Quasars are the brightest & most distant objects in the known universe. The name quasar comes from "quasi-stellar radio source" & they are often referred to as QSOs or quasi-stellar objects. They are mysterious as we still do not know exactly what they are. They emit enormous amounts of energy and can burn with the energy of a trillion suns. Some are thought to be producing more than 100 times more energy than our entire galaxy, all from an area around the size of our solar system.
Recent evidence suggests that quasars are produced by hyper-massive black holes consuming matter in an acceleration disk which causes the matter to spin faster and faster leading to friction between the particles producing heat, light and other forms of radiation. As the black hole consumes the equivalent mass of our sun per year, huge amounts of energy is ejected from its north and south pole, which are called Cosmic jets. Another possibility is that quasars are young galaxies. The ejected energy could be from the cores of very young and very active galaxies. Other astronomers believe that quasars are distant points in space where new matter may be entering our universe. Who knows?
The first quasar was discovered in 1960 by T. Matthews & A. Sandage. It was called 3C 273. Today if a discovered object has a very high red shift and appears to be producing massive amounts of energy it becomes a prime target for quasar research. More than 2000 have been identified so far.
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