Quasar: The Universe’s Brightest Object eat a Sun Daily

Quasar are the most luminous objects in the universe, powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. They can outshine entire galaxies and emit more energy than hundreds of billions of stars. But how do they get so bright and what do they feed on?

A quasar is a type of active galactic nucleus (AGN), which is a compact region around a black hole that emits enormous amounts of radiation. The radiation comes from the accretion disc, a swirling ring of gas and dust that falls into the black hole. As the material spirals in, it gets heated to millions of degrees and radiates across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays.

The accretion disc can be as large as our solar system, but the black hole itself is much smaller. The mass of the black hole determines how much material it can consume and how bright the quasar can be. The most massive black holes can have millions or billions of times the mass of the sun, and they can devour up to a sun’s worth of matter every day.

The first quasar was discovered in 1963 by astronomer Maarten Schmidt, who noticed that the object 3C 273 had a very high redshift, meaning it was very distant and moving away from us very fast. The redshift also indicated that the object was extremely bright, equivalent to about 2 trillion suns. Since then, more than half a million quasars have been detected, some as far as 13 billion light-years away.

Quasars are not only fascinating for their extreme properties, but also for their role in the evolution of galaxies and the universe. Quasars are thought to be more common in the early universe, when galaxies were more abundant and collided more often, triggering bursts of star formation and feeding the central black holes. Quasars can also affect their surroundings by producing powerful jets of plasma that can extend for thousands of light-years and interact with the intergalactic medium.

Quasars are still mysterious in many ways, such as how they form, how long they last, and how they vary over time. Scientists are using various telescopes and techniques to study them in more detail and reveal their secrets.

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