19 Mar 2020

What is QUASAR | Brightest Object in the Universe | Quasi Stellar Radio Source

What is QUASAR (Quasi Stellar Radio Source) and Why it is so Awesome?

Quasars are the brightest and most distant objects in the known universe. Quasar contains a supermassive black hole at its center having mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. This supermassive Black hole is surrounded by an accretion disk. This accretion disk is a circular disc like structure which is made up of different types of gases and matter that spins around the black hole at an extremely high speed. This giant disk feeds the  hungry supermassive black hole.
As matter starts falling into the black hole from the accretion disk, the friction between the fast spinning matter slowly heats up that causes tremendous amount of energy emission from it.
As the accretion disc rotates, the charged particles are shot upward. These charged particles form a tight column because of the twisted magnetic field lines which is known as the quasar jets, cosmic Jets or astrophysical jets.
The charged particles that are present in the quasar Jets travel at nearly the speed of light and can shoot out to very long distances. This makes them visible from Earth, although they are present at a distance of billions of light years away from Earth.
Keep it in mind that, the quasar jet does not originate from the center of the black hole but is ejected from the spinning disc of gas and matter. Finally this extremely hot and fast spinning accretion disk in eaten up by the supermassive giant black hole.
You will find it hard to believe that The largest quasars can eat up mass equivalent to 600 earths every single day!. If we talk in terms of mass of the Sun, it can feed a mass equal to the mass of 1000 suns every year.
But When the quasar eats up the whole matter present in the accretion disk, it eventually dies, as there is nothing left for it to feed on.
"Quasars" is actually a short name for Quasi Steller Radio Sources. Quasars actually belong to a family of astronomical objects known as the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), The Quasars are the most distant and most energetic objects of all the objects in the Active Galactic Nuclei. The brightness of most powerful Quasars may be upto thousands of times Greater than a Galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars such as the Milky Way. Quasars are not just the brightest objects in the universe, they are also the most distant objects ever found. Generally quasars are found millions or billions of light years away. The most distant quasar discovered is the ULAS J1120+0641 that is present at a distance of 29 billion light years away from us. Even the closest Quasar known as IC 2497 is 730 million light years away from earth.
The first quasar discovered by the scientists was 3C 273 which was found in the year 1950. As of date nearly 200 thousand quasars have been discovered. As we know that quasars are billions of light years away from earth so they are surely the most ancient objects known to us. This helps us in understanding the mysteries of the early universe.
According to scientists our galaxy Milky Way once hosted a quasar but now it's not alive. But nearly after 5 billion years from now, the milky way galaxy will collide with its neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy, at that time the Milky way may have a Quasar.
Researchers have found that quasars are drifting away from us at an unbelievably high speed of 150 thousand kilometers per sec. Some quasars have been seen moving even at 93% of the speed of light.
So friends this was all about the brightest thing in the universe, the Quasars!

What is QUASAR (Video)




No comments:

Post a Comment