Maarten Schmidt (28 December 1929 – 17 September 2022) was a Dutch-born American astronomer who first measured the distances of quasars. He was the first astronomer to identify a quasar, and so was pictured on the March cover of Time magazine in 1966.
After completing his doctorate, Schmidt resided in the United States for two years on a Carnegie Fellowship. He returned briefly to the Netherlands, but ultimately emigrated to the US on a permanent basis in 1959 to work at the California Institute of Technology.[3] In the beginning, he worked on theories about the mass distribution and dynamics of galaxies. Of particular note from this period was his formulation of what has become known as the Schmidt law, which relates the density of interstellar gas to the rate of star formation occurring in that gas.[4][5] He later began a study of the light spectra of radio sources. In 1963, using the 200-inch reflector telescope at the Palomar Observatory, Schmidt identified the visible object corresponding to one of these radio sources, known as 3C 273 and also studied its spectrum. While its star-like appearance suggested it was relatively nearby, the spectrum of 3C 273 proved to have what was at the time a high redshift of 0.158, showing that it lay far beyond the Milky Way, and thus possessed an extraordinarily high luminosity. Schmidt termed 3C 273 a "quasi-stellar" object or quasar; thousands have since been identified.[3]
Schmidt married Cornelia Tom in 1955. They met at a party hosted by Oort, and remained married until her death in 2020. Together, they had three daughters: Anne, Elizabeth, and Marijke.[3]