Quasars

Interstellar, what a classic!! If you liked it, this is the blog for you. If you are one of those who dream of travelling space, moving from one planet to the next in a cute little spaceship, chances are you must be having some idea what quasars are. 

 Let’s delve a little deeper into what the whole thing is. 

 

1. Quasars are bright astronomical objects found within the centres of some galaxies, which gets it’s energy by spiralling gas into a large black hole at a very high velocity.

2. Many quasars are so bright that they can outshine all the stars in the galaxies in which they live, which is why they are visible from billions of light-years away.

3. They are one of the most distant and luminous objects.

4. The black holes themselves do not emit visible or radio waves. Quasar light comes from an accretion disk, a disk of gas and stars that surrounds the black hole.

5. Quasar is compact and luminous, the radiation pressure inside the quasar is huge.

6. If a quasar is not to blow itself up with its own radiation, it must be very massive, at least one million solar masses, i.e., not to exceed the Eddington limit —the minimum mass at which the outward radiation pressure is balanced by the inward pull of gravity.

7. In spite of the fact that quasars are intrinsically very bright, we cannot detect any without a telescope.

8. Scientists often use quasars as background light sources for studying surrounding galaxies and diffuse gas. “Absorption spectroscopy” means that the material between the quasar and Earth is detected only after it absorbs some of the quasar’s light.

9. The emission of a quasar can only last as long as there is fuel available to form an accretion disk. The average lifespan of a quasar is 100-1000 million years.

Now we know what’s the whole deal about quasars. Please share the most interesting thing you learned about this cosmic phenomenon.