Maarten Schmidt

Maarten Schmidt, Francis L. Moseley Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, at Caltech, passed away on Saturday, September 17, 2022. He was 92 years old. Schmidt is best known for his 1963 discovery of quasars—ferociously bright and faraway cosmic objects powered by supermassive black holes. At the time of their discovery, quasars, which are typically billions of light-years away, were among the farthest objects known in the universe. Schmidt's discovery in essence broke open the exploration of the distant universe and even placed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1966. Later, in 2008, Schmidt, together with former Caltech postdoc Donald Lynden-Bell, would win the inaugural Kavli Prize for their quasar findings. "In the '60s, people were astonished that a single quasar that sits in a galaxy could be so bright and yet so very far away," says Richard Ellis, a former Caltech professor and colleague of Schmidt's who is now based at University College London and remains a visiting associate at Caltech. "Many people didn't believe it and thought these objects must be in our Milky Way galaxy. His discovery created this excitement that the 200-inch [telescope at Palomar Observatory] could look back at the evolution of our universe." Schmidt was born on December 28, 1929, in Groningen, the Netherlands. In an essay about his life that he wrote for the Kavli Prize website at the time of his award, Schmidt talked about first gazing at the stars during World War II, when Germany occupied the Netherlands. "All during the war, a strict blackout was enforced. This made it possible to see the night sky even in the middle of the city. My father would often take me on a walk at night, unless there was an air alarm when Allied bombers would fly over, or sometimes bombard, the city of Groningen. These walks may well have played a role in awakening my interest in astronomy." Schmidt's uncle, Dik Schmidt, a pharmacist and amateur astronomer, also helped shape his interest in the cosmos. In the Kavli essay, Schmidt wrote that his uncle "showed me the sky through his telescope on an upper floor of his pharmacy. I found a lens at my paternal grandfather's workshop in Berkhout and soon put my first little telescope together." (Schmidt's first telescope consisted of a lens and a toilet paper roll, as he described in his oral history for the Caltech Archives .) Schmidt and his friend Jan Borgman, who would go on to become an astronomer and the president of the University of Groningen, also built telescopes when they were young. The two met while walking to school, when Schmidt was in the fourth grade and Borgman in the second grade. In his oral history, Schmidt describes grinding mirrors for telescopes in a metal shop with Borgman in wartime Holland in 1944. "In these circumstances, where you couldn't find tires for your bicycle, where there was no butter, no sugar, essentially no meat—there was a very small amount of bread, but all rationed—we managed to build telescopes under those circumstances." After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Groningen, Schmidt moved to Leiden. While attending an astronomy conference, he met the astronomer Jan Oort, who was the first to describe a cocoon of comets surrounding our solar system, now called the Oort cloud. Oort invited Schmidt to be an assistant at Leiden Observatory. Schmidt accepted, and after as short post in the army, he returned to the observatory and ultimately attended graduate school at Leiden University, earning his PhD in 1956. There, he worked with his advisor Oort to measure the brightness of comets and study how their brightness changes as the comets travel in toward the sun. During this time, Schmidt left Leiden for about 15 months to work at a Dutch observatory in Kenya, where he measured the position of stars as a means to understand the structure of the galaxy. In his oral history, Schmidt talks about his time in Kenya, saying he played a lot of bridge, learne