To be covered:

  • asteroids
  • black holes
  • clusters, globular
  • comets
  • galaxies
  • galaxy filaments
  • Kuiper Belt Objects
  • meteors
  • nebulae, nebulas
  • Oort Cloud Objects
  • open clusters
  • planetary nebulae
  • planets, exoplanets, dwarf planets
  • quasars, large quasar groups
  • stars
  • superclusters

Quasars

From Quasars: Brightest Objects in the Universe (2018) by Nola Taylor Redd:

  • Quasars are part of a class of objects known as active galactic nuclei (AGN). Other classes include Seyfert galaxies and blazars. All three require supermassive black holes to power them.
  • In the 1930s, Karl Jansky, a physicist with Bell Telephone Laboratories, discovered that the static interference on transatlantic phone lines was coming from the Milky Way. By the 1950s, astronomers were using radio telescopes to probe the heavens, and pairing their signals with visible examinations of the heavens. However, some of the smaller point-source objects didn’t have a match.
  • Astronomers called them “quasi-stellar radio sources,” or “quasars,” because the signals came from one place, like a star.
  • However, the name is a misnomer; according to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, only about 10 percent of quasars emit strong radio waves.
  • Scientists now suspect that the tiny, point-like glimmers are actually signals from galactic nuclei outshining their host galaxies. Quasars live only in galaxies with supermassive black holes — black holes that contain billions of times the mass of the sun.

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