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Quasars are the blazing centers of active galaxies. We take a look at how they form and why they're the brightest objects in the universe.

The radio signals hint at an important evolutionary step in the lives of galaxies.

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" -Albert Einstein Our galaxy is but one among hundreds of billions in the cosmos, nearly all of which contain supermassive black holes at the center. Ours happens to be "only" a few million times as massive as our Sun, as well as quiet.

Not all galaxies are quiet. Some are what we call active galaxies, where the supermassive black hole in their cores are actively feeding on material. The material forms a flattened disk around the black hole which heats up to infernal temperatures and gets so bright it can outshine all the stars in the galaxy combined. Active indeed.

Zoom In What we see from an active galaxy depends in large part on our viewing geometry. If the jet is aimed at us we can see high-energy light like X-rays and gamma rays. If we see the dust torus edge-on it can block most of the high-energy stuff and we only see optical or infrared light. There's a whole menagerie of active galaxy types out there. Quasars tend to have a lot of high-energy light (the first was discovered by its X-ray emission) and early on were also seen to be powerful sources of radio energy. But as we learned more we found that radio-loud quasars