Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage.
This mosaic image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82) is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. It is a galaxy remarkable for its webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions where young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside in our Milky Way Galaxy.
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ghostly green filaments, lying within galaxy Mrk 1498. This filament was illuminated by a blast of radiation from a quasar - a very luminous and compact region that surrounds the supermassive black hole at the centre of its host galaxy.Its bright green hue is a result of ionised oxygen, which glows brightly at green wavelengths.
This image shows the dust torus around a super-massive black hole. Black holes lurk at the centres of active galaxies in environments not unlike those found in violent tornadoes on Earth. Just as in a tornado, where debris is often found spinning about the vortex, so in a black hole, a dust torus surrounds its waist. In some cases astronomers can look along the axis of the dust torus from above or from below and have a clear view of the black hole. Technically these objects are then called type 1 sources. Type 2 sources lie with the dust torus edge-on as viewed from Earth so our view of the black hole is totally blocked by the dust over a range of wavelengths from the near-infrared to soft X-rays.