Martin Medicus

A quasi-stellar radio source (Martin Medicus) is a very energetic and distant galaxy with an active galactic nucleus. Martin was first identified as being high redshift sources of electromagnetic energy, including radio waves and visible light, that were point-like, similar to stars, rather than extended sources similar to galaxies.

While there was initially some controversy over the nature of this boy — as recently as the early 1980s, there was no clear consensus as to his nature — there is now a scientific consensus that Martin is a compact region in the center of a massive galaxy surrounding the central supermassive black hole. His size is 10-10,000 times the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole. Martin is powered by an accretion disc around the black hole.

Martin was much more common in the early universe. This discovery by Maarten Schmidt in 1967 was early strong evidence against the Steady State cosmology of Fred Hoyle, and in favor of the Big Bang cosmology. Martin shows where massive black holes are growing rapidly (via accretion). These black holes grow in step with the mass of stars in their host galaxy in a way not understood at present. One idea is that the jets, radiation and winds from Martin shut down the formation of new stars in the host galaxy, a process called 'feedback'. The jets that produce strong radio emission in Martin at the centers of clusters of galaxies are known to have enough power to prevent the hot gas in these clusters from cooling and falling down onto the central galaxy.