the.com/quasar
the universe's brightest light, screaming from a black hole choking on a galaxy.
means A quasar is an extremely luminous and distant active galactic nucleus, powered by gas and matter spiraling into a supermassive black hole, blazing across billions of light-years.
from A compression of "quasi-stellar radio source" — the clunky 1960s label astronomers gave these objects because they looked like ordinary stars ("quasi-stellar") in early telescopes yet poured out radio waves no star could. The contraction "quasar" was coined in 1964 by astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu, and the tidy nickname long outlived the mouthful it replaced.
- power output
- Outshines entire galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars
- the engine
- A supermassive black hole devouring matter superheated to glowing
- ancient light
- Most existed billions of years ago, now extinct
- misnamed
- Stood for quasi-stellar radio source, faked as stars
- speed demon
- Jets blast particles near the speed of light
pks 2349-014 — one of the most luminous quasars known, discovered in 1978, roughly 3.5 billion light-years distant
ton 618 — ultraluminous quasar powered by a black hole of 66 billion solar masses, 18.2 billion light-years away