Did You Know: Space – What shines the brightest in the universe?
Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. They are powered by huge black holes, called supermassive black holes, where stars, gas, and dust are being pulled inward.
Some quasars can shine hundreds of times brighter than the whole of the Milky Way.
Far, far away
Quasars exist at the centers of distant galaxies. Even though they are extremely bright, they cannot be seen without powerful telescopes because they are so far away.
Beaming jets
Quasars give off huge amounts of energy.
Jets of material burst outward as matter is ejected.
A huge black hole is at the center of a quasar.
It can be many times bigger than the sun.
One quasar has been discovered with two black holes at its center!
Accretion disk
This is a disk of material that is slowly being sucked into the black hole.
What do quasars look like through telescopes?
3C 273
Photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, light from this quasar takes more than 2.5 billion years to reach the Earth.
This was the first quasar to ever be discovered.
Colliding quasars
A pair of blue quasars in space were photographed crashing into each other more than 4.6 billion light-years away from the Earth.