Quasars the Galactic Powerhouses
Quasi-stellar radio sources, more commonly known as Quasars, are the most luminous, and some of the most powerful objects that we have ever observed in our universe. Although Quasars are beautiful to look at, the method that goes into creating them is a continuous process of death and destruction. Quasars may be billions upon billions of light years away, but that has not stopped them from having serious scientific implications, the most famous being that they have helped to prove The Big Bang Theory. Quasars’ actual scientific names are quasi-stellar radio sources, which came from early surveys of the sky using radio waves in the 1950’s. These objects appeared to be starlike. Before scientists really knew
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This means that the entirety of the Quasar could only be a few light days across. This again, led to more questions of how Quasars work. How could something so small put out so much energy and be so bright. “Astronomers were faced with a conundrum: how could an object about the size of the solar system have a mass of about a million stars and outshine by 100 times a galaxy of a hundred billion stars?” (Britannica.com) The answer that astronomers eventually came up with is accretion of gravity onto a supermassive black …show more content…
One implication it had was that it helped further prove the Big Bang Theory and helped to further disprove the Steady State theory. Steady State Theory is the theory that the universe is static, not expanding or contracting, and that there is no beginning or end to it. While the Big Bang Theory states that the universe was created due to a massive explosion and since that massive explosion the universe has been constantly expanding and still is until today. Since the discovery of Quasars scientist have been able to further prove Big Bang Theory due to the redshift of the Quasars. Quasars are extremely red-shifted hence why Maarten Schmidt and other scientists had such a hard time identifying what they actually were, but it is this powerful redshift that helps prove the theory. Since Quasars are so red-shifted it means that they are always moving away from us, which shows that the universe is expanding. If the universe is constantly expanding then clearly Steady State Theory cannot be
The third thing they debated was how bright novae seemed. Shapley said that some novae looked so bright to us, that they would have be amazingly bright to also be so far away. Curtis said that they were so bright that
...f gas, which collapsed and broke up into individual stars. The stars are packed together most tightly in the center, or nucleus. Scientists believe it is possible that at the very center there was too much matter to form an ordinary star, or that the stars which did form were so close to each other that they coalesced to form a black hole. It is argued that really massive black holes, equivalent to a hundred million stars like the Sun, could exist at the center of some galaxies
But this does not justify it. Whether there is a star after the other, the assumption of uniform distribution (at that time there was no reason to think of a more privileged, more full of stars elsewhere) allows the existence of stars "next". This formal language, the stars are "dense" in the celestial sphere.
Black holes - the strange scientific phenomenon that has astounded physicists and astronomers alike for decades. Popular subjects in science fiction novels, black holes are one of the greatest enigmas of the scientific world. Even today, the concept of a super-dense ball of matter that not even light can escape from is somewhat farfetched, and many scientists disagree with each other about nearly every aspect of a black hole. This project will attempt to shed some light on these mysterious formations, and will inform you the reader of the most popular and widely accepted theories surrounding them.
Anthony Crehan, #10514 Mr. Constantinides Science 8, Period 4 April 8, 2014 Quasars and Pulsars Pulsars and Quasars Let’s start out at the very bottom: the definitions of a quasar and a pulsar. A quasar consists of a supermassive black hole surrounded by a cloud of dust that allows for focused beams of radiation. Quasars are usually only seen in moderately young galaxies, as they require a large amount of matter, commonly known as “stardust,” to keep the beam going. This energy source has to be extremely compact to give the quasar enough energy to exist. Once this fuel runs out, though, the quasar ceases to be and becomes a normal supermassive black hole.
...etts Institute of Technology. (2014, February 20). Closing the 'free will' loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell's theorem. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 23, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm
Just recently a major discovery was found with the help of a device known as The Hubble Telescope. This telescope has just recently found what many astronomers believe to be a black hole, After being focuses on a star orbiting empty space. Several pictures of various radiation fluctuations and other diverse types of readings that could be read from that area which the black hole is suspected to be in.
By 1936, astronomers had realized that the hazy balls they sometimes saw in their telescopes, which looked like stars obscured by gas, were actually galaxies (Hibbison).
Tyler, Pat. Supernova. NASA’s Heasarc: Education and Public Information. 26 Jan. 2003. 22 Nov. 2004
Shklovskii, Iosif S. Stars: Their Birth, Life, and Death. Moscow: Central Press for Literature in Physics and Mathematics, 1975.
Supernovas are extremely powerful explosions of radiation. A supernova can give off as much energy as a Sun can within its whole life. A star will release most of its material when it undergoes this type of explosion. The explosion of a supernova can also help in creating new stars.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the Milky Way Galaxy’s closest neighbor; with it being around 2.5 million lightyears away from Earth. It was once referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older readings. It gets its name from the Andromeda constellation which in turn received its name from the Greek goddess Andromeda.
The first person to ever observe the Milky Way was Greek philosopher, Democritus, who said the galaxy may consist of distant stars. In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and came to the conclusion that it was composed of billions and billions of faint stars. Then, in 1750, Thomas Wright c...
The era of radio telescopes along with radio astronomy begun with Karl Guthe Jansky's discovery of an astronomical radio source in 1931. In the 20th century, many types of telescopes were developed for a wide range of wavelengths from radio to gamma-rays. (infrared telescopes--700 nm/ 0.7 µm - 1000 µm/1 mm, ultra-violet teles...