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Space
Space
Science
Robert Lea

Hubble Telescope sees 'weird things' in closest-ever look at a quasar from monster black hole

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the core of quasar 3C 273. A coronagraph on Hubble blocks out the glare coming from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar.

The Hubble Space Telescope has stared deeper into a quasar than ever before, discovering "weird" features in its vicinity.

Quasars are the superbright centers of active galaxies, and they're powered by feeding supermassive black holes. The one Hubble studied, designated 3C 273, is one of the closest of these extreme objects to Earth. 3C 273 is incredibly luminous — so much so that, if it were tens of thousands of light-years from Earth instead of several billion, it would be as bright as the sun in our sky.

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