What is the mystery object?

This project must be done by individuals.

Joe Cosmos uses his telescope to take spectra of objects in the sky: stars, galaxies, nebulae -- he's seen them all. Then, one night, he acquires the spectrum of an object which baffles him. What could it be? It looks somewhat like the spectrum of a star ... but there aren't any lines in the right place.

Download the spectrum. The data file has two columns: the first one is wavelength, (in nanometers), and the second is flux (energy per second per square meter per unit wavelength).
Another copy of the data this time with a colon separating the two columns of numbers. May be more easily imported into spreadsheets.

Your job: identify the mystery object.

You might follow these steps:

Download the data file
Make a plot of flux versus wavelength. Print it out, and include it in your report.
Look for absorption lines. If this is the spectrum of a star, there should be "dark" (absorption) lines due to cool gas in the star's upper atmosphere. Mark the 3 strongest lines you can find.
In ordinary stars, the lines of hydrogen often appear strong (there's a lot of hydrogen in stellar atmospheres). Can you find lines due to hydrogen? Joe is certainly right: they aren't exactly where you might expect them. Hint: even if the wavelengths shift, the RATIO of wavelengths of the lines in a series remain the same.
Explain why the hydrogen lines aren't where you'd expect them. Be quantitative.
Look at the overall shape of the spectrum. Estimate the temperature of the mystery object.

Back in the 1960s, astronomers worldwide were baffled by faint bluish star-like objects. They emitted radio waves, and were called "quasi-stellar radio sources," or "quasars" for short. It took several years for someone to recognize their spectra, because they (like this one) didn't have lines in the right places.