Quasars

tali1 | 11:08 Sat 20th Feb 2016 | Science

10 Answers

Quasars are said to have trillion times more energy than the Sun.Is this calculated on the huge distances the Quasar is emitting from?

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Unidentifiable Sea Creature

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jim360

Best Answer

14:54 Sun 21st Feb 2016

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Peter Pedant

or has someone gone there and looked ?

calculation I think

and a propos of absolutely nothing - here is a biog of the leddy who discovered the index case - pulsar and who was cheated - yes cheated ! - out of a Nobel prise for it and said philosphically - well I have had a bad career as the lady who should have won the Nobel Prise....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell

Peter Pedant

I recollect the discovery - LGM stays in my mind - but I dont remember the snarling and fur flying amongst the scientists when she didnt get the Nobel but her thesis supervisor did !

dear dear and he said nothing

tali1

Question Author

Calculation based on distance?

Peter Pedant

I would have thought Jim cd give us the answer ....

Peter Pedant

blimey I didnt realise they were so controversial

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar

jim360

I could ask an experimental astrophysicist but I don't know myself. As a guess, though, it would be something like this: measure the amount of energy received from the quasar over a certain amount of time; separately, measure the distance from the source (probably involving a great deal of uncertainty as quasars are some distance away, and relying on some sort of parallax measurement); and then one can scale the energy we received from the quasar based on that distance to estimate the total energy output from the quasar. That estimate will probably depend greatly on certain assumptions about the way quasars emit energy, eg no preferred direction, so may not be totally accurate, but is probably a reasonable order of magnitude estimate.

So my guess is that it will have to rely on distance calculations in some way.