Quasars the Galactic Powerhouses
Quasi-stellar radio sources, more commonly known as Quasars, are the most luminous, and some of the most powerful objects that we have ever observed in our universe. Although Quasars are beautiful to look at, the method that goes into creating them is a continuous process of death and destruction. Quasars may be billions upon billions of light years away, but that has not stopped them from having serious scientific implications, the most famous being that they have helped to prove The Big Bang Theory. Quasars’ actual scientific names are quasi-stellar radio sources, which came from early surveys of the sky using radio waves in the 1950’s. These objects appeared to be starlike. Before scientists really knew
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This means that the entirety of the Quasar could only be a few light days across. This again, led to more questions of how Quasars work. How could something so small put out so much energy and be so bright. “Astronomers were faced with a conundrum: how could an object about the size of the solar system have a mass of about a million stars and outshine by 100 times a galaxy of a hundred billion stars?” (Britannica.com) The answer that astronomers eventually came up with is accretion of gravity onto a supermassive black …show more content…
One implication it had was that it helped further prove the Big Bang Theory and helped to further disprove the Steady State theory. Steady State Theory is the theory that the universe is static, not expanding or contracting, and that there is no beginning or end to it. While the Big Bang Theory states that the universe was created due to a massive explosion and since that massive explosion the universe has been constantly expanding and still is until today. Since the discovery of Quasars scientist have been able to further prove Big Bang Theory due to the redshift of the Quasars. Quasars are extremely red-shifted hence why Maarten Schmidt and other scientists had such a hard time identifying what they actually were, but it is this powerful redshift that helps prove the theory. Since Quasars are so red-shifted it means that they are always moving away from us, which shows that the universe is expanding. If the universe is constantly expanding then clearly Steady State Theory cannot be
The third thing they debated was how bright novae seemed. Shapley said that some novae looked so bright to us, that they would have be amazingly bright to also be so far away. Curtis said that they were so bright that
The Big Bang theory is a theory that states that the universe originated as a single mass, which subsequently exploded. The entire universe was once all in a hot and dense ball, but about 20 million years ago, it exploded. This explosion hurled material all over the place and all mater and space was created at that point in time. The gas that was hurled out cooled and became our stellar system. A red shift is a shift towards longer wavelengths of celestial objects. An example of this is the "Doppler shift." Doppler shift is what makes a car sound lower-pitched as it moves further away. As it turns out, a special version of this everyday life effect applies to light as well. If an astronomical object is moving away from the Earth, its light will be shifted to longer (red) wavelengths. This is significant because this theory indicates the speed of recession of galaxies and the distances between galaxies.
Only after Vesto Slipher, Hubble and others discovered in the second decade of this century that the universe was expanding, it could give a satisfactory explanation for the paradox.
As was stated earlier, quasars are composed of a supermassive black hole and the cloud of dust feeding it. They are only ever found in new galaxies, as there is enough matter there to keep the quasar fed and producing a signal. In fact, scientists believe that quasars are a partial reason that there aren’t many small, scattered galaxies in the universe. The quasar’s signal will gradually weaken as the quasar’s life goes on and will eventually stop when there is not enough matter to keep the quasar fed. Scientists have never seen the formation of a new galaxy and, therefore, have never seen the actual formation of a quasar.
In truth, English geologist John Michell was the first to suggest the existence of black holes. He referred to them "dark stars" and based his calculations on Newt...
Every day we look into the night sky, wondering and dreaming what lies beyond our galaxy. Within our galaxy alone, there are millions upon millions of stars. This may be why it interests us to learn about all that we cannot see. Humans have known the existence of stars since they have had eyes, and see them as white glowing specks in the sky. The mystery lies beyond the white glowing specks we see but, in the things we cannot see in the night sky such as black holes.
...etts Institute of Technology. (2014, February 20). Closing the 'free will' loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell's theorem. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 23, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm
Shklovskii, Iosif S. Stars: Their Birth, Life, and Death. Moscow: Central Press for Literature in Physics and Mathematics, 1975.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the Milky Way Galaxy’s closest neighbor; with it being around 2.5 million lightyears away from Earth. It was once referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older readings. It gets its name from the Andromeda constellation which in turn received its name from the Greek goddess Andromeda.
Tyler, Pat. Supernova. NASA’s Heasarc: Education and Public Information. 26 Jan. 2003. 22 Nov. 2004
By 1936, astronomers had realized that the hazy balls they sometimes saw in their telescopes, which looked like stars obscured by gas, were actually galaxies (Hibbison).
Supernovas are extremely powerful explosions of radiation. A supernova can give off as much energy as a Sun can within its whole life. A star will release most of its material when it undergoes this type of explosion. The explosion of a supernova can also help in creating new stars.
The first person to ever observe the Milky Way was Greek philosopher, Democritus, who said the galaxy may consist of distant stars. In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and came to the conclusion that it was composed of billions and billions of faint stars. Then, in 1750, Thomas Wright c...
The era of radio telescopes along with radio astronomy begun with Karl Guthe Jansky's discovery of an astronomical radio source in 1931. In the 20th century, many types of telescopes were developed for a wide range of wavelengths from radio to gamma-rays. (infrared telescopes--700 nm/ 0.7 µm - 1000 µm/1 mm, ultra-violet teles...