

If it would be just 33 light-years away from us, it would act/appear as our sun. They are immensely bright – for example – 3C 273 is around 4 trillion times brighter than our Sun. The real power behind quasars are the supermassive black holes. Quasars existed in the early age of the universe and some exist in young galaxies that have enough material to create them. This results in a massive output of energy. Basically, quasars form when supermassive black holes feed on an abundant matter such as gas or dust. Galaxies produced stars at a very rapid rate, and some of the very rich gas supplies from back then, most certainly found their way into the nuclei of galaxies, where it encountered supermassive black holes.Īs such, the accretion disks formed, and many new quasars were born. The quasar epoch happened around 10 billion years ago when violent star formation was active. Studies suggest that quasars were very common in the distant past. Quasars are astrophysical phenomena that are thought to occur in young galaxies where there is a lot of material to fuel the quasar.

Many factors influence the properties of the quasar, such as the mass of the black hole, the rate of accretion, the orientation of the accretion disk relative to the observer, the presence or absence of a jet, and the degree of obscuration by gas and dust within the host galaxy. This helped to demonstrate that quasars occur in the centers of galaxies or the merging of galaxies. As the technology evolved, the Hubble Space Telescope captured many high-resolution images of quasars. When they were identified in photographic images at visible wavelengths, they appeared as faint star-like points of light. The first quasars were identified in the 1950s as sources of radio-wave emission of unknown origin. Quasars were identified relatively recent and our journey of understanding them has just begun. It is possible that when the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies collide, the supermassive black holes will merge and create a new quasar.This occurred in a period of violent star formation and as such, helped to quell it down. Hot gas cannot collapse and form new stars. They decreased the active star formation by heating up gas. Quasars played a great role in the shaping of the Universe.These supermassive black holes are surrounded by a solar system-sized whirlpool of superheated plasma which shines brighter than entire galaxies.Usually, the supermassive black holes behind quasars have millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun.Quasars emit energy levels of around millions, billions, or even trillions of electron volts.This makes them the most distant objects to be discovered. Most of the discovered quasars are billions of light-years away from us.There is a supermassive black hole behind every Quasar, but not every black hole is a quasar.Because of this, they are visible from incredibly long distances and as such, are among the brightest objects in the universe. Many of the charged particles inside the quasar jets reach speeds that are very near the speed of light.


