24-04-2021 | 12:22 PM
Quasars
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.
