A blazar is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) with a relativistic jet (a jet composed of ionized matter traveling at nearly the speed of light) directed towards an observer.

Blazars are powerful sources of emission across the electromagnetic spectrum and are observed to be sources of high-energy gamma ray photons.

Blazars are highly variable sources, often undergoing rapid and dramatic fluctuations in brightness on short timescales (hours to days).

In 2009, a team of astronomers using the Swift spacecraft used the luminosity of S5 0014+81 to measure the mass of its super-massive black hole. They found it to be about 10,000 times more massive than the black hole at the center of our galaxy, or equivalent to 40 billion solar masses

  • teftEnglish
    36·
    11 months ago

    From wikipedia

    The central black hole of the quasar devours an extremely huge amount of matter, equivalent to 4,000 solar masses of material every year.

    It is 25,000 times more luminous than all the stars in the milky way galaxy combined.

    Those two facts are mind bogglingly insane.

    • xantoxis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      201·
      11 months ago

      Imagine orbiting this thing. Watching it. Watching 11 stars a day worth of matter spiralling into it: every 2 hours, you can look up and an entire star, power and mass equivalent to our life-giving sun, is now inside the event horizon, gone forever, lost to time itself.

    • Wanderer@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      He has sat immobile, His body slowly crumbling, for over 10,000 standard years. His shattered, decaying body can no longer support life, and it is kept intact only by the cybernetic mechanisms and sustained by the daily sacrifice of thousands of lives.