Contact: Gertie Skaarup
skaarup@nbi.dk
453-532-5320
University of Copenhagen

Quasar

Caption: Quasars were discovered in the beginning of the 1960s as distant sources that emitted electromagnetic energy and radio waves. It was thought that it was a special type of star that emitted radio radiation so it got the name quasar. The word quasar is a contraction of quasi-stellar and means star like. But their light is very different from ordinary stars and it was first in the beginning of the 1980s that it was discovered that they were heavy black holes in the middle of a galaxy in the very early universe.

Credit: NASA

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