A General Outlook on the Quasars

Abstract

Since my main field of research is astrophysics, I suppose that when asking me to present this paper, Professor Ramakrishnan probably intended to stress the point that the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, which is so rapidly and vigorously developing from year to year, after having extended the domain of its activities from theoretical physics to pure and applied mathematics, is now just starting to include astrophysics. And therefore, the real meaning of my paper should be to show that this new extension is worthwhile and that astrophysics may actually provide the theoretical physicist with problems which are no less important, exciting, and fundamental as those related to elementary particles. For this reason, I have chosen as the subject of my paper the problem of the so-called quasi-stellar sources, or quasars,whose study appears to hold implications for cosmology and the type of model which we use to explain our world. Therefore, I shall try, in a summary of this field, to present its most outstanding features, and the important steps in our knowledge of the universe which have been accomplished by the radioastronomical techniques developed in the last decades, among which the discovery of the quasars appears actually to be one of the most significant.