Alright so what is a quasar?

lundyjb

Ive looked on a good number of websites, including the pedia, and i still feel like i didnt get a straight answer. What exactly is a quasar. Is it a black hole in the center of a galaxy? What is the physical makeup of a quasar?

Drakkith

It is a supermassive black hole, typically in the center of a galaxy that has an active accretion disk surrounding it which puts out a significant amount of EM radiation. The accretion disk is primarily made up of hydrogen and helium gas, and "younger" quasars may also have dust in their accretion disks as well.

jnorman

perhaps you could elucidate how an accretion disc could be responsible for such enormous output of EM radiation?

AbsoluteZer0

Radiation emission is triggered by compression of the materials falling into the center by gravity. The properties of the central object dictate the frequency range of this radiation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disc

94JZA80

the accretion process is one of the most efficient ways of converting mass into energy (that we know of anyways). suppose a very small amount of matter undergoes a chemical reaction of some sort (combustion, synthesis, acid-base, etc.), and releases several hundred eV (electron volts) of energy. if an identical amount of that same matter were split apart at the atomic level (nuclear fission), it would produce several hundred MeV (several hundred million electron volts). the rate at which nuclear reactions convert mass into energy is several orders of magnitude greater than any chemical reaction. in nuclear fission, approx. 0.04% of the mass involved in the reaction will be converted to energy. nuclear fusion is approx. 8 times as efficient as fission, converting approx. 0.3% of the mass involved in the reaction into energy. but when it comes to converting mass directly into energy, hardly any other method appears to be more efficient than accretion around a highly compact massive object (the only other method i can think of that is theoretically more efficient is matter-antimatter annihilation). while i don't have a source in front of me, i seem to recall reading that an accretion disk can convert up to a whopping ~10% of its mass into energy.

now, as AbsoluteZer0 mentioned, the radiation emission is triggered by friction within the accretion disk, which is itself caused by the central body's gravitational pull. now while a supermassive BH is much larger than a stellar mass BH (both with respect to mass and EH diameter), it is still confined to what is otherwise an extremely small volume of space in comparison to the size of the galaxy in which it is at the center. using the concept of energy density, one can easily see that the release of such prodigious amounts of energy from within such a confined volume results in an extremely bright source...in this case, it can sometimes be bright enough to be seen from across the visible universe.