Скачать или смотреть All about quasars: This Week in Astronomy with Dave Eicher 5/8/23

Hi folks, tune in every week of 2023 for the best in astronomy from Astronomy Editor Dave Eicher, brought to you by Celestron.

This week, we'll discuss the science and history of quasars!

Quasars, short for quasi-stellar objects, were first identified in 1962 by Maarten Schmidt at the California Institute of Technology. They appear as star-like points, but they lie at enormous distances, which means they're emitting incredible amounts of energy.

By the 1980s, quasars' prodigious X-ray and radio emissions led most astronomers to believe these objects contain black holes in their centers. In the 1990s, scientists increasingly viewed quasars as young galactic cores where gas, dust, and stars fed a central black hole.

One byproduct of the infalling matter is a high-energy jet erupting from near the black hole and hurling material into space. Quasars became part of a spectrum of energetic galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN), which also includes Seyfert galaxies, BL Lacertae objects, and radio galaxies. Perhaps these diverse objects, astronomers thought, were similar creatures viewed from different angles.

Slowly, the question of what quasars are morphed into how quasars formed. Observational clues from the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments able to observe the far reaches of the cosmos are giving astronomers leads. Some quasars seen at high resolution exhibit a "fuzz" of light. In recent years, Hubble has revealed faint galactic forms around quasars. This confirms these distant beacons are, indeed, young galactic cores.

For years, quasars provided the only way astronomers could get a glimpse of the early cosmos. Astronomers' assumption that quasars were linked to the formation of galaxies was key to understanding how everything in the early universe formed. They've confirmed that quasars are young, energetic galaxies. And supermassive black holes appear to be typical in all but the smallest galaxies - including our own.

For more information on quasars, see here: https://astronomy.com/magazine/greate...



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Thumbnail image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech