Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 10 October 1986:
Vol. 234. no. 4773, pp. 155 - 161
DOI: 10.1126/science.234.4773.155
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Articles

Quasars at 25

VIRGINIA TRIMBLE 1 and LODEWIJK WOLTJER 2

1 Professor in the Department of Physics, University of California, Irvine, CA 92717, and visiting professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.
2 Director General of the European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, D-8046 Garching bei München, Federal Republic of Germany.

In the quarter century since the first optical identification of a "radio star" (3C 48), astronomers have come to general agreement that the underlying quasar energy source is accretion onto a massive black hole. There is much less agreement on the detailed physics of the processes by which this energy is converted to the forms observed, but this has not prevented the objects from serving as valuable probes of the universe at distant times and places.

To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)