My fascination for Quasars( Quasi- Steller Radio Source) By Katherine Lightwood

My fascination for Quasars( Quasi- Steller Radio Source)

By Katherine Lightwood  

One of the enigmatic of all astrophysical phenomenon is the mighty Quasars...This topic is quite close to my heart because when I was about five years old my father told me the stories of these astronomical giants called QUASARS when we were walking under the moonlit sky at a late summer evening.

Space stuff is awesome. Take stars- 100 billion megatons per second thermonuclear explosions that just don't stop exploding. Like this quasars have everything. They are like fire-breathing bat-winged vampire rainbow unicorns of astrophysical phenomenon. They don't just have black holes. They have a supermassive black hole. Millions to billions of times the mass of the sun which is surrounded by solar system sized whirlpool of superheated plasma that shines brighter than an entire galaxy. Sometimes they even have jets of near light speed particles filling the surrounding universe with giant radio plumes. So they are not only cool, they literally helped a lot to shape our universe.

In fact, without these most violent of all astrophysical phenomenon, we might not be here to think about them. When the very first radio telescope was pointed to heaven, scientists saw fat blobs radio waves whose sources were unknown. Those sources were only a bit blobby because of those early radio antenna had some pretty bad spatial resolutions making it difficult to pinpoint exactly where on the sky they were located.

Then a special event occurred. In 1962, astronomers caught a break. In an event known as Occultation when the moon passed right in front of one of the brightest of these radio blobs. The Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia which was trained on the Occultation and registered the exact instant that the radio signal vanished behind the moon. That timing allowed astronomers to identify a tiny star-like point of a bluish light as the source of the radio emission. Astronomers turned their optical telescope on this strange star and split the light into a spectrum. It looked nothing like the spectrum of any star ever seen. So, the name QUASI- STELLER- RADIO SOURCE as born and later it became QUASAR. 

And if you ask what was so different about the spectrum, it was red shifted. The wavelength of its light was stretched out as though the photons traveled through the expanding universe. And that put those QUASARS very far away. Its light must have been traveling from two billion light-years away to acquire the observed redshift. So, that was the reason. Now I should stop blabbering about these nerdy things because I got lots and lots of work to do. 

 So, that was my thought of the day. To see more posts like this make sure to visit our main page. And Do not forget to visit our institute's page to know more about graphic design, 3D, animation courses and other awesome stuff. Till then good day to you.

Katherine Lightwood