Quasars—short for quasi-stellar radio sources—were extraordinarily powerful pointlike signals, possibly from the farthest depths of space. Their discovery in 1963 provided breathtaking evidence for astronomers that the universe visible in radio waves is not the universe we see with our eyes. And the quasar work that Rubin and Ford did with the new image-tube spectrograph was not unrewarding. Only months after they’d published one of their findings, Jim Peebles was using their data to advance a theoretical exploration of the early universe.
