First light

An easter egg. You blocked the glare.

Quasar 3C 273 imaged by Hubble's WFPC2 — a blinding, star-like core with diffraction spikes, throwing a luminous jet toward the lower right. — Hover, focus, or tap to block the core. Image: NASA, ESA, Bin Ren (Université Côte d'Azur/CNRS).

The same quasar under Hubble's STIS coronagraph — a black occulting disk blocks the core's glare, revealing faint blue filamentary structure and the jet. — Hover, focus, or tap to block the core. Image: NASA, ESA, Bin Ren (Université Côte d'Azur/CNRS).

This is 3C 273 — the 273rd entry in the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources, and the first object ever recognized as a quasar. In 1963 Maarten Schmidt realised its baffling spectral lines were ordinary hydrogen, redshifted by about 16% (z ≈ 0.158): the thing sat billions of light-years away yet outshone whole galaxies. A new kind of object — a quasi-stellar radio source — had its name.

A quasar is so luminous it drowns its own host galaxy in glare. To see the structure around it, astronomers block the core: Hubble's STIS coronagraph does exactly that in the second frame, and the jet and filaments step out of the light.

A quasar outshines its own host galaxy in glare; block the core and the structure appears. Quasareum is built on the same move — past the human-facing glare to the machine-readable structure that agents read and act on. 3C 273 is where that idea got its name.

More: science.nasa.gov · Wikipedia. Back to quasareum.com.