The Mysteries of Quasars

Ok, first I'm going to introduce myself.

I'm a high school student named Rafael Guevara (Id. number: A01280452), but people call me Rafa or Alex, both are fine to me, but I like more the first way. Well, now I would like to talk a little bit about what my pseudonym, Quasar Man, actually means.



First of all, a quasar:

1) Is a compact region in the center of a massive galaxy.

2) It has an incredible quantity of energy that produce a lot light, that’s why quasars seem to be stars, in fact, the name “quasar” (quasi-star = star-like) comes from this similarity.

3) Quasars are relatedly a recent discovery in astronomy. It was in 1963 when Thomas Matthews and Allan Sandage, both scientists from the Californian observatory Monte Palomar, discovered a very curious object in space: it was too small for the quantity of light it produced. They called it quasar (star-like), although it was much more powerful than any star.

4) They are extremely far away. One of the shiniest quasars is about 2 billion light-years away, but they shine much more than one of the greatest galaxies.

5) Quasars allow astronomers to know how the Universe was in its early years because light takes a lot of time to travel such distances, so we are actually looking the quasars as when they were very youth, since the beginning of the Universe itself.

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I don’t know what do think, but I really love all this stuff about Outer Space, I don’t think we are alone in Universe, it’s not logical to think that way, I mean, there are billions of galaxies, and each galaxy has billions of stars, and, I don’t know, at least millions of those stars must have several planets around them. Just imagine the huge possibility for life to develop somewhere in those innumerable planets.

Hope you enjoy this humble web blog, you can comment freely, seriously, all humans (and any intelligent life-form) are welcome ;)

Bibliography:

Mienciclo Universal. 2010. 22th august 2011 <http://0-www.mienciclo.es.millenium.itesm.mx/enciclo/index.php/Qu%C3%A1sar>.