QUASAR THURSDAY!

 Hey Space Placers!

From NASA:

Amateur astronomers can hunt for a unique starlike object, called 3C 273, which holds the record as the farthest target available to be viewed from Earth through a common-sized backyard telescope. Because 3C 273 pours out the light equivalent of trillions of suns it can be seen across over two billion light-years! Today we know it is the blinding bright core of an active galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole gobbling up material.

Back in 1963, 3C 273 was a complete mystery. Astronomer Maarten Schmidt zoomed in on the object because its loud radio emission caught his attention. It looked like a star in the world's most powerful telescope of the time. But its light was weird. The expansion of the universe stretched the light into red wavelengths. This yardstick, called cosmological redshift, corresponds to a distance of 2.5 billion light-years for 3C 273. That's too far away for a lone star to be seen. It became an utterly new mysterious class of object called a quasar, or quasi-stellar object. Its extreme brightness and gusher of energy was staggering for something to exist among far-flung galaxies.

In 1929, long before the quasar's discovery, astrophysicist Sir James Jeans suggested that the bright pinpoint centers of galaxies are where matter is pouring into the universe from another dimension. This conjecture was later dubbed a "white hole." But exactly the opposite is true. Today we know quasars and the broader class of active galactic nuclei containing monster black holes that goggle up matter. Quasars are now a fundamental part of astrophysics and cosmology. These brilliant beacons are intimately tied to the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies.

The new Hubble image is opening a gateway into better understanding quasars. Hubble's vision is so sharp it photographed weird things within 16,000 light-years of the black hole such as filaments, lobes, and a mysterious L-shaped structure. Some of the objects may be captured small satellite galaxies falling into the nearly 900-million-solar-mass black hole. At least 1 million quasars are evenly scatted across the entire sky. And, 3C 273 started it all as the first quasar ever discovered.

Read the whole article here.

Here is a pic I took of Quasar 3C 273 in 2014 with a remote controlled telescope. Now I need to update it with my Unistellar Smart Telescope.

Sky Guy in VA