Maarten Schmidt

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Maarten Schmidt (born December 28, 1929) is a Dutch astronomer who measured the distances of astronomical objects called quasars.

Schmidt was born in Groningen, (The Netherlands) and studied with Jan Hendrik Oort. He earned his Ph.D. from Leiden Observatory in 1956.

In 1959 he emigrated to the United States and went to work at the California Institute of Technology. In the beginning he worked at theories about the mass distribution and dynamics of galaxies. After a while he studied light spectra of radio sources. In 1963, using the famous 200-inch reflector telescope at Mt Palomar Schmidt identified the visible object corresponding to one of these radio sources, known as 3C 273 and also studied its spectrum. While its star-like appearance suggested it was relatively nearby, the spectrum of 3C 273 proved to have what was at the time a very high redshift of 0.158, showing that it lay far beyond the Milky Way, and thus possessed an extraordinarily high luminosity. Schmidt termed 3C 273 a "quasi-stellar" object or quasar; thousands have since been identified.