Astronomers…please help! I know that quasars pump out huge amounts of radiation-far more than a standard star does. So exactly what are they? Do they evolve like stars do ? And, is it possible to have planetary systems orbiting quasars?
There’s lots of theories about what they are. Arguably the most widely-accepted theory currently is that they are the cores of distant galaxies being consumed by a central supermassive black hole. As stars, dust and gas are “sucked” into the black hole it is compressed, causing the material to heat to extremely high temperatures, releasing radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays.
Quasars are referred to as “quasi-stellar” just beacuse when they were first detected, they sort of looked a little like stars (at least in so far as they appear pointlike). But they’re a very different sort of beast in actuality, being (almost certainly) a supermassive black hole in the core of a galaxy which is eating a lot of matter. You can orbit one just like you can orbit anything else with mass, but at a planetary distance, you’d get incinerated.