Quasars

Context:

• An international team of astronomers have discovered the most distant ‘radio-loud’ quasar with the help of European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT).

What are Quasars?

• A Quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN).
• At the heart of most galaxies there are a supermassive black holes billion times more massive than the Sun.
• In the intense gravity, matter falls toward the black hole at high speeds, crashing together and heating up to millions of degrees, causing the material to shine with incredible brilliance.
• Galaxies that contain these types of luminous, black-hole-fueled structures are known as ‘Quasars’.

About the quasar P172+8:

• The new quasar is named P172+18.
• It's a "radio-loud" quasar, meaning its jets are bright in radio wavelengths. Only about 10% of quasars discovered fall into this category.
• The supermassive black hole feeding this quasar is 300 million times more massive than our sun.
• It took 13 billion years for the quasar’s light to reach earth from this quasar.

Prelims Question

” P172+8”, recently in news is:
(a)Comet
(b)Quasar
(c)Asteroid
(d)Nebula

Answer to the Prelims Question