Quasar is a contraction for quasi-stellar radio source. Quasars were first observed with radio telescopes, and were "bright" objects in radio waves. When optical telescopes looked to see what was so active in radio waves, all that was seen was a small angular size bright spot in visible light - similar to how a nearby star would appear. Many astronomers believe these objects to be the bright cores of young galaxies in the process of formation. Remember that as we look farther into space, we look farther back in time. These objects are among the most distant observable, and are hence among the earliest objects formed in the universe. It is entirely possible that our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy (M-31) were quasar-like some 12 billion years ago, but have since either settled down, or have, through accretion, shielded their bright quasar cores. Quasars almost certainly have black holes at their center.

Quasar stands for ‘quasi-stellar radio source’. Quasi means resembling; as it were or seemingly, but not actually. They look like faint stars but are actually thousands of millions of light years away and have to be extremely bright to been seen from that distance. A quasar has a super massive Black Hole in its centre that dwarfs super massive Black Holes like the one in the centre of the Milky Way. Around the Black Hole is an accretion disk that is gas the Black Hole is drawing in that heats up as it moves in wards and glows brightly. The activity of the Black Hole consuming the gas of torn up stars causes jets of charge particles to shoot thousands of light years off into space at close to light speed. Around the accretion disk are clouds of dark dust and gas the can obscure the brilliantly bright core. The energy that is concentrated into such a small space at the centre can only be caused by a truly massive Black Hole an by measuring the speed of the spiralling stars and gas astronomers can weigh the Black Hole. The faster the spiralling gas, the heavier the Black Hole. The record Black Hole is one weighing the same as 100,000 million Suns and is a massive as the entire Milky Way! The first quasar was discovered in 1963 by the Dutch-American astronomer Maerten Schmidt. The ‘star’ 3C 273 was giving out radio waves. When the light was analysed he realised that 3C 276 is further away than most galaxies and also the wavelength of the light it stretches by the expansion on the Universe. Blazars, radio galaxies and quasars are the same thing. A radio galaxy is angled so that the outer ring of dust and gas obscures the core and the jets are observable by a radio telescope. A blazar has a brilliant light that comes mainly from the jets and is angled so the accretion disk and the jets are facing us. What we know as a quasar is angled so we can see the accretion disk and the jets. Thousands of quasars have been found with 3C 273 being the first and one of the nearest at only 2,000 million light years away. The furthest object ever seen in the Universe is a quasar called SDSSpJ104433.04-012502.2. It is racing away from us at just over 128,000 miles a second (205,000 kilometres a second) which is 68.5 percent of the speed of light. It is 10,000 million light years away and was discovered in April 2000. Most quasars are trillions of times brighter than the Sun but no larger than out Solar System. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A659135