• Question: What is a quasar?

    Asked by xWarlord24x to Anna, James, Joe, Leonie, Olivia on 6 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      Hi xWarlord24x,

      A Quasar is (I think) the bright region near supermassive black holes as matter (such as space dust) is sucked into the black hole. The energy that is released as it is sucked in is emitted as the light, which can be brighter than loads of stars!

    • Photo: Joe Spencer

      Joe Spencer answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      xWarlord24x

      Quasars are basically space flares. As far as I know they’re the brightest thing in the Universe.
      They are black holes which suck in loads of stuff around them and all this stuff at the edge of the black hole (the accretion disk) collides it emits massive amounts of light rays, x-rays, radio waves. Loads of stuff.
      This light then travels billions of light years to us and we can look at them through special telescopes which tells us information about the early universe.

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