SPACE
Unknown radio structure detected around brightest known quasar
WORDS BRANDON SPECKTOR
A Hubble Space Telescope image of quasar 3C 273
A stronomers have found two large, mysterious objects blasting out of the brightest black hole in the known universe. Discovered in a 1959 survey of cosmic radio wave sources, the supermassive black hole 3C 273 is a quasar – short for quasi-stellar object because the light emitted by these behemoths is bright enough to be mistaken for starlight. While black holes do not emit light, the largest ones are surrounded by gargantuan swirls of gas called accretion discs; as gas falls into the black hole, friction heats the disc and causes it to blaze with radiation, typically detected as radio waves.