Exploring The Universe

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Exploring the Universe

Maarten Schmidt
Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125;
email: mxs@astro.caltech.edu
Annu. Rev. Astro. Astrophys. 2015.53. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 2015. 53:1–14 Keywords

The Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics is 21-cm line, rate of star formation, 3C 273, quasars, evolution, gamma-ray
online at astro.annualreviews.org
bursts
This article’s doi:
10.1146/annurev-astro-082214-122514 Abstract
Copyright c 2015 by Annual Reviews. I cover my life and career, first in Holland during World War II and then in
All rights reserved
Pasadena, California, after we emigrated in 1959. My main work concerned
the rate of star formation and the discovery of quasars and their cosmological
evolution.
It’s a great honor to write an autobiographical contribution for this vol-
ume of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It is primarily an
autobiography with an attempt to link my own career to some of the major
developments in astronomy.
GRONINGEN
I was born in Groningen, the Netherlands, in December 1929. My parents, Wilhelm (Wim)
and Annie Wilhelmina were both from Berkhout, near Hoorn. My paternal grandfather was a
housepainter. He liked to philosophize endlessly with my father and my uncle Dik, who was a
pharmacist. My maternal grandfather was a farmer with extensive grazing land in Berkhout and de
Wael near Hoorn. He was a tall man. I inherited his first name, which is difficult to get correctly
spelled outside Holland with two a’s and an e.
My parents had known each other for many years before they were married in 1922. Father
was a government accountant, who gradually rose in his career until he ended in the top position
in the country. He died in 1977. Mother eventually moved to Roden near Groningen, where she
died in 1991 at the age of 91. My brother Cees is retired after an academic career specializing in
Middle Age Dutch.
WORLD WAR II
We lived in Groningen till 1948. This time period included World War II, during which Holland
was under German occupation for five years. The Messerschmitts flying low over our house on
May 10, 1940, heralded the beginning of years of increasing fear and persecution. Our immediate
family was lucky enough to escape the most serious consequences. Accountants soon came under
increasing pressure to work in Germany; some were eventually forced to go. Gradually a national
underground resistance developed that would occasionally attack German targets. In retaliation,
the Germans would execute a substantial number of notables of the community, seemingly at
random.
Around 1943 all men of age 18–45 years were required to work for the Germans, often by dig-
ging defense ditches for the Organisation Todt. Large numbers of men at risk went underground
or tried to get medical exemptions. Father succeeded early in obtaining one. For Cees it was a
different matter, and he was for years at risk of being called out. He was detained over Christmas
1944 for getting a false exemption and sent to a camp south of Groningen. I remember visiting
him there after skating over the lake near Paterswolde. Up till the end of the war it was touch and
go whether he would be sent to Germany.
In the beginning of the war, my father would often take me on a walk in the evenings, unless
there was an air alarm when Allied bombers would fly over, or bombard, the city of Groningen.
Because all lights had to be shielded, the sky was dark when clear. These walks may well have
played a role in awakening my interest in astronomy. This interest intensified when I visited my
uncle Dik Schmidt in Bussum in the summer of 1942. He was an active amateur astronomer who
observed occultations of stars by the Moon. He showed me the sky through his telescope on
the upper floor of his pharmacy. When I next stayed in Berkhout, I found a lens at my paternal
grandfather’s workshop. With a toilet roll and a loupe as an eyepiece, I put my first little telescope
together. To find what I could see in the sky, I read many popular books, including some by
Flammarion.
In late summer of 1944, Allied troops advanced into the southern part of Holland, and ex-
pectations were high for a fast liberation of the country. The failed attempt by Field Mar-
shall Montgomery to secure the bridge across the Rhine in Arnhem brought the advance to an
abrupt halt in September. In retaliation for a general strike by the railroad workers in support of
Montgomery’s battle, the Germans executed any railroad workers that could be found on sight.
They also dismantled the entire railroad system in Holland and sent the iron to Germany for the
war effort. A shortage of food had already developed and, with the lack of transport, became critical
2 Schmidt
in the western part of the country. This led to the “hunger winter” in which tens of thousands lost
their lives.
In the eastern part of the country, we managed to survive. Even though rationing cards were
designated for bread, butter, meat, and milk, etc., there was practically none in the stores. Most
people would occasionally visit a farmer they knew who would feed them a solid meal and send
them home with a bottle of milk.
I had been going to school every day with the son of a railroad worker; he disappeared when
the strike started and I never saw him again. I then walked to school with Jan Borgman. Even with
all the shortages, we were able to grind and polish some mirrors. When we needed to consult an
article in an astronomical magazine in January 1945, we visited the Kapteyn Laboratory and met
the young astronomer Adriaan Blaauw, who eventually became one of my dearest colleagues.
Finally, on April 13, 1945, Canadian troops advanced to the south side of Groningen. The next
day we were in no-man’s-land between the retreating Germans and the Canadians. The house
across the street was hit twice by artillery fire. Then, at 4:30 PM the Canadians appeared on the
street. It was the moment of our liberation, and my parents were very emotional. I went out on
the street to talk with the troops. Then the firing along the street resumed and we ran home. The
night found us in between the Germans and the Canadians. It was terrifying, with heavy explosions
and tank fire over our house. We spent much of the night on the kitchen floor in the back of the
house—looking through the window we could see the sky, blood red as the center of Groningen
was afire. Two days later when we were safely behind the front, a Canadian soldier gave me a
glove, motioned me away, and threw me a ball to play catch. What a joy! It took several more
weeks for the war to end. Even before the German surrender, Swedish aircraft painted white with
a red cross flew over west Holland dropping large amounts of food on soccer fields to distribute
to the starving population.
Because many schools had been occupied by the Germans for a year, I went back to high school
in the summer of 1945 to catch up on missed school days. In 1946, I entered Groningen University
to study physics, mathematics, and astronomy. Lucas Plaut was kind enough to let me help with
observations at the Kapteyn Laboratory. Curiously, the observer was authorized to turn off certain
rooftop advertisements—it required us to get on our bicycles to find the switch at the offending
building. In spring of 1949, at the annual conference attended by all astronomers and students in
the country, Professor Jan Oort offered me the position of assistant at Leiden Observatory upon
my graduation.
LEIDEN
After some six weeks working on the variable star SV Centauri for Professor Oosterhoff, I was
called into military service. Holland was conducting a “police action” against the Dutch East
Indies, and it was expected that I would be sent out at the end of basic training. As luck would
have it, the police action ended and Indonesia became independent. Not only that, but I was also
one of a dozen recruits who got no assignment after basic training. For several weeks I wrote
weekend railroad tickets for my fellow soldiers until we were granted a release after approximately
two months.
When I returned to Leiden, I found that my assistantship had disappeared, but I was happy
enough to be back. Professor Oort asked me to study the brightness behavior of comets. He had
just launched his theory that there exists a cloud of comets around the Solar System reaching
halfway to the nearest star, now called the Oort cloud. I did a literature study of the brightnesses
of comets, particularly at perihelion and at the largest observable distances. I found that “new”
comets that come in from the outer parts of the cloud showed a much slower increase in brightness
www.annualreviews.org • Exploring the Universe 3
as they approached than “old” comets that had been near the Sun many times in the past, such
as periodic comet Encke. This result has at times been overlooked, leading to overly optimistic
predictions of the expected brightness of newly discovered comets.
KENYA
While this work was in progress, Prof. Oort made a stunning request: that I go to Kenya to take part
in the Leiden expedition to measure declinations of stars. Researchers usually obtain declinations
based on altitude measurements with a meridian telescope. There are systematic errors in these
measurements as a consequence of the atmospheric refraction and the flexure of the telescope
tube. At the equator, the declination of a rising or setting star is a horizontal angle in azimuth,
and therefore not subject to these errors.
The observer in Kenya, Bert van Herk, had been assisted by Lt. Van Zadelhoff of the Dutch
navy. His three-year assignment was coming to an end, and I was to fill in for the last year of the
expedition. So, in August 1950 I boarded the Dunnottar Castle in Dover to sail to Mombassa.
In the Suez Canal it was 100◦ F with 100% humidity; the job of being an engineer below deck
seemed inhumane. Beyond Aden, in the Indian Ocean the weather was very bad, and I was mostly
seasick. I got pretty weak; upon landing in Mombasa I walked to the post office like a drunken
sailor. There I learned that Cees had gotten married that very day.
Bert and Attie van Herk met me at the train station in Nairobi. I was wearing my new tropical
suit, and Attie remarked that I looked so neat but that it wouldn’t last long. She was right: The
main roads were composed of red clay that would become very slippery in rainy weather. I became
very adept at installing tire chains, often under trying conditions. The expedition was located at
9,600 ft on Timboroa Hill in the Western highlands of Kenya. The region was lightly populated,
with farms some five or more miles apart.
Van Herk and I shared the observational work, each taking half a night. The program consisted
of azimuth measurements through a small telescope mounted at a fixed altitude of 7◦ , alternatively
of a rising star above the eastern horizon and a setting star in the west. The housing of the telescope
was pushed aside at night so the observer was entirely in the open. Only a weak fence separated
us from the savanna.
At daytime when walking under a tree in the field, you had to be careful to check that no
leopard laid waiting on a branch. The scariest moment I had while observing was one night when
I heard the sound of something galloping. I checked with a flashlight but found nothing. The
most moving experience occurred when on Christmas night I heard a number of Kikuyus singing
carols in the distance. Then suddenly they were all around me and started singing. It took me a
minute to find a gap in my program so I could talk to them, in Swahili, and give them a reward.
During most nights one would hear a slow moving train hard at work to reach the station Equator,
supposedly the highest in the British Empire.
There was also a cosmic ray physicist, Jan Strackee, who maintained Geiger counters for Prof.
Clay of the University of Amsterdam. So, there was a foursome, and we could play bridge when it
was cloudy. Attie sometimes was a bit optimistic in bidding, and our games often led to interesting
discussions afterward.
In the morning of February 11, 1951, we drove to a neighboring wood mill for breakfast. I was
driving the 1944 Canadian army telephone truck with Jan at my side. The sand road was full of
shadows from the trees, apparently causing me to overlook a large tree trunk on the road. The
car overturned on its side, with part of my right leg under it. The mill workers were called in
to lift the car. They first gave it a little trial and dropped it! At the second attempt I was freed,
and the van Herks transported me to the hospital in Nakuru. I am still grateful for the great job
4 Schmidt
Dr. Gordon did in putting my right ankle together again. I was in hospital for 23 days. Once back
in Timboroa I was able to resume my share of the night observations.
The expedition was to end in November 1951. Our access road from the main highway had
a number of steep parts where the wet weather caused much erosion. I spent a couple of weeks
with the staff of Kikuyus to haul rocks to fortify the road to ensure we would be able to get out.
It worked, and we loaded all our equipment in a railroad car at Timboroa station.
I left in early November for Kampala. There I found to my surprise that a bus service from
East Uganda into Ruanda-Urundi did not run, even though it was still advertised in the Farmers
Weekly. Upon arrival in Kigoma, I was sick for a few days. I missed the outburst of the nearby
volcano. I then traveled by bus to the north end of Lake Tanganyika. We were a few hours late, but
fortunately the ferry going down the lake waited for us: It runs every three weeks!, from Albertville
for five days up the Congo. We got grounded once, but the captain managed to get around it.
In Elizabethville, I took the train to Victoria Falls, where I stayed for several days in the famous
hotel. From there I went on to Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town, where I stayed at the
Cape Observatory at the kind invitation of Dr. Stoy, Her Majesty’s Astronomer at the Cape. Then
it was on to London by boat, to arrive in Holland on December 15 after a trip of 39 days.
FEBRUARY 1, 1953: NORTH SEA FLOOD DISASTER

I remember vividly the morning of February 1. I was staying for the weekend with my parents in
Utrecht. It had been a night with very high winds, but this is not all that uncommon in Holland.
The morning news said that six people had died in flooding and that communications to the
southeast part of the country were down. Gradually it became clear that a disaster had happened
overnight. In the evening, all students in Holland were asked to report to their student societies.
I returned to Leiden and did so.
At midnight, buses came that transported us to the harbor of Rotterdam. Around 6 AM, we
were loaded in passenger boats normally used for tourists. While crossing the island of Goeree-
Overflakkee, we saw the first dyke breach: Beyond it was water as far the eye could see! We landed
in Middelharnis and were told to tell all farmers that they would be evacuated. While walking
down the road, which barely stuck out above the water, I realized that we rescuers were at risk if
the tide was low and rising. So, to allow warnings to be passed to those deepest inland, we left a
member of our group on the road every 200 meters, at shouting distance from each other. By the
evening we had loaded 800 people on three cargo ships. I sat in the bottom with a man who had
lost his wife. He had last seen her when she disappeared through an upper window as the flood
wave struck. She was one of 1,800 people who lost their lives that night.
21-CM-LINE MAPPING
After such an adventurous year in Kenya, I had to get used to living at sea level, adjusting to
the Dutch climate and getting used to the routine of attending classes. I became involved in
observations at the 21-cm line of neutral hydrogen. The line had been predicted by Hendrik
van de Hulst in an “underwater” (in hiding) colloquium at Leiden in 1944 and first observed at
Harvard, Holland, and Australia in 1951. Using the 21-cm line had the enormous advantage that it
was not affected by absorption in dust clouds in the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy. After an initial
exploration by Oort and Van de Hulst, Gart Westerhout and I were given the task of exploring the
northern part of our Galaxy, Gart doing the part outside the solar circle and I taking the inside part.
The observations were carried out with a German Wurzburg radar mirror at Radio Kootwijk.
To stay fixed on a particular field, the telescope had to be moved every 2.5 min, both horizontally
and vertically, by hand. This was done in the cabin that moved with the telescope and contained
the radio receivers and recording equipment. Because the radial velocity for circular orbits in the
plane of the Galaxy depends only on the distance from the Galactic Center, there were in the
interior part of the Galaxy two locations on the line of sight contributing to the observed line
strength. I observed line profiles perpendicular to the Galactic plane to disentangle the near and
far contributions. I remember well when it was time to plot the results on a map of the Galaxy. I
had derived distances and densities of hydrogen at more than 800 locations. It was a hot summer
night, with all the windows open, when I had finished writing the density at each location on
the map, allowing me to draw isodensity contours. And here it came, the first plot showing the
spiral structure in the inner parts of our Galaxy. To be the first one to see it was momentous, an
experience that I was to have once more later in my career.
I was living at Leiden Observatory at Sterrewacht 2, together with Westerhout, Kwee-Kiem
King, and Huug van Woerden. In 1954, at an Observatory party organized by the ladies of the
Observatory, I met Corrie Tom, who was a kindergarten teacher at the Haanstra school. We were
married in September 1955.

The 21-cm observation allowed a direct observation of the rotation curve of our Galaxy. I soon
started to construct models of the mass distribution that could produce the rotation curve. Prof.
Oort, who had been a pioneer in this field, was my thesis advisor. He had introduced the rotation
constants (now called Oort constants) A and B in 1932. A could essentially be derived from radial
velocities of objects like Cepheid variables, but proper motions were required to determine B. The
accepted ratio of −B/A was around 2/3, leading to a rotation curve declining with distance R from
the Galactic Center at our location. Rotation curves of external galaxies obtained by Vera Rubin
and others later showed that they are actually flat, requiring the introduction of dark matter.
I had the office opposite Oort in his house, allowing me easy access to Jan. Discussions with
Oort were characterized by long silences while he was thinking; the outcome was always inspiring.
The Ph.D. exam in early 1956 was very formal, in white tie, with a small invited audience. Part of
the exam included making about a dozen propositions, all outside the field of astronomy. These
were presented to professors while visiting them at home. Each of them showed interest (but they
did not bring it up at the exam) in my proposition about the need to grant the right of way to
traffic on a roundabout.
Following the ceremony-ending “hora est,” the committee stayed out a long time; this was
curious, because granting the Ph.D. at this stage is a mere formality. Oosterhoff told me later that
Oort tried to convince the committee to confer my Ph.D. cum laude. The university had stopped
doing that when H.A. Lorentz, who had not been awarded one, had been awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1902.
CARNEGIE FELLOWSHIP
Prof. Oort wrote Walter Baade at the Mount Wilson Observatory about my work. This was still
the era of the old boys network, and I was soon offered a Carnegie Fellowship. In May 1956 we
traveled by boat to New York City, where we stayed with John Seeger, brother of both the folk
singer Pete Seeger and the radio astronomer Charles Seeger, in Manhattan. The culture shock
was immense. It never seemed to be quiet. We stayed a few days with the Boks in Cambridge, then
with the Savedoffs in Rochester. We drove across the United States, visiting many observatories,
including Harvard and Yerkes where I gave colloquia. Soon after our arrival in Pasadena, I started
observing with the Mt. Wilson 60-inch and 100-inch telescopes. I worked on the color-magnitude
diagram of star clusters, a field in which Allan Sandage did pioneering work. This work gave me
invaluable experience in the practical aspects of observing.
6 Schmidt
RATE OF STAR FORMATION

In a discussion with Sydney van den Bergh while I was still at Leiden, he inquired about our
results on the gas density from 21-cm work, wondering how long it would take star formation to
exhaust the local supply of gas. I realized that there also would be a substantial return of gas to the
interstellar medium from stars that evolve off the main sequence within a few billion years. It was
not known how the rate of star formation depended on the gas density. I assumed that it would
go as a power law of the gas density with power n. This made it possible to derive the density
of stars and gas as a function of time, including the evolution of the metal abundance in stars.
At the 50-year anniversary of the law celebrated in Tuscany in a NATO supported workshop, it
appeared that the power law, with n = 1.35, fits remarkably well although it is not understood in
detail why.
EMIGRATION
Upon returning to Leiden in 1958, I found myself in a rather low-level position at the Observatory.
We now had two daughters, Elizabeth (Els) and Marijke and, in the tight market of postwar
housing, had to pay a very high rent. Rudolph Minkowski inquired at the end of 1958 whether
I was interested in returning to the United States. Soon, Jesse Greenstein made me an offer of
a professorship at Caltech, which after some negotiation I accepted. Getting a waiver from U.S.
legislation that imposed a waiting time of two years following a fellowship took almost a year.
We emigrated in late October 1959. Our families were all at Schiphol, which made for an
emotional farewell—it seemed all very definitive. While we crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a DC-7
at night, I remember how remarkable it was: giving up a permanent position in the Dutch civil
service, after more than ten years of service, for another position on the basis of a letter from
President DuBridge of Caltech. Needless to say, it all worked out well. I started to teach classes a
day after arrival, we bought a house, and Anne was born within a year.
In 1961, I started my first observational work with the Palomar 200-inch telescope. My work
on star formation had shown how the abundance of heavy elements would increase with cosmic
time, but the situation with helium was unclear. I observed various locations in the Andromeda
galaxy but found no evidence for differences in helium abundance. I did see considerable systematic
variation in the OIII/H-β ratio in HII regions as a function of radius but unfortunately did not
follow that up. Instead my interest gradually turned to radio sources.
RADIO SOURCES IDENTIFIED WITH GALAXIES

In the late 1950s, Cambridge astronomers had produced the 3CR catalog, which was largely
free of spatial confusion. Tom Matthews had been observing these with the twin interferometer
at Owens Valley to derive accurate positions for optical identification. Rudolph Minkowski had
been following up with optical spectroscopy to confirm and obtain the redshift. Just before his
retirement, Minkowski had found a record redshift of 0.46 for the source 3C 295. I took over his
role and eventually published spectra and redshifts for some 30 radio galaxies. While developing
the small spectroscopic plates in the darkroom, I remember dreaming that I would hopefully find
a redshift as large as 2/3 in my career!
RADIO SOURCES IDENTIFIED WITH STAR-LIKE OBJECTS

Quite separately from this work, there had been a remarkable development in 1960. Allan Sandage
and Matthews had identified the source 3C 48 as a star rather than a galaxy. The star varied in
light over months. Its spectrum showed emission lines that could not be identified. As time went
on, several more star-like objects were identified with radio sources.
Three star-like objects associated with 3C 286, 280, and 298 observed in 1961 were spectro-
scopically uninteresting and turned out to be misidentifications because of radio lobe shifts in the
interferometric observations. May 1962 yielded two objects whose spectra were inconclusive at
first. 3C 196 showed a continuum spectrum. The correct identification of 3C 286 exhibited one
broad emission line at 5,170 Å. I noted in a brief letter that this line was not observed in any other
astronomical object, including 3C 48. The spectrum of 3C 147 showed several lines in the red part
of the spectrum. In retrospect all these differences pointed to the effect of different redshifts, but
because all these objects looked optically like stars the idea that they might have redshifts simply
did not come up. I also observed in May 1962 a very faint galaxy mistakenly identified with 3C
273. Ken Kellermann and I have not been able to reconstruct why the galaxy was a candidate.
3C 273
The situation changed dramatically when 3C 273 took the stage. It had been occulted by the
Moon several times in 1962. Cyril Hazard and colleagues had obtained very accurate positions
with the 210-ft Parkes radio telescope. The source consisted of two components with a separation
of 20 arcsec. Component A had a steep radio spectrum, whereas component B was very flat.
Matthews gave me their results in late 1962. The optical identification of the two radio sources
was unusual. Component C fell on a star of magnitude 13, and component A came from the end
of a 20-arcsec jet protruding from component B.
Initially I was convinced that the bright star could not be the radio source. When I had time
with the 200-in Hale telescope in late December 1962, I observed its spectrum, essentially to take
it out of consideration. The first spectrum taken at the end of the night of December 27/28, 1962,
was badly overexposed—I was not used to observing such bright objects. At the UV end of the
spectrum it seemed to have emission at 3,250 Å. In addition, I saw emission lines at 5,650 and
5,820 Å and suspected the presence of other emission lines. Two nights later I obtained a spectrum
with the correct exposure and found several more emission lines.
Subsequently, J.B. Oke observed 3C 273 spectroscopically using the 100-inch telescope at
Mount Wilson and detected a strong emission line in the infrared at 7,600 Å. A total of seven
emission lines was now known in 3C 273, and in hindsight it seems strange that with so much
information no larger effort was undertaken to identify the lines. I did show the spectra to Dr. Ira
S. Bowen, the Director of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories. Dr. Bowen had resolved
the problem of “nebulium” in 1927, identifying the emission lines in gaseous nebulae as [OIII],
forbidden lines of doubly ionized oxygen.
In January 1963, Cyril proposed that we both write an article about 3C 273 to be published
together in Nature. It was while preparing the manuscript that I realized that four of the six
emission lines showed a regular pattern of intensity and spacing, i.e., decreasing intensity and
spacing from red to blue. To check on the regularity of the spacing, I decided to compare it with
that of the Balmer lines of hydrogen by taking the ratio of each 3C 273 line to its nearest Balmer
line. The ratio of the emission at 5,650 Å to H-β was 1.16. The next emission line at 5,030 Å
over H-γ was 1.16, etc.! Soon it became clear that most of the spectrum of 3C 273 was simply the
Balmer spectrum of hydrogen redshifted by a factor of 1.16!
This happened on February 5, 1963, in my office in the Robinson building. I immediately
went to Jesse Greenstein’s office. He produced the list of emission lines in 3C 48 and we quickly
realized that it had a redshift of 0.37. One of the emission lines identified was the MgII doublet
at 2,798 Å. It showed up in 3C 273 as the UV line at 3,250 Å, providing mutual support for the
8 Schmidt
derived redshifts. Jesse and I made so much noise that Bev Oke came out to see what was going
on. We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring other possible explanations according to very
highly ionized emission but did not come up with any.
Well into the evening, the three of us trooped to Jesse’s house, where we surprised Naomi
in going for doubles for whatever we were offered to drink. Corrie was equally surprised when I
showed up very late for dinner. She still remembers that in the evening I kept pacing back and
forth, realizing the opportunity these very luminous objects would provide in exploring the very
distant Universe.
The next day, Jesse and I explored the possibility that the redshifts were gravitational but on
the basis of physical arguments concerning the emission lines we found that the resulting mass
of the emission region became excessive. We concluded that the redshift had to be cosmological,
fully aware that the light variation in 3C 48 required that the object have a diameter of less than
a light year. This was an absolutely astounding discovery. Not only was 3C 273 an extragalactic
object rather than a star, but with its apparent magnitude of 13 at redshift 0.16 it exceeded the
luminosity of the brightest known galaxies by a factor of 40!

The results for 3C 273 and 3C 48 were published in four consecutive articles in Nature six
weeks later (Greenstein & Matthews 1963, Hazard et al. 1963, Oke 1963, Schmidt 1963).
These developments were presented and discussed at the First Texas Symposium on Relativistic
Astrophysics held in Dallas in December 1963, weeks after President Kennedy’s assassination. In
reviewing the Symposium in early 1964, Hong-Yee Chiu used the term quasar for these new
objects.
PACIFIC TRAVEL
Soon after this development, I left for Australia to attend an IAU symposium on the Galaxy and
the Magellanic Clouds. Jesse had arranged that I would fly on Military Air Transport Service on
his Navy contract. On the flight from Travis Air Force Base, I had the equivalent rank of general;
in fact I, was sitting next to a real one. In Guam, we were both given a tour to inspect the latest
typhoon damage. Upon arrival at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, a technical sergeant took my
papers to process me through customs. He returned to tell me that the Philippine government
was not prepared to let me go to Manila to continue my trip: the Navy had forgotten to inform
the Philippines 14 days in advance that a third national would enter through the base.
My downfall from general to a nobody was complete. First I had to get a place in the barracks.
Then I called the Dutch embassy in Manila, saying I was a citizen in distress. They responded
that it was a matter between the United States and the Philippines. I am uncertain how many days
I was in this situation. I explored the possibility of flying out with an Australian squadron but it
would have been to Sydney and not till a week later. Eventually, I established a contact and found
myself one evening at the house of the Commander of the 33rd Air Force (his son had an interest
in astronomy). He offered me three possibilities: fly back to Guam, fly back to San Francisco, or
fly to Vietnam.
So, the next morning at 6 AM, the Military Police woke me and put me on a charter DC-6
full of soldiers with rifles straight up in front of them. Upon arrival in Saigon, they got extensive
instructions from a lieutenant. At the end, I asked him for advice. He mentioned that a Pan Am
flight to Singapore was about to take off. I remember running across the field while buying my
ticket from the Pan Am agent. When I entered the plane, I encountered James Lequeux from
Paris who was going to the same conference.
In Singapore, it turned out that I needed a visa for Australia. We visited the agricultural attaché
at his home. Because he did not have official paperwork there, he wrote the visa on a blank piece
of paper and testified on another piece that the visa was valid! Upon return to the airport, the Pan
Am airplane we were to take came in smoking. Flying in a replacement took 24 hours. Finally,
we arrived at the Kingsford-Smith airport in Sydney at 6 AM on the day the conference started.
When I left the airplane, coming down the stairs onto the airfield, there were two gentlemen at the
bottom who introduced themselves as reporters from the Sydney Morning Herald. They wanted
to interview me about 3C 273.
The fact that they knew I was on this flight shows how closely the airlines cooperated with the
media. Corrie had actually no clear idea what had happened to me. I had sent postcards from all
the places I had been but they did not arrive in the order I sent them.
Following the conference, Olin Eggen and I traveled back. In Manila, there was no trouble
entering Clark Air Base. However, the taxi that brought us there had its lights going on and off.
Traveling behind trucks was safe, but our driver could simply not resist overtaking them. Upon
arrival at Clark his lights were out and the guards detained him. While flying in to Travis Air
Force Base, our captain said that one of the engines had to be feathered and that we would divert
to San Francisco with a longer runway. Olin tried to cheer me up by telling me that he once had
landed a plane with a dead pilot when he worked for the Office of Strategic Services.
OBSERVING LARGER REDSHIFTS

It was clear that given their high luminosities, quasars should be detected at large redshifts. Within a
year, Matthews and I found a quasar with a redshift of 0.55, surpassing Minkowski’s record. Larger
redshifts would depend on emission lines in the UV, well below the MgII doublet at 2,800 Å. Dr.
Bowen supplied me with an extensive list of possible candidates. With a quantum efficiency of
around 2% of the photographic plates (even though they were specially designed by Eastman
Kodak for astronomical work), it took a lot of observation time and repeat exposures to even be
sure of the existence of the UV lines I detected. Based on spectra of 5 quasars, I resolved the
puzzle. The lines I found successively were semiforbidden [CIII] at 1,909 Å, CIV at 1,549 Å, and
Ly-α at 1,216 Å. In 1965, I published five large redshifts, including 3C 9 at a redshift of 2.0 This
opened up the possibility of exploring the history of the Universe over the last 10 billion years.
At a conference in Moscow, the Russian theoretician Viktor Shklovsky posed the possibility
that the object CTA 102, which showed variability at low radio frequencies, could be a civilization.
A curious situation developed in which, through the Soviet press agency Pravda, the Associated
Press, and Caltech Public Relations, he asked whether CTA 102 was a quasar. It was one of the
five quasars mentioned above—I replied that it was. The next day they asked what was its redshift.
I replied with “no comment,” because it was in press but not yet published in the Astrophysical
Journal. The editor of the journal, S. Chandrasekhar, was very excited that a redshift as high as 2
was now observed. He delayed publication of the issue in the Astrophysical Journal, so my article
dated April 8 appeared in the April 1 issue. Chandrasekhar also wrote a lengthy article in a major
Chicago newspaper. The entire development got so much attention in the press that I asked my
secretary to take all my telephone calls. Even then, the pressure was so great that I decided to take
my parents to the Grand Canyon. As we were leaving Pasadena, I heard the word “quasar” on the
local station KFAC. (I liked KFAC, as it broadcast classical music from midnight to 6 AM, which
was great for observing.)
QUASAR EVOLUTION FROM SURVEYS

My observational work then concentrated on collecting a well-defined sample of quasars, i.e.,
observing all quasars in the area covered by the 3CR catalog to its radio flux density limit of
10 Schmidt
9 × 10−26 Wm−2 Hz−1 at 178 MHz and an optical magnitude limit mlim . In 1968, optical work was
still done with photographic plates, which had a low quantum efficiency, and the sample of 33
quasars was only complete to a rather bright optical magnitude of V = 18.3.
Deriving the luminosity function from this survey required a new approach, because it was
subject to both the optical and the radio flux limits. For a given quasar, these correspond to two
different redshift limits. If the lower one of these is zmax , then V max = V (zmax ) is the volume
over which it can be observed as part of the sample. Its contribution to the luminosity function is
1/Vmax . Because our objects have substantial redshifts, Vmax is a cosmological comoving volume.
If the objects have a constant density in space, then V/Vmax should have a uniform distribu-
tion between 0 and 1, with an average of 0.5. The actual value for our sample was 0.67 ± 0.5.
Clearly, there are more quasars at high redshift, i.e., at earlier cosmic time than at present. The
corresponding density variation was around (1 + z)6 . I believe that this was the first time that
cosmological evolution was found in astronomy.

Allan Sandage showed in 1965 that objects with little or no radio radiation also could show
the quasar phenomenon. My thesis student Richard Green set out to observe 10,700 deg2 of the
northern sky for optical quasars brighter than a magnitude of 16. The resulting Palomar Green
survey contained about 100 quasars and many exotic rare objects. Eventually, we were able to
show that the density evolution with redshift was dependent on the quasar’s luminosity.
Soon a debate developed about whether the evolution is density evolution or luminosity evolu-
tion. I had a feeling that luminosity evolution required a conspiracy for quasars to all move down
in luminosity as cosmic time progresses and that it implied a very long lifetime for them. I also
believe that luminosity-dependent density evolution gives sufficient freedom to model nature if
the shape of the luminosity dependence is not prescribed.
NONCOSMOLOGICAL REDSHIFTS?
Around 1966, several prominent astronomers argued that quasars may not be at cosmological
distances. Halton (Chip) Arp of the Mount Wilson Observatory suggested that, in the direction of
a number of quasars, the galaxy density was higher than elsewhere. Because these galaxies were at a
much lower redshift, he believed the quasar had to be at that redshift too. Much of the debate about
the validity of this finding had to do with the statistical methods used. Geoffrey Burbidge doubted
from the beginning that quasar redshifts were cosmological and would chide the community for
accepting this without discussion. Fred Hoyle, who had been one of the founders of the Steady
State theory in cosmology, attacked the treatment of the counts of quasars. Because the steady
state does not allow cosmological evolution, its predictions are precise. They did not agree with
the observed value of < V /Vmax >.
ADMINISTRATION
As so often happens in academic careers, as you age you may be called upon to carry out an
administrative role. In 1975, I was appointed Chairman of the Division of Physics, Mathematics,
and Astronomy at Caltech. With distinguished faculty members like Richard Feynman and Murray
Gell-Mann this was quite an honor. There were several cases in which tenure review committees
for young faculty did not recommend tenure, and in which the faculty as a whole endorsed this. I
kept the candidates informed as the process went on.
From 1948, the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the California Institute of Tech-
nology were closely cooperating in optical astronomy. The observatories at Mount Wilson,
Palomar Mountain, and Big Bear Lake were jointly administered, eventually under the name
Hale Observatories. There was an observatory committee that recommended staff member
appointments by consensus and played a major role in the assignment of telescope time to staff
members on the basis of applications they submitted each year.
In 1977, I was appointed Director of the Hale Observatories. For several years things proceeded
smoothly until the fall of 1979. A conflict arose in the approval of staff membership for a person
that many members of the observatory committee felt did not qualify. The next morning, I sent
a letter to the Presidents of Carnegie and Caltech proposing that the joint administration of
the Observatories be terminated. I outlined how each of the two institutions could handle the
separation, announced that I would resign as Director on July 1, 1980, and that I would not
participate in any discussions about my proposal.
In retrospect, I believe that the separation has worked out all right. Carnegie now has the
two 6.5-m Magellan telescopes and Caltech, in cooperation with the University of California
(UC) system, has two 10-m Keck telescopes. There are ambitious plans for 25-m and 30-m
telescopes, respectively. In both of these, the institutions are founding members of consortia of
institutions/countries set up to provide the funding.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 10-METER TELESCOPE PROJECT

For many years, our colleagues at the UC had been pursuing their goal of building a 10-m telescope
(TMT). There had been competing proposals for the mirror. Joe Wampler was proposing a single
dish, whereas Jerry Nelson wanted to build the mirror from hexagonal segments that would be
continually monitored and adjusted to keep its shape. As a guest, I was privileged to attend meetings
of the UC greybeards committee (actually, Margaret Burbidge was also a member). The greybeards
eventually recommended that Jerry’s segmented design be adopted. I was quite happy about that,
because it opened the way to even larger mirrors.
It was estimated that the telescope would cost around $70 million. A widow, Marion Hoffman,
was prepared to give $36 million to honor her late husband. After meeting with the UC President,
she died the next day before the papers were made up. The executor of the Hoffman Trust
transmitted the $36 million, but this was contested in probate court and the money had to be
returned. As I remember it, the UC President then turned to Caltech to see whether it would be
prepared to be a 25% partner. I believe the cost by that time had increased to $100 million so
Caltech President Murph Goldberger asked his development staff to work on this. They went to
their five best prospects and asked each for $5 million. The next day, Howard Keck called Murph
and asked him whether he wanted to know why he had declined. Murph said yes, probably not
expecting anything, but Howard said that he wanted Caltech to be in charge!
This was an extraordinary offer that insured that the telescope would be built. But it did create
a potentially major problem: The offer was to Caltech and not to UC. Our UC colleagues would
suspect that Caltech might highjack the whole venture. We had always had excellent relations
with our neighbors at Lick Observatory, and we definitely did not want to jeopardize that. Robbie
Vogt, our Provost, convened a number of meetings with the optical astronomy faculty, out of
which came several options:
1. UC could build a 10-m telescope in the Southern Hemisphere,
2. Or UC could set up another 10-m telescope near the Northern Hemisphere and use it
independently or in combination as an interferometer, or
3. UC could supply 25 years of operating costs and have a 50% share of the observing time.
The last option was the basis for the agreement between UC and Caltech to cooperate. After
some years, the Keck Foundation offered additional funds to realize the second option, hence we
12 Schmidt
had Keck I and Keck II evenly shared between UC and Caltech. A special corporation was created
to carry out this ambitious program.
CHARGE-COUPLED DEVICE SURVEYS

Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) came into astronomical use in the 1990s. They had high quantum
efficiency, linear response to brightness, and digital output. James Gunn had built the “4-shooter”
camera for use at the 200-inch Palomar telescope. My suggestion that it be used to search for
quasars was well received, and together with Don Schneider we started the observations. Because
4-shooter would saturate on stars brighter a magnitude of 14, my task was to search the Palomar
Observatory Sky Survey for suitable fields. Deriving positions on the sky survey was laborious
and unpleasant. One night, I asked Jim whether we could conduct a search at fixed declination
by stopping the telescope drive and reading the CCDs out continuously at the sidereal rate. Jim
thought for 10 min and said we could. For the next run, he had adapted the electronics and it
worked. What a joy to search for quasars in a quiet dome with a fixed telescope!
By the year 2000, we had collected a sufficient sample of quasars to show that at given luminosity
their comoving density peaked at a redshift between 2 and 3 and then declined. Because quasars
at their enormous luminosities probably have a lifetime of around 108 years, this means that their
rate of formation peaks at around redshift 2.5.
X-RAY SURVEYS
Starting in 1984, I participated in frequent discussions at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterres-
trial Physics with Joachim Trümper, Guenther Hasinger, and Riccardo Giacconi to plan an X-ray
survey with the Röntgensatellit (Rosat) satellite. Guenther had a ray-trace program that allowed
quantitative evaluation of detection algorithms. In the evening, we enjoyed a lighter program of
beer and “HinterHaksen.” Shortly before the launch of Rosat in 1990, I realized that our survey
field (chosen on the basis of its minimal X-ray background) was close to a magnitude 2 star in Ursa
Major. Just before the first of the Rosat exposures were taken, Guenther managed to shift the field
by several degrees. I started taking spectra of the optical identifications at Palomar. Later on we
used the Keck telescope with a multiobject spectrograph, which was very effective.
The enormous advantage of using X-rays to find quasars is that they are the main component of
the X-ray population. In contrast, at optical wavelengths quasars are relatively rare: the brightest
quasar, 3C 273 at magnitude 13, ranks probably around one millionth in the sky! The luminous
X-ray quasars peak at a redshift of 2 to 3, just like the optically selected quasars. For X-ray quasars
of lower luminosity, all the way to the Seyfert galaxies, the peak is at redshift 1 or lower. It appears
that the big black holes were the ones that formed first. I believe that it is not easy to understand
how they could form so early in the Universe.
GAMMA-RAY BURSTS
Since 1990, I have become interested in gamma ray bursts (GRBs). Given that the phenomenon is
so short-lived, it is radically different from the statistics of steady objects. The Burst and Transient
Sources Experiment (BATSE) on board the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory recorded around
2,700 GRBs in its 9-year life span. The trigger criteria in terms of a signal-to-noise limit were
changed many times during the mission, making the resulting Current BATSE Burst Catalog
unsuitable for statistical work.
I decided instead to use archival data, in particular the BATSE DISCLA data, which provide
a continuous record of the Large Area Detector counts in four energy channels on a timescale
of 1,024 ms in each of the eight BATSE detectors. This involved the creation of an independent
catalog of GRBs, on the basis of my own detection criteria. To make the catalog uniform, I first
went through the data to exclude all stretches affected by some 1,500 solar flares, bursts from strong
gamma-ray sources like Cyg X-1 and Nova Persei 1992, as well as many atmospheric events. In
total, I excluded around 200,000 time windows of different lengths. After some 10 years of work,
I ended up with the Gamma-Ray Bursts Uniformly Selected BATSE Archival Data Catalog that
contains 2,204 GRBs, including 589 bursts not listed in the Current BATSE Burst Catalog.
Given that only 10–20% of BATSE GRBs have measured redshifts, we can only estimate their
luminosity function by indirect means. We used for this purpose the Euclidean value of V/Vmax .
This is not the real value of V/Vmax , as it ignores the redshift. Its average value for cosmological
objects will not be 0.5 but lower. In fact, it is a cosmological distance indicator because the larger
the average redshift of the sample, the smaller it is.
It turned out that there was a correlation between the average Euclidean value and the observed
spectral peak of the GRB energy distribution. This allowed us to derive the GRB luminosity
function without using any redshifts. We found that the GRB formation rate increases with
redshift. It appears to peak at a higher redshift than that of typical star-formation history (at
around z ∼ 2.5).
KAVLI PRIZE FOR ASTROPHYSICS

On May 28, 2008, we were staying in the desert community of Borrego Springs. At 3:15 AM, the
phone rang and a gentleman with an accent (I have one, too) did everything he could to assure me
that he had legitimate business. He called from Oslo (not Stockholm) to inform me that I had won
the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics and that I would share the $1 million prize with Donald Lynden-
Bell of Cambridge University. He explained that three Kavli Prizes had been established by Fred
Kavli, a Norwegian businessman, the other two prizes being in nanotechnology and neurology.
I was dumbfounded and did not dare tell anybody else until the Caltech public relations office
called that there was a request for a photograph from the Kavli Foundation. The foundation was
generous in providing for lodging in Oslo for 10 guests. Within days, every member of our family
had called in to say they wanted to come to Oslo in early September. The award ceremonies and
the subsequent banquet for 500 people in the City Hall were an unforgettable experience for all
of us.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that
may be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
LITERATURE CITED
Greenstein JL, Matthews TA. 1963. Nature 197:1041
Hazard C, Mackey MB, Shimmins AJ. 1963. Nature 197:1037
Oke JB. 1963. Nature 197:1040
Schmidt M. 1963. Nature 197:1040
Schmidt M. 1965. Ap. J. 141:1295
14 Schmidt

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Annu. Rev. Astro. Astrophys. 2015.53. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.

V I E W Review in Advance first posted online

still occur before final publication

Exploring the Universe

Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 2015. 53:1–14 Keywords

www.annualreviews.org • Exploring the Universe 3

FEBRUARY 1, 1953: NORTH SEA FLOOD DISASTER

www.annualreviews.org • Exploring the Universe 5

married in September 1955.

RATE OF STAR FORMATION

RADIO SOURCES IDENTIFIED WITH GALAXIES

RADIO SOURCES IDENTIFIED WITH STAR-LIKE OBJECTS

www.annualreviews.org • Exploring the Universe 7

luminosity of the brightest known galaxies by a factor of 40!

www.annualreviews.org • Exploring the Universe 9

OBSERVING LARGER REDSHIFTS

QUASAR EVOLUTION FROM SURVEYS

cosmological evolution was found in astronomy.

www.annualreviews.org • Exploring the Universe 11

institutions/countries set up to provide the funding.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 10-METER TELESCOPE PROJECT

CHARGE-COUPLED DEVICE SURVEYS

www.annualreviews.org • Exploring the Universe 13

KAVLI PRIZE FOR ASTROPHYSICS

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