Quasar

The Cosmic War Between Ancient Starburst Galaxies And Supermassive Black Holes

These red dots represent some of the earliest galaxies known to astronomy. Located ten billion light-years away, they’re only a few billion years older than the Big Bang. Their presence explains why we’re now surrounded by massive elliptical galaxies. The European Southern Observatory’s APEX telescope has completed this survey of the universe’s most distant galaxies,…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jan 25

Crinkle Your Way Through the Great Outdoors with Backpacks Made from Yacht Sails

Backpacks have an inherent trade-off—the larger they are, the more they can carry. Corollary: the bigger the bag, the more it weighs. The new Quasar line from Terra Nova Equipment is both strong and light—they use the same material as yacht sails. Terra Nova’s “Ultra fabric” is a polyethylene material that provides superior strength at…

Tech News Andrew Tarantola Dec 21

Astronomers discover the first unchanged relics of the Big Bang

Located some 11 billion light-years from Earth are two clouds of gas. Just two billion years younger than the Big Bang itself, they appear to be the first known clouds that are completely unaltered since the birth of the universe. The elements that make up a cloud of gas or other cosmic structure can help…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Nov 22

Ancient black hole contains 100,000 Suns worth of water

A distant, hyper-energetic black hole known as a quasar contains the largest reserve of water in the known universe, equivalent to 140 trillion times the water on Earth. The solution to our water crisis is only 12 billion light-years away! Technically speaking, quasars occur when giant black holes suck in huge amounts of gas and…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jul 25

This Supermassive Black Hole Fuels a Quasar 60 Trillion Times as Bright as the Sun. Trillion.

Sometimes I’m dissatisfied with this little spinning puffball we’re stuck on, but then I see that there’s a black hole out there with a mass of two billion of our suns, powering an unfathomably large quasar. Luckily, it’s very distant! How distant? Far away enough that it’s revealing facts about the way the universe sat…

Space & Spaceflight Sam Biddle Jun 30

Why supermassive black holes are too greedy for their own good

The galaxy Markarian 231 is dying, and its own supermassive black hole is ripping it apart. The black hole is absorbing so much material and spewing so much dust and gas back out that star formation has been completely disrupted. The black hole at the heart of Mrk 231 is about ten million solar masses,…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Mar 1

Solving the cosmic mystery of the green blob in space

Back in 2007, Dutch schoolteacher and amateur astronomer Hanny van Arkel spotted a strange object near a distant spiral galaxy…and nobody had any idea what it was. Now, four years later, we’re finally learning the truth about this mysterious object Hanny’s Voorwerp – which is simply Dutch for “Hanny’s Object” – confounded astronomers when van…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jan 12

The early universe caught a fever from super-energetic black holes

The universe is thought to have consistently become cooler over time. But about 1.5 billion years ago, the cosmos overheated in a massive temperature spike, caused by runaway black holes that pumped tons of ultraviolet radiation into the universe. The universe’s initial temperature was north of 10^28 Kelvin, and even a billion years later it…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Nov 4

Quasar gravitational lens is seen for the first time ever

Gravitational lenses are cosmic phenomena that radically distort light passing by, make objects behind the lens appear much brighter, and help astronomers see distant parts of the universe. And now we’ve seen a quasar get in on the fun. We’ve seen massive objects from stars to entire galaxies act as lenses before, in which their…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jul 20

Galaxies linked by quasar-making nebula six times bigger than the Milky Way

Billions of light years away, quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. So bright, in fact, that we’d never gotten a good look at what makes them tick…until scientists discovered a gargantuan nebula linking galaxies and fueling one quasar. A subclass of galaxies contain an incredibly active galactic nucleus, thought to contain a central…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Jun 25

Two Galaxies Smash Together To Create Binary Quasar

Astronomers have caught the first definitive glimpse of one of the most dramatic events in the universe. Billions of light-years away, two galaxies are merging into one, creating a supermassive binary quasar at their center. Quasar is the term given to the central regions of extremely distant, ancient galaxies. The supermassive black holes at the…

io9 Alasdair Wilkins Feb 4

Water Vapor Discovered Near Black Hole 11.1 Billion Light Years Away

The discovery of water vapor in a distant quasar system has overturned established ideas about the existence of water in the early universe. This is the farthest, and thus the oldest, water ever seen in the Universe. (Because the light from this quasar took 11.1 billion years to reach Earth, it is 11.1 billion years…

io9 Annalee Newitz Dec 18

Maid Without Tears (1978)

Matt Chapman, co-creator of Homestar Runner, sent me this great image from the 1978 book Exploring the World of Robots. While I’ve never had a maid, I didn’t know that they were always on the verge of crying! As Matt notes, “the ‘Maid Without Tears’ does not appear to have been made without cords as…

Tech News Matt Novak Nov 26

360-Degree Speakers Pump Out Sweet Sounds from Anywhere in the Room

Here’s a wild idea for a design concept: put together a speaker with 12 sides, otherwise known as a dodecahedron, and you’ll get a 360-degree blast of music. These spacey-looking Quasar speakers send their sound all over the place, so no matter where you are in the room, their sweet audio will be spilling out…

Tech News Charlie White Aug 27

Low End Theory

Quasar: Praised, Then Buried By Brendan I. Koerner Think of the Quasar brand as the Cinderella of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. family, minus the eventually happy fate. Matsushita’s worthiest designs have long been reserved for its more renowned brands, such as JVC, Technics, and even Panasonic. Quasar, meanwhile, has been forced to play the…

Tech News Brendan I. Koerner Apr 20

The Cosmic War Between Ancient Starburst Galaxies And Supermassive Black Holes

Crinkle Your Way Through the Great Outdoors with Backpacks Made from Yacht Sails

Astronomers discover the first unchanged relics of the Big Bang

Ancient black hole contains 100,000 Suns worth of water

This Supermassive Black Hole Fuels a Quasar 60 Trillion Times as Bright as the Sun. Trillion.

Why supermassive black holes are too greedy for their own good

Solving the cosmic mystery of the green blob in space

The early universe caught a fever from super-energetic black holes

Quasar gravitational lens is seen for the first time ever

Galaxies linked by quasar-making nebula six times bigger than the Milky Way

Two Galaxies Smash Together To Create Binary Quasar

Water Vapor Discovered Near Black Hole 11.1 Billion Light Years Away

Maid Without Tears (1978)

360-Degree Speakers Pump Out Sweet Sounds from Anywhere in the Room

Low End Theory

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