What Is A Quasar?

The sky that we watch every night is full of thousands stars. But in reality, what we see with our naked eye is just a tiny part of the Universe. In reality, the Universe is so big that most of the distant objects are not visible to us. However, certain objects are so powerful that despite their immense distance from us, we are still able to detect them (although only using telescopes). I’m talking about quasars, or “quasi-stellar radio sources”. Do you want to know what they are? Watch this video and I will tell you more!
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The discovery of quasars dates back to the 1950s, and it’s interesting to look at the history of their first observations.
In the 1950s, astronomers started to look at the sky using radio telescopes for the first time. Radio telescopes, contrary to normal telescopes, detect radio waves instead of visible light. When astronomers first started to “watch” the sky with these instruments, they were surprised to find several objects emitting a large amount of radio waves, but almost no visible light. In fact, most of these sources of radio waves did not correspond to any known visible object.
The first quasar ever discovered was 3C 273, a weird name indicating the 273rd object in the Third Cambridge Catalog of Radio Sources (3C). It was discovered thanks to a “lunar occultation”, an event that occurs when the Moon passes between an object and the Earth, hiding the object to our view. In 1959, a group of astronomers at the Cambridge University identified a radio source in the sky (3C 273), but they couldn’t find an optical counterpart to it. Three years later, in 1962, John Bolton and his Caltech radio astronomy group used the Parkes radio telescope to realize a series of observation of the sky during which the Moon was passing in front of the radio source discovered three years earlier. Thanks to these lunar occultations, Bolton and his group were able to calculate the location of the source with precision. And more importantly, they were able to associate it to a visible counterpart, a faint stellar object.
Later on, new quasars were discovered. Generally, their position in the sky matched with very faint objects, like very distant stars: that’s why they were called quasars, a contraction of “quasi-stellar” (star-like) and “radio source”. However, the chemical composition of these objects observed by looking at their spectral lines was very different from any known star. Also, the amount of radiation emitted by them was too large in order to be normal stars.
The observation of these quasars continued throughout the years. By observing their radiation spectrum, scientists found out that these objects were moving very fast and away from the Earth. This could be inferred thanks to a phenomenon known as “redshift”. What is it?
Every object in the sky emits radiation in a broad range of frequencies – and even in the visible part of the spectrum, which consists of different colours: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. The colour that our eye perceives depends on the frequency of the light that we observe: violet corresponds to the highest frequency, while red corresponds to the lowest one. While the light emitted by an object in the sky contains a mix of different frequencies, it has a peak at a certain colour. If we look at the sky, in fact, we notice that some stars appear red, while others appear blue.
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Credits: Ron Miller
Credits: Nasa/Shutterstock/Storyblocks/Elon Musk/SpaceX/Esa
Credits: Flickr

Video Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:43 What is a Quasar?
03:06 Redshift
06:31 Quasars and Black Holes
08:17 Observing Quasars

#insanecuriosity #quasars #howtheuniverseworks

[InsaneCuriosity]

Hey Insane Curiosity Squad! If you liked the video, we would love for you to share it with your friends or on other social networks like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, etc... (Since the algorithm is not cooperating in showing us to the public 😅). In just 30 seconds, you will greatly help our Channel to grow and improve future contents. A big thank you from all of us.

[soulsniper_gamer]

6:14 just saved you 13 minutes or 6 minutes

[TheRealGuywithoutaMustache]

Imagine being able to garner and utilize the energy from these quasars

[JamesHill-vskn]

Thank you for helping us to have a better understanding! We support your work. Thank you again.

[jacobbosley]

The irony of time: to us visible light is everything from the beginning of time until it ends, but when the entire expanse of the universe is turned into a life that has a beginning and an end we are in motion observing an otherwise stationary universe.

[MrBoomer-jlgw]

Quasars are fascinating. Mind boggling to know that they are the most bright object in the universe and yet theyre undetectable with the naked eye!

[barbaradevine]

Really mind blowing and the information was understandable.Thank you!

[jtejvhp]

Your voice is very clear and also the contents of these videos. :-)

[timmyarnold]

It almost like we are an experiment at Fermilab !!!!

[mistyninjax]

Makes me wonder if there is a maximum threshold as to how big galaxies can get.

[ecospider]

Great history about how we understood quasars.

[LJayyBeh]

The first channel I've seen that ever said the audience can like and or dislike their video. I like that. That alone made me give you a thumbs up.

[chrisfreitag]

I love how I chose this video first by pure chance. Afterwards saw the vid about quasars from PBS.. 1.5 million views on that one. Honestly I love this one far more lol and you deserve more views.

[horizonbrave]

Easily the coolest and most bizarre thing in galaxy to me...everybody makes much ado about blackholes... but I swear the quasar and pulsars are where the real jaw dropping stuff is seen xD

[ahmedsenussi]

I love ur videos and commentary u make it just a bit easier to understand thanx please please keep going

[simateix]

Still remember reading a magazine as a kid where there was an article about quazars and we had no idea what are we observing and here we are 15 years later taking pictures of black holes

[BigNewGames]

Correction sir:, In October of 2019 ALMA Radio Telescope released a Doppler image of the supermassive black hole Sgr A* in the center of our galaxy. The image showed the motion of the gas near the black hole. The red to white colored gas was moving away from us (red shift). The blue to light blue colored gas was moving towards us (blue shift). The darker the color the slower it was moving. The brighter the color the faster the gas was moving. Mind you the shift in the wavelength of light only occurs if the gas is moving towards us or if it is moving away from us. Not if it's motion is relative to us. So behind the black hole we would expect that the gas would be blue, moving towards the black hole relative to us. We would expect the gas between us and the black hole to be shifting into the red because it would be moving towards the black hole and away from us.

But the Doppler image posted by ALMA Radio Telescope showed completely the opposite. The red to white colored gas was behind the black hole. Indicating that the gas was moving away from the black hole and us. The closer the gas was to the black hole the faster it was moving away from it relative to us. Energy jets were produced by the black hole on both sides of the black hole. One almost pointing directly at us and the other pointing away from us. Massive amounts of gas and energy were coming from the black hole. The gas was not even orbiting the black hole. It appeared as if the gas was being made by the black hole, radiating away extremely fast from it's surface and then gradually slowing down as it got far away. The red colored gas moving away from us was located behind the black hole and extends away from the black hole for a long distance. X-ray images show these long gas clouds to be emitting massive amounts of radiation as they speed away from the black hole. The black hole is a hot spot of heat and electromagnetic fields moving away from it in all directions.

The Doppler image was empirical evidence, actual observations of matter and energy coming from the black hole. The image did not even indicate that the gas was orbiting the black hole in an accretion disk. That was the explanation for all the energy radio telescopes detected coming from the center of the Milky Way and that was incorrect too.

It appears that Einstein's field equations are wrong about the gravity of black holes. It appears that nothing is able to fall into them because of the stiff cosmic wind that they spew full of electrically charged particles similar to our sun's solar wind but much more energetic.

Looks like we found all that missing energy needed to explain the expansion of space throughout the universe.

Would anyone like to see the ALMA radio telescope Doppler image of Sgr A*?

[PascalGautron-xk]

I loved this video thank you for telling me more about Quasars

[bluemonk]

I still don't get it and now I'm frustrated because I can't comprehend them. And now I have a headache

[larspersson]

Got to ask... What is the difference between a black hole and a quasar?