1Quasars

**Description** Quasars, a part of an active galaxy (a galaxy showing suprising features); is a compact region of great luminiosity surrounding a central supermassive black hole. There are over 200,000 quasars that we are capiable of observing, varying in distance from 780 million lightyears - to 12 billion light years away!
 * Quasars**

**Main Info** Quasars are very distant, and yet still very bright, most of the time out shining the luminosity of galaxies. If a quasar was 33 light years away from us, it would actually outshine the sun! The incredible part is, Quasars are not very large, often around 1 light week in diameter (the size of our solar system). Scientists are able to tell the size of these far-terrestrial objects by simply measuring its light change, if it changes brightness within an hour, it is one light hour long. Since its luminosity changes so frequently, it is said that all of this light comes from one central point. Since all the parts of a quasar are connected, if it takes 1 week for it to change its brightness, it must be one light week in diameter.

**History ** In the 50's quasars were discoved as giant radio sources, baffled by what these were, scientists had trouble figuring out what these sources were. During the early 60's quasars were finally visualized. At First astronomers thought quazars to be wormholes, or portals throughout the universe. Hong-Yee Chu coined the term quasar for the then called Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources. Quasars are now thought to be much more common in the early universe, considering the fact that Quasars burn of tremendous amount of matter, and can only exist a very short time.

-High redshift, 80% the speed of light! -Size of our solar system -Average magnitude of 12.9! -After burnt up all resources, turns into a regular galaxy -2 trillion times brighter than our sun!
 * Facts **

**Links** [|starchild.nasa.gov] [|Wikipedia.org]

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