Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Virgo (Vir)
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Quasar 3C 273.0, Michael Southam
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Quasar 3C 273.0

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Quasar 3C 273.0, Michael Southam
Powered byPixInsight

Quasar 3C 273.0

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Description

WHAT IS A QUASAR?

A quasar (also known as a quasi-stellar object) is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus, in which a supermassive black hole with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun is surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk. As gas in the disk falls towards the black hole, energy is released in the form of electromagnetic radiation, which can be observed across the electromagnetic spectrum. The power radiated by quasars is enormous: the most powerful quasars have luminosities thousands of times greater than a galaxy such as the Milky Way.

QUASAR 3C 273.0

3C 273 is a quasar located in the constellation Virgo. It was the first quasar ever to be identified. It is the optically brightest quasar in the sky (m ~12.9), and one of the closest with a distance of 2.443 Billion Light Years. Even so, when the photons I captured began their journey, Earth had only just entered the Proterozoic Eon where the first multi-cellular life was beginning to emerge. Dinosaurs didn't arrive on earth until the light had completed 90% of its journey to my observatory. Quasar 3C273.0 is also one of the most luminous quasars known, with an absolute magnitude of −26.7, meaning that if it were only as distant as Pollux (34 light years) it would appear nearly as bright in the sky as the Sun. Since the sun's absolute magnitude is 4.83, it means that the quasar is over 4 trillion times more luminous than the Sun at visible wavelengths.

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