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Quasars Essay

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Quasars Since their discovery, the nature of quasars has been one of the most intriguing and baffling problems as evidenced by the following quotations: " the problem of understanding quasi-stellar objects… is one of the most important and fascinating tasks in all physics" - G.Burbidge and Hoyle. "The quasar continues to rank both as one of the most baffling objects in the universe and one most capable of inspiring heated argument" - Morrison. "The redshift problem is one of the most critical problems in astronomy today" -
G. Burbidge. "Quasars still remain the profoundest mystery in the heavens" -
Hazard and Mitton. The conventional interpretation of the spectral lines observed in quasars is based on the …show more content…

Answering these basic questions may summarize much of the information regarding Quasar.

What is the definition of a quasar? When radio telescopes were first turned on the heavens, point sources of radio waves were discovered (along with spread-out regions of emission along our Milky Way). Astronomers using ordinary visible-light telescopes turned toward these radio points and looked to see what was there. In some cases a supernova remnant was found, in others, a large star-birth region, in others a distant galaxy. But in some places where point sources of radio waves were found, no visible source other than a stellar-looking object was found (it looked like a point of a star).
These objects were called the quasi-stellar radio sources or quasars for short. Later, it was found these sources could not be stars in our galaxy, but must be very far away as far as any of the distant galaxies seen. We now think these objects are the very bright centers of some distant galaxies, where some sort of energetic action is occurring, most probably due to the presence of a supermassive black hole at the center of that galaxy.
(Supermassive - made up from a mass of about a billion solar masses.)
What do quasars have to do with black holes? It is thought the infall of matter into the Supermassive black hole can result

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