Charles Bell, Jr., age 11, of Newport News, Virginia, for his question:
What exactly are quasars?
It's nice to fit a huge problem into a small diagram and very annoying to discover that you have captured only a corner of it. This is just about what happened when quasars were discovered. Astronomers had fitted the known stars and galaxies into neat patterns of behavior. Ouasars and quasar galaxies blew these neat ideas sky high to say the least. From billions of light years out in space, they flung us a dramatic challenge to expand our concept of the universe. ~r * ~r
The familiar stars are individuals with slight variations. The mass of our sun is related to its energy. More or less the same ratios apply to the 100 billion stars concentrated in our Galaxy. It seemed likely that the same pattern governed the entire universe. Then radio telescopes tagged enormous emissions coming from a couple of super powerhouses. Telescopes identified them as two dim bluish stars. Further investigations placed the dynamic strangers way outside the Milky Way, at distances of two billion and four billion' light years.
They were named quasars, car starlike objects, and the first was cataloged fn 1959. Since then, several hundred quasars and quasar galaxies have been pinpointed. But so far, nobody can explain their peculiarities. The mass of such an object may equal 100 million suns, concentrated within a package no wider than a liphtyear. The energy it emits may exceed the total output of our entire Galaxy, which is a million times more massive and spans a width of 100,000 lipht years.
Obviously these peppy aliens are driven by unusual energy systems. One theory suggests they may be hot superstars, perhaps victims of collapsing gravitation. Some suspect that their fantastic energies may be too extravagant to last. They may consume themselves in perhaps 80 billion years. In any case, their radio and light emissions would continue on and on across the universe.
Scientists still are mystified by the extravagant quasars. But meantime, wouldn't you know, they may have found a use for them. From such remote sources, the angles of energy waves are very precise. They can be used to detect mere half inch changes in our earth's restless crust. Researchers hope to use these angles to report slight disturbances around fault zones. Of all things, the broadcasts from these remote quasars may help to predict major earthquakes on our little planet.
Quasars are the brightest, the most energetic and the most remote celestial objects so far discovered in the universe. Some are eight billion light years away ¬and each light year equals six million million earth miles. Their energies that reach us may have been broadcast by powerhouses that consumed themselves long ages ago.