By JEFFREY KLUGER Monday, June 25, 2012
An artists conception of a quasar.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The biggest celestial
Astronomy and biology share one basic — and unlikely — rule: If a body is going to stay alive, it's got to eat.
The Earth eats every day, though its diet consists mostly of sunlight — a constant source of energy that bathes the planet and provides much of the basic fuel that drives biological processes. The sun eats constantly too, but what it's consuming is itself — using nuclear fusion to convert its massive stockpiles of hydrogen into helium, which keeps its fires lit. When the hydrogen is gone, the sun will wink out.
The biggest celestial gluttons of all, however, are surely black holes — particularly the ones that produce quasars. First discovered by radio-telescopes in the 1950s, quasars are fantastically hot, brilliantly bright beacons of energy that result from the black holes' gobbling up anything that ventures too close./.../
The Earth eats every day, though its diet consists mostly of sunlight — a constant source of energy that bathes the planet and provides much of the basic fuel that drives biological processes. The sun eats constantly too, but what it's consuming is itself — using nuclear fusion to convert its massive stockpiles of hydrogen into helium, which keeps its fires lit. When the hydrogen is gone, the sun will wink out.
The biggest celestial gluttons of all, however, are surely black holes — particularly the ones that produce quasars. First discovered by radio-telescopes in the 1950s, quasars are fantastically hot, brilliantly bright beacons of energy that result from the black holes' gobbling up anything that ventures too close./.../
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