• In the late1960’s quasars were first detected by astronomer Maarten

Schmidt.

• Thousands of Quasars have been found since.

• He also measured radial velocities of hydrogen clouds and thus

map out the spiral arms in half of the Galaxy.
• Scientists debated on what Quasars really were

• Some scientists thought that these bright lights

were the results of other civilizations harvesting
the power of all the stars in their galaxy.

• There were multiple bodies that scientists thought

were different but were really all Quasars just
viewed from a different angle.
• Quasars emit energies of millions, billions, or even trillions of electron volts.

• This energy exceeds the total of the light of all the stars within a galaxy.
• They are the brightest objects in the universe, they shine anywhere from 10 to 100,000
times brighter than the Milky Way.

• Quasars are massive bodies that stretch for a kilo parsec or 3261.56 light years. A light
year is 9,460,730,472 580 km so multiply that by 3261.56 light years and that’s how big
a quasar is.
• It is believed that these huge energy sources are powered by super powerful black
holes that have masses of millions or even billions times our sun.

• No one really knows how these humongous black holes came to be in the first place,
and scientists are researching to see if they can discover what caused the black
holes in the first place.
• Quasar jets (also called Astrophysical jets) are huge beams of light, energy,
radiation, and other materials that burst off as columns into space at high speeds.

• When this greatly accelerated matter in the beam approaches the speed of light,
astrophysical jets become relativistic jets as they show effects from special
relativity.
• Scientists are still not entirely sure what powers quasars, and how they are created.

• It is thought that the center of these enormous objects are supermassive black holes