What Does a Quasar Look Like?Ī quasar is not only the feeding black hole itself, but the light-producing structures that surround it. The nearest quasar is Markarian 231, which lies about 600 million light-years from Earth. Supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies typically do not have that much gas available to them, so quasars are typically found in distant galaxies. The gas spirals around as it falls in, heating up in the process and emitting radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. They reside in galaxies with plentiful gas supplies, perhaps supplied by a recent galaxy-galaxy collision, and they gorge on the inflowing material. Other dormant black holes occasionally shred an infalling star, making their presence known by the flare of radiation that ensues.īut quasars are a different breed of black hole. We know it’s there, though, from the orbits of stars around it.
Our Milky Way’s behemoth weighs in at 4.3 million solar masses, but its starvation diet mutes all but faint flashes and flickers. In fact, almost every large galaxy hosts a black hole with the mass of millions to billions of Suns, and many of these black holes lurk in the dark.
It’s a bit of a contradiction to call a black hole luminous black holes themselves are, of course, black. Now, the term is a catch-all for all feeding, and therefore luminous supermassive black holes, also often called active galactic nuclei. Quasar is short for quasi-stellar radio source, because astronomers first discovered quasars in 1963 as objects that looked like stars but emitted radio waves. An artist's impression of a quasar within its host galaxyĪ quasar is a supermassive black hole feeding on gas at the center of a distant galaxy.
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