Quasars are fascinating objects. In the simplest possible terms, quasars are bright accretion disks that form when intense heat and light is emitted from the accretion disk. This is caused by friction produced from the material swirling around, and eventually into, the black hole. The material gathers around the event horizon the point at which gravity becomes so strong that no matter not even light is able to escape. As the material around the black hole spins, friction heats up the gases and other material in the accretion disk, making them visible in optical light, x-ray, and infrared wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Some of the universe s stars have gone missing But where did they go? livescience.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from livescience.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Space Mysteries: An international team of astronomers is on the hunt for objects that should be impossible.
Could the missing stars be a completely new phenomenon?
(Image credit: Tobias Roetsch)
Stars don t just vanish or do they? For thousands of years, astronomers accepted the idea that the lights in the sky were fixed and unchanging. Even when it became clear that these lights were actually physical objects like the sun, one of the key assumptions for astrophysicists has been that they go through major changes very slowly, on timescales of millions or billions of years.
And when the most massive stars of all which are many times heavier than the sun do go through sudden and cataclysmic changes as they reach the ends of their lives, their passing is marked by the unmissable cosmic beacon of a
Take A Look At This 10 Trillion Pixel Image Of The Night Sky
A photograph of the northern sky that weighs in at a whopping petabyte has become a treasure trove of information for astronomers.
Space is an impossibly massive zone that countless stars and planets reside in, and if you want to capture even a fraction of the sky then you re going to have to approach that challenge with some equally gigantic ideas. Astronomers across the world gathered for a chance to capture a photo of the northern sky according to SyFy, pooling resources over six years to create a 10 trillion pixel image.
trillion pixels, and makes up a
petabyte of data a thousand terabytes, or a million gigabytes.
Oh, it also has over
a billion galaxies in it. A. Billion.
Like I said: Vast.
It s the result of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, maps of the sky made by the three observatories (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey, and the Mayall zband Legacy Survey, in combination with the orbiting WISE infrared observatory). They mapped the northern sky in seven colors, covering a third of the entire sky 14,000 square degrees, or the equivalent area of 70,000 full Moons on the sky.