Quasars

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• Recently, an international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant ‘Radio-Loud’ Quasar with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT).

• Warping is twisting. With this discovery, the number of known quasars has increased by 25%. 

What are Quasars?

• A quasar known as a quasi-stellar object is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN), in which a supermassive black hole with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun is surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk.

• As gas in the disk falls towards the black hole, energy is released in the form of electromagnetic radiation, which can be observed across the electromagnetic spectrum.

• The power radiated by quasars is enormous; the most powerful quasars have luminosities thousands of times greater than a galaxy such as the Milky Way.

• Most active galaxies have a supermassive black hole at the center which sucks in surrounding objects.

• Quasars are formed by the energy emitted by materials spiraling around a black hole right before being sucked into it.

Note:

• ESO’s VLT is the Very Large Telescope used to observe the P172+18 is located at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert.