3C 273, which is the bright object at the center of this Hubble Space Telescope image, looks like a star. In fact, though, it is the first quasar ever discovered, and the brightest in Earth’s night sky–bright enough, in fact, to see with a small amateur telescope. It consists of a disk of superhot gas spiraling around a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. The disk produces many times more energy than all the stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. A streamer of gas swirls to the upper left of the quasar. 3C 273 is 2.5 billion light-years from Earth, in Virgo. [ESA-Hubble/NASA]
Find out more in our radio program entitled Distant Light.