The scientists were able to observe the quasars using a technique called gravitational lensing.
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Many quasars emit strongly at radio wavelengths, so can be tracked very accurately by radio telescopes.
On its route to earth, light from some quasars passed through a cloud of gas.
And at 84, he still gazes out many billions of light years into the universe to find new quasars.
So much time has passed, that the quasars no longer even exist anymore.
"10 billion years ago there were 100 times as many quasars in the universe as there are now, " Schmidt said.
His work helped track some of the earliest spacecraft and was instrumental in confirming the first discovered pulsars and quasars.
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Today, the observatory is more concerned with issues like star formation and the origins of quasars but it still does world-respected science.
He says the new experiment will do much the same thing using Jupiter instead of the Sun and quasars instead of stars.
The quasars provide him a view on the history of the universe.
It had previously been suggested that black holes up to this mass might exist in quasars, but this is the first direct confirmation.
Using Keck I, a telescope on a mountain-top in Hawaii, the physicists analysed light emanating from very bright but distant galaxies called quasars.
These observations will go a long way towards refining what we know about quasars, and what conditions were like in the universe billions of years ago.
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The deviations are too small to be seen in any single quasar, but by averaging the results for 72 quasars the team claims to have secure statistical evidence.
Although quasars are light days across, they are billions of light years from Earth, which means that most of what scientists know about them comes from extrapolations and not direct evidence.
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Astronomers say that the key to SDSS's success in quasar spotting is its recording of precision digital data in five colours, which allows researchers to easily distinguish quasars from more common faint stars.
Jodrell Bank, which remains part of Manchester University, spends much of its time looking for quasars and pulsars, large stars that have collapsed in on themselves and become hugely dense rotating neutron stars.
If the evidence from the mine and the evidence from the quasars are both correct, alpha would have to have changed between 2 billion and 9 billion years ago, and then stayed constant.
Another is that they have been confirmed time and again by tests that range from minute measurements of bodies circling the solar system to observations of the farthest known light sources, quasars, billions of light years from Earth.
"This means that by watching what happens to the positions of the quasars on the sky as the gravitational field of Jupiter moves past their line-of-sight, the scientists can test other aspects of the general relativity theory, " says Professor Shanks.
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