These black holes are surrounded by a cloud of rotating dust and gas. One of the only energy sources strong enough to power quasars are supermassive black holes (black holes with the mass of about a million times the mass of the Sun). So, if you take its size, and consider how bright it is, a quasar emits baffling amounts of energy. The Quasars are also only about a light day or so across, which is about the size of our solar system. Each quasar is many times brighter than our entire galaxy of 200 billion stars. Quasars are now believed to be the very bright centers of distant galaxies. Once translated, the names of these things are notoriously uncreative. Basically, what we’re talking about is something that looks like a star and gives off a radio signal. Radio and Source are self-explanatory, but Quasi-Stellar just means star-like. Quasi-Stellar Radio Source also sounds really complex, but when you translate it to simple English, it’s really not. Quasar actually stands for Quasi-Stellar Radio Source, but that’s quite a mouthful, so we call them quasars for short. The Hubble Telescope has them ranging from 2.6 to 16 billion light-years away. These objects looked like tiny dots of light in the sky (like a star does when looking with just our eyes) however, we were looking through massive telescopes and getting goose egg for detail. Because the objects were so blurry, that could only mean that these were mind numbingly far away. But there were other odd objects that they discovered that were not so easily classified. They found some supernova remnants, star forming regions, and distant galaxies. They found a lot of different things, but no aliens. Astronomers turned their ordinary visible-light telescopes to these radio sources to try to see what was giving off the radio signals (and hoped they wouldn't see little green men waving back at them). One of the more interesting ideas was that there was an armada of alien ships out there talking to one another. You can imagine what some people thought. We were getting some kind of radio signal from almost every direction. When radio telescopes were first turned onto the heavens in the 1940’s, radio sources were found all over the place.
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