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Marteen Schmidt in California (picture from 2008)
Photo: Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Marteen Schmidt, died last Saturday at the age of 92, the institute announced.
Schmidt became known in 1963 when he discovered quasars: bright, distant cosmic objects that are reminiscent of stars in appearance.
Quasars are black holes at the centers of very distant galaxies.
Because there was no name for it, Schmidt dubbed it "quasi-stellar radio source" - i.e. star-like radio source, from which the term quasar emerged.
Since that observation in 1963, thousands of quasars have been identified, the release said.
These objects only existed in the early days of the universe, but they are still visible today because it takes so long for light to travel these enormous distances.
Schmidt was born in 1929 in Groningen, the Netherlands, as Caltech announced.
He received his doctorate from Yale University and worked at Caltech from 1959 until his retirement.
According to the institute, his research focused on the mass distribution and dynamics of galaxies.
His work entitled "The Rate of Star Formation," in which he showed a relationship between gas density and the rate of star formation in a particular region, the release says, eventually led to the naming of that relationship: it has been dubbed Schmidt- law known.
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