What is the brightest thing in the universe?

These are the quasar galaxies. Powered by an active supermassive black hole guzzling material at such a tremendous rate, they blaze with some of the brightest light in the Universe, lighting up the galactic center right across the electromagnetic spectrum.

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What is the brightest thing possible?

A quasar (/ˈkweɪzɑːr/ KWAY-zar) is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO.

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What is the brightest light in the universe?

Quasar: Brightest object EVER reaches Earth

Quasars — the “brightest, most powerful objects in the Universe” — are ignited when galaxies collide.

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How bright is a quasar?

Quasars emit energies of millions, billions, or even trillions of electron volts. This energy exceeds the total of the light of all the stars within a galaxy. The brightest objects in the universe, they shine anywhere from 10 to 100,000 times brighter than the Milky Way.

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Is A quasar bigger than a supernova?

A single supernova outshines an entire galaxy for a few weeks. A single quasar can outshine 10,000 galaxies for millions of years. Take that, supernovas, you chumps. Quasars are by far the most powerful engines found in the universe.

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What's The Brightest Thing In the Universe?

28 related questions found

Is a quasar stronger than a gamma-ray burst?

Gamma Ray Bursts are a short lived. While a quasar will emit more energy over it's long life. Gamma Ray Bursts are more powerful. They are formed mostly as a result of energy released in gravitational collapse during a hypernova.

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What is brighter than a galaxy?

As the core collapses, the outer layers are blasted outwards in a supernova, the biggest explosion known to occur in the Universe. At its peak, a supernova can be brighter than an entire galaxy and can reach a diameter several light-years across.

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What is brighter than Sirius?

Stars more luminous than Sirius

Scientists think at least three stars in the constellation Canis Major, where Sirius resides, are thousands of times more luminous than Sirius: Aludra, Wezen and Omicron 2.

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What is the oldest light in the universe?

This light, known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, marks a time 380,000 years after the universe's birth, when protons and electrons joined to form the first atoms. Before that time, the cosmos was opaque to light.

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What's the darkest thing in the universe?

Black holes are infinitely dense and infinitely small so they end up bending the space around them so much that they end up turning it into a sort of funnel that would cause anything that came too close to fall in.

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What is the brightest quasar in the universe?

3C 273 is a quasar located at the center of a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. It was the first quasar ever to be identified and is the visually brightest quasar in the sky as seen from Earth, with an apparent visual magnitude of 12.9.

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Is A quasar a black hole?

Today most astronomers believe that quasars, radio galaxies and the centres of so-called active galaxies just are different views of more or less the same phenomenon: a black hole with energetic jets beaming out from two sides. When the beam is directed towards us we see the bright lighthouse of a quasar.

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What was in the universe before light?

Most of the universe was hot plasma. Scientists have used ESO's Very Large Telescope to probe the early universe at several different times as it was becoming transparent to ultraviolet light. This brief but dramatic phase in cosmic history — known as reionisation — occurred around 13 billion years ago.

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What is higher than light-years?

Parsec is larger unit of the distance as compare to the light year. Thus, parsec is the larger unit of the distance than light year and one parsec is approximately times bigger than light year.

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What was there before light?

Even before that light, there was a soup of matter and antimatter, which annihilated to produce the majority of today's photons, but even that wasn't the very beginning.

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What is the biggest star ever?

The biggest star in the universe (that we know of), UY Scuti is a variable hypergiant with a radius around 1,700 times larger than the radius of the sun. To put that in perspective, the volume of almost 5 billion suns could fit inside a sphere the size of UY Scuti.

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What are the 2 brightest stars?

The Sun is the brightest star as viewed from Earth, at −26.78 mag. The second brightest is Sirius at −1.46 mag.

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How hot is Sirius?

The brightest star in the night sky, Sirius (also known as the "Dog Star"), has a surface temperature of about 18,000 degrees F, which gives it its bluish tinge. But there are other stars, invisible to the naked eye, which are far hotter than Sirius.

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How bright is a hypernova?

At peak intensity, astronomers calculated the signal to be shining with a mind-boggling intensity of 570 billion times brighter than our sun.

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What causes a hypernova?

A hypernova (alternatively called a collapsar) is a very energetic supernova thought to result from an extreme core-collapse scenario. In this case a massive star (>30 solar masses) collapses to form a rotating black hole emitting twin energetic jets and surrounded by an accretion disk.

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Can a supernova destroy a galaxy?

Description. Supernovas are created during the last moments of a star's life. These gigantic explosions can wipe out galaxies and the planets inside them.

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Could we survive a gamma-ray burst?

A GRB would deplete the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, allowing harmful UV radiation to reach the ground and thus have dire consequences for life. However, the ground-level ozone caused by the GRB would not be an additional hazard for life.

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What if Earth got hit by a quasar?

If so, “we would all be dead.” It would cook the Earth's surface with massive bursts of radiation called gamma rays, he said. Then, if it were close enough, the quasar would devour our planet, our sun, the whole solar system, in a matter of months, Schmidt said.

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Has a gamma-ray burst ever hit Earth?

Although nearby GRBs hitting Earth with a destructive shower of gamma rays are only hypothetical events, high energy processes across the galaxy have been observed to affect the Earth's atmosphere.

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Who created dark matter?

The term dark matter was coined in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology to describe the unseen matter that must dominate one feature of the universe—the Coma Galaxy Cluster.

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