Quasars

Very bright point source objects that were billions of light years away confused astronomers. These objects were brighter than many nearby stars. How is this possible?

What they eventually discovered was that these were quasi-stellar object or QSO or quasi-stellar radio source, better known as a Quasars, and they are very interesting. Over 200,000 quasars have been found and they are from 600 million to 29 billion light years away. This indicates that quasars go back to only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. It also suggests that quasars were much more common in the early universe.

What the heck are these very bright quasars? Essentially, a quasar is a supermassive black hole surrounded by an orbiting accretion disk that's active, meaning that it's feeding on the gas and dust swarming around it and blasting out powerful jets of energy that are super bright, much brighter than the galaxies they're in. Think about that! The Quasar is putting out trillions of trillions of more power per second than the largest nuclear bomb ever. Quasars are the most powerful and brightest objects in the universe.

Super massive black holes are voracious eaters. The gas and dust in the accretion disk of these giants is heated to millions and millions of degrees and this causes them to emit huge amounts of radiation. Eventually, the supermassive black hole eats so much so fast, it causes a cosmic burp in the form of powerful jets of energy that blast out of their poles billions of miles, in some cases hundred of thousands of light years. These jets are very hot and brighter than the entire galaxy they come from. They are trillions of degrees hot and blasting at near light speed. These are the true death rays of the universe; much more powerful than the Star War's death star. These jets can blast stars apart and vaporize planets.
What's important about quasars is that they are essential to the formation of galaxies and that includes our galaxy. In fact they act as thermostats in regulating star formation. When young galaxies form around a supermassive black hole they begin forming large M-class stars that burn very bright, as much as 50,000 times the brightness of our sun, and then explode in supernovae in only a few hundred thousand years. If left unregulated, these frequent supernovae would wipe out all life forming on planets around dwarf stars like our sun. The good news is that these quasars eventually consume the supply of gas and dust and turn off much like a thermostat switch. Cosmologists believe that the quasar in our galaxy turned off just in time to allow us to evolve on Earth.

All of this makes sense. In order of us to be here, supermassive black holes had to form early on after the Big Bang. Cosmologists believe that these were formed from massive stars directly collapsed into large black holes, millions of times the mass of our sun. These supermassive black holes attracted stars to form galaxies, which because of excess gas and dust allowed quasars to turn on.

So, quasars are both death rays as well as star formation regulators. If our supermassive black hole formed a quasar, it would blast the atmosphere off of our planet and destroy all life. No need to worry because this won't happen anytime soon. Cosmologists believe that it won't happen until our Milky Way galaxy collides with Andromeda in about 4.5 billion years. The resulting collision of our supermassive black hole and the huge one in Andromeda will ignite a quasar, and if our solar system is anywhere near it, good bye to any life that remains.

The true nature of how these quasars actually form is not completely understood. The reason for this is that quasars form around supermassive black holes, which are not really understood. Black holes spin very fast and form very strong magnetic fields that are concentrated at the poles. That's what helps form the quasar beams. Recently, a quasar had been observed to form rapidly, as in a few hundred days. This is most unusual and emphasizes the fact that we don't really fully understand these crazy quasars.

Thanks for reading.