A friend recently asked me waht a quasar is and I accually had no idea, so, i did a little research on the subject and this is what i found.

A Quasar is a quasi steller object. They are basically points in space that are extemely far away, yet extremely bright which is why it is difficult to say exactly what they are. Astronomers have studied stars for a long time and the way that they find the number of stars in a cluster (like the great hercules cluster) is by measuring the light given off. They know how much light a star gives off at a certain distance and use this to measure a stars distance, etc. In the case of quasars, they are extremely bright yet far away, which is the opposite of everything else we have observed. There are many theories as to what exactly these quasars are.

The most accepted theory is that they are Active Galactic Nuclei. This means they are an extremely sctive center of a distant galaxy. In the center of these galaxies are huge black holes, very massive ones at that. The black hole at the center of the galaxy sucks in all the matter and interstaller dust. Because this matter is being accelerated at a great rate it creates a lot of heat. This heat is what create the bright light that we see shining from it. Also, black holes sometimes create a jet stream of particles shooting out the top and bottom of them. Astronomers believe that the quasars we see are these streams that are pointed directly at us. Since these jet streams can be shot out millions of light years at an accelerating rate the combined light of the jet stream and the accelerating dust creates the massive amount of light that we see here.