Last weekend I spent Saturday night bathing my eyes in my favorite part of the night sky, the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, my eyes endlessy scanning countless grey fuzzy gems of island universes some 50 million light years away. Few sights conjure in the mind just how insignificant we are in the astronomical scale of the universe.But then I shudder when I think of one tiny bluish speck that expands this unimaginable scale some 40 fold larger still. Amongst all the elliptical and spiral galaxies of every shape and size imaginable, this one tiny speck once revealed a whole new class of massive deep sky objects. Discovered some 40 years ago, 3C 273 is the brightest Quasar visible from Earth, an active galaxy that is so voraciously swallowing stars and planets into its black hole that massive jets of particles and energy are streaming out into space for thousands of light years (see the jets in the inset picture). The relative brightness (between magnitude 12.8 and 12.9 on this night) belies its huge distance. Using the Cosmology Calculator program I developed, I know that the light we are seeing left the Quasar 1.95 billion years ago. However, based on the discovery only 10 years ago that the expanson of the universe is actually accelerating, my same Cosmology Calculator shows that 3C 273 is already actually 150 million light years further away right now, some 2.1 billion light years distant. It won't be forever before so many of these Quasars, these denizens of ealier active times in the universe's history, disappear beyond the obsrvable universe forever. I can't help but wonder what scale of history and civilizations are already beyond the visible universe horizon.
