Quasars

Scientists are watching pulsars carefully to detect the rippling fabric of the cosmos. Credit: dani3315/iStock/Getty Images

Searching for gravitational waves from supermassive black holes

Artist's impression of how gravitational lensing works. Image Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA, Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI/AURA), ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI). Additional Processing: Robert Gendler

Astronomers spot galaxy 5 billion lightyears away

This image shows an artist’s conception of the “changing-look quasar” as is appared in early 2015. The glowing blue region shows the last of the gas being swallowed by the central black hole as it shuts off. The spectrum is the previous one obtained by the SDSS in 2003. Image credit: Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc.; SDSS collaboration.

Astronomers spot disappearing quasar

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Powerful gamma rays seen in distant galaxy

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Quasar light reveals galaxy ‘fingerprints’

This is an artist’s impression of the quasar 3C 279. Astronomers connected the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA for the first time, to make the sharpest observations ever, of the centre of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279. Quasars are the very bright centres of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes. This quasar contains a black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us. The team were able to probe scales of less than a light-year across the quasar — a remarkable achievement for a target that is billions of light-years away.

Quasars control star formation