Mysterious quasar sequence explained
Thursday, September 11, 2014 - 03:32
in Astronomy & Space
Quasars are supermassive black holes that live at the center of distant massive galaxies. They shine as the most luminous beacons in the sky by rapidly accelerating matter into their gravitationally inescapable centers. New work solves a quasar mystery that astronomers have been puzzling over for decades. It shows that most observed quasar phenomena can be unified with two simple quantities: how efficiently the hole is being fed, and the viewing orientation of the astronomer.