Who discovered the quasar and when?
The discovery of quasars was really spread over time. Quasar is a shortening of “quasi-stellar radio source”, and they’ve also been called quasi-stellar objects or QSOs. In the late 50s, several radio sources were matched with very dim optical objects that looked like stars, but had strange spectra with a lot of ultraviolet excess. One of them, 3C273 had it’s position very accurately measured by C. Hazard and co-workers, using lunar occultations. In 1962, M. Schmidt obtained a spectrum of this “star”, which showed a redshift of 0.158. This is when QSO was coined, because this was a very distant object that was masquerading as a star, a quasi-stellar object. This description is paraphrased from a book, “High Energy Astrophysics”, by M.S. Longair. Also, you can see http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/Images/rosat/misc_3c273.html Thanks for your question!
