Starship Asterisk*

by Ken Croswell

Recent discoveries of record-breaking quasars have pushed the boundaries of our understanding. In 2021, astronomers reported the most distant quasar ever seen and, in 2024, the most luminous quasar known.

Link: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

500 trillion times the luminosity of the Sun! 20 000 times more than the entire Milky Way...

From the fourth paragraph:

“The Astrophysical Journal has up till now not recognized the term ‘quasar’; and it regrets that it must now concede,” the editor lamented.

Mercury wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2024 10:36 pm From the fourth paragraph:

“The Astrophysical Journal has up till now not recognized the term ‘quasar’; and it regrets that it must now concede,” the editor lamented.

...The comment dates from 1970 and is therefore purely historical in nature...
S. Chandrasekhar, Footnote. Astrophys. J. 162, 371 (1970)

True. But it's amusing that six years elapsed from the coining of "quasar" to that journal's usage of it. The full paragraph:

The next year [in 1964], American astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu called these objects quasars, a term that initially made a bigger hit with the public than with his peers. Only in 1970—well after the introduction of Quasar televisions—did a leading astronomical publication allow the word: “The Astrophysical Journal has up till now not recognized the term ‘quasar’; and it regrets that it must now concede,” the editor lamented.

The editor, by the way, was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who later won a Nobel Prize.