Go Long!

Nebulae, star clusters and galaxies are always popular targets in astronomy, but I sometimes like to go long and take a deeper look into the universe. The most distant objects that are consistently visible are quasars. For those who don't know, quasars are infant galaxies that have supermassive black holes in their cores. Black holes, as you might expect, are black, but when they have things like stars and gas clouds falling into them everything around the black hole gets super hot and shines with intense brightness allowing them to be seen from billions of light years away. 

When quasars were first found they were quite mysterious. They looked very much like stars in our own galaxy that were emitting radio waves. Nobody understood what they really were for quite sometime, but the first piece of the mystery to be solved was that they are immensely far away and therefore shining with a brightness that at the time could not be explained. The first quasar to have its distance identified was 3C 273 [Note: Quasars have terrible names!].

Quasar 3C 273

Determining the distance to a quasar is a matter of taking its spectrum to determine its redshift. From there getting the distance of the quasar is pretty straight forward if you understand exactly how the universe itself is expanding. There is still some disagreement as to the exact rate at which the universe is expanding, so the distances that I'll use here are not precise. 3C 273 lies some 2 billion light years from our home galaxy the Milky Way which, because that's how long its light took to get here, means that we see this core of a baby galaxy the way it looked 2 billion years ago.

It's important to put that figure into perspective. The light captured here with my 4.5-inch eVScope left that quasar 2 billion years ago. That was right around the same time that primitive, single-celled life was starting to seriously add oxygen into Earth's atmosphere [this was actually quite terrible for most things that were alive at the time, but that's another story].

The quasar known as PG 1427+480 [See, I told you they had terrible names, though most of them are a nod to their coordinates in the sky.] is marked in the image below:

PG 1427+480 is even farther away, with a distance 2.8 billion light years.  

Hopefully you haven't gotten tired of seeing dots yet. This next one is HS 0624+6907:

HS 0624+6907 is around 4.2 billion light years away. Light from this quasar left it when Earth was very young, around 500 million years before life began here.

The last one in this post is faint, so I've cropped the image from the full frame:

That little dot is a quasar known as S5 0014+81. The image shows light that left the quasar 11.96 billion years ago. Think about that. The light recorded here left the quasar long before Earth itself was formed.  Seeing this can really give you a sense of perspective. 

To find these quasars I rely heavily on the SkySafari Pro app, especially to identify the star fields. There's also a couple of sites on the Web that are helpful. The Frankfurt Quasar Monitoring site is a great resource and there's a text list of over 450 quasars here. There are various Cosmology Calculators online where you can input an object's redshift (z) and get a distance. You can find one here and here.

Star Trek: The Galileo Seven

The Enterprise is en route to Makus III to deliver medical supplies when it encounters Murasaki 312, a quasar-like formation. On board is Galactic High Commissioner Ferris, who doesn't like it that Kirk has "standing orders to investigate all quasars and quasar-like phenomena wherever they may be encountered." The medical supplies aren't due to be delivered for five days and the trip takes just three. Over the protests of Commissioner Ferris, Kirk dispatches Spock and a crew of six into shuttlecraft Galileo to investigate the effect. I mean, sure, here is a plague running rampant, but why should they deliver the medical supplies early?

When this episode was filmed in 1966, nobody knew what the hell quasars were. Quasars had only just been discovered a few years earlier. Why this object was surprisingly on their path when, you know, it has a name and all is a bit of a mystery.

What was known about quasars in the mid-1960s was that they are intensely bright, so much so that they look like ordinary stars (ones that give off radio waves), yet they are located on the far reaches of the observable universe. What made them so bright was unknown. They were certainly a mystery when the episode was written and it made sense to give the Enterprise standing orders to investigate them.  

Murasaki 312

I have a recollection from an old astronomy book, possibly from the Time-Life series with an illustration of what a quasar might look like. It was somewhat like what was shown on Trek, but with what looked like lighting cutting across it. Does this ring a bell with any readers of the blog? If so, leave me a comment or reach me on Twitter.

Decades later, astronomers have figured out was quasars are - the cores of baby galaxies. Embedded within them are supermassive black holes that are feeding on gas. Much of this gas spirals around the black hole forming a flat disk of gas called an accretion disk. This disk of gas is intensely bright. Some of the in falling gas misses the disk and becomes accelerated outward at tremendous speeds by intense magnetic fields.

Quasars were common in the early universe, which is why we usually see them at the far reaches of the universe. It takes time for that light to get to us, and because of that we see them in their infancy, as they were long ago. There are smaller versions of quasars, that form around stellar black holes. Unlike the supermassive black holes, which weigh in at millions of times the mass of the Sun, stellar mass black holes are only a few times more massive than the Sun. These stellar mass black holes can do the same kinds of things that quasars do, but on a smaller scale. That's why they are called microquasars.

The new knowledge of quasars was all taken into account when The Galileo 7 was remastered a few years ago. They updated the look of Murasaki 312 to make it a plausible microquasar:

I am not a big fan of the remastered versions of Trek, but this particular change makes a lot of sense.

On the way in Spock checks the forecast on the Clear Sky Chart.

Back to the episode. The shuttlecraft is pulled off course and directly into the heart of the Murasaki effect (but thankfully not into a black hole!) where they end up on a planet (Taurus II) inhabited by huge ape-like humanoids with a chip on their shoulders.

The Galileo is low on fuel and overweight, by the equivalent weight of three grown men. If they hope to leave Taurus II, they are going to have to lighten the load. McCoy is quick to point out that this is Spock's first command, prophetically citing that it will "take more than logic to get us out of this."

The natives are restless. Latimer takes one for the team.

Gaetano gets a close (and fatal look) at the natives, who are amazingly not life-like.

With two crewmen gone and Scotty on board to work his magic, the shuttlecraft just might make it.

Maybe the natives just want to play? Strangely no attempt at communication was made with the tool-using natives. Ever.

The real drama here is how everyone reacts to Spock's unemotional command, Spock's inability to realize that the natives might not have a logical reaction to his show of force and of course Kirk's inability to affect a rescue. The latter shows just how far Kirk is willing to push his command to rescue Spock and those on board the Galileo, even in the face of not delivering supplies to a planet ravaged by a plague.

Scotty's quick thinking (using the energy in phasers as fuel - brilliant!) get's them off of the ground only to once again prove that no writer on this series has any idea what the word "orbit" really means, and that a vehicle does not have to constantly burn fuel to remain in one.

In the end, Spock performs an emotional act of desperation, igniting all the remaining fuel as a flare.  

If you like Spock vs. McCoy episodes then this is your thing. While this isn't in my top 10 Trek list, if I stumbled across it on the TV I'd watch it. There's a lot here to like.

There's no new music in this episode, so I'll skip that. Watch the episode online here.

Next up, Court Martial. Until then, I've got some comet photos to go through.