what's going on up there.
NCSA and quasars--those distant, tantalizing, extremely bright objects in the night sky, thought to be powered by supermassive black holes--go way, way back.
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| The Samuel Oschin telescope, a 48-inch aperture wide-field Schmidt telescope, to which the Palomar-Quest survey camera is currently attached. Photo credit: Palomar/Cal Tech. |
"Many of the simulations which have given credence to the standard model of quasars and active galactic nuclei were done on NCSA systems," says Robert Brunner, assistant professor in the department of astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a research scientist at NCSA.
By looking at what kind of light quasars emit, Brunner and other researchers interested in these objects can determine not only how far away they are, but also the physics that governs their extreme luminosity. Furthermore, because they are so bright, quasars can be seen to great distances, allowing astronomers to use them to probe both the physics of the early universe and the formation and evolution of galaxies.
Now Brunner, who leads NCSA's Laboratory for Cosmological Data Mining, is overseeing the processing and storing of data from the Palomar-Quest Survey (PQS), a sky survey that, by imaging the same large region of sky night after night, might help identify gradual changes in the fabric of the universe.
Access Online | Posted 2-8-2005
