The Rise and Fall of

Quasars

Dormant monsters may lie sleeping in nearby galaxies.

40

May 1999 Sky & Telescope

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

he year is 10 billion B.C. The Earth and Sun have

not yet formed, but you a telescope-toting time traveler
are on another planet that formed very early in the history of the Milky Way. As you scan the constellations of
the night sky, numerous galaxies are visible to your naked
eyes because the universe is thirty times more densely
packed than in the age of humankind. Through the eyepiece of your telescope you can see bright pointlike objects
at the centers of several nearby galaxies. These dazzling
blue pinpoints of light look like stars, but each one outshines the combined light of all the stars in the galaxy surrounding it. The Earthbound astronomers of the late 20th
century will call these extraordinarily luminous objects
quasars. Ten billion years ago they were far more common
than they are today.
How did quasars arise and why did they vanish? The
answers to these questions appear closely related to the
formation and evolution of galaxies. Quasars flourished
from 2 to 4 billion years after the Big Bang, a period
during which many of todays galaxies were still under
construction. Since that golden age, the number of
quasars in the universe has steadily declined. At the
same time, galaxies have gradually matured. Stars now
form much less vigorously, and galaxies themselves appear much more settled than they did several billion
years ago. Faced with this circumstantial evidence, many
astronomers suspect that the demise of quasars is directly linked to the maturation of galaxies. But how?

By G. Mark Voit
Il lu st r ation by Don Dixon

Where Quasars Live

Not long ago, little was known about the galaxies that quasars
lived in. The difficulty with observing galaxies around
quasars is that the latter are both bright and far away. One of
the nearest objects luminous enough to qualify as a quasar is
3C 273, a starlike source of radio waves whose redshift was
measured by Maarten Schmidt in 1963. This brilliant beacon
was to become the first quasar with a measured distance,
roughly 2 billion light-years from Earth. At such a large distance, the galaxy around 3C 273 appears relatively tiny and
dim, and in ground-based photographs the starlike quasar almost entirely drowns out its indistinct, fuzzy host.
Most astronomers were willing to accept the fuzzy light
around this quasar and others as evidence that quasars lived
inside distant galaxies, but the fuzz revealed few details about
the host galaxies themselves. Without much other evidence to

Right: Two high-resolution views of 3C 273, the quasar whose unusually

great distance, and hence luminosity, was first measured. The CanadaFrance-Hawaii Telescope obtained the view at right, while that at far right
comes from the Hubble Space Telescope. The latter image has had the quasars starlike core subtracted mathematically, showing that the quasar
resides within a luminous elliptical galaxy. CFHT image courtesy Matthew
Colless and David Schade. HST image courtesy Sofia Kirhakos.

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Jet

Jet

These Hubble Space Telescope images confirm what ground-based views have long hinted at:
quasars live in galaxies. Many are in obviously disturbed (top row) or interacting (middle row)
systems, though others seem to shine from textbook spirals and ellipticals (bottom row).

is attractive because it would naturally explain why

quasars were so common in the early universe. Edwin
Hubbles groundbreaking observations of galaxy motions in the 1920s established that galaxies generally
move away from each other, implying that they must
have been much closer together in the distant past. During the golden age of quasars, galaxies were typically
three to four times closer together than they are today,
making collisions between galaxies far more frequent.
Like a crowd leaving a sporting event, galaxies were generally spreading out, but not without plenty of jostling
and bumping as they gradually moved apart. If collisions between galaxies really did ignite quasars, then the
decreasing frequency of collisions as galaxies drifted
apart may account for quasars dwindling numbers.
In hopes of establishing a link between galaxy collisions and quasars, astronomers have closely scrutinized
some conspicuous galaxy collisions nearer to our own
time and place in the cosmos. Many of the most luminous galaxies in our own corner of the universe are, in
fact, pairs of colliding galaxies in the process of merging
to form a single, larger galaxy. When two spiral galaxies
collide, much of their gas collects at the center of the
morass, creating a concentration of fuel primed for an
explosion of star formation (S &T: March 1998, page
48). Infrared observations of colliding systems confirm
that many of them are indeed bursting with young stars.
For a few hundred million years, the brilliant light from
such a starburst remains shrouded in its birth cocoon of
dusty gas, heating the dust until it emits copious infrared radiation. The most extreme of these colliding
galaxies generate as much power as a modest quasar,
making it seem quite plausible that they conceal quasars
as well as young stars beneath their dusty shrouds.
Of course, the real story might not be so simple. Highresolution radio observations, designed to probe beneath
the enshrouding clouds in the most luminous infrared

One notable hidden quasar is the galaxy

Markarian 231, the dusty aftermath
of a galaxy merger.
42

May 1999 Sky & Telescope

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

JASON SURACE / CALTECH

NASA

go on, astronomers presumed that the galaxies

around quasars were similar to some bright-centered
galaxies closer to Earth. A
few percent of the galaxies
in our own cosmic neighborhood contain objects,
known as active galactic
nuclei, that look strikingly
like quasars but are considerably less luminous. The
nuclei of these unusual
galaxies pump out a power
equivalent to billions of
Suns, staggeringly potent,
yet modest compared to
the quasars, whose luminosities are measured in
trillions of Suns.
Images of quasars taken
by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) since its refurbishment in 1993 have verified that quasar fuzz was not an
illusion: quasars do indeed live at the centers of galaxies
(S&T: March 1996, page 12). Because the Earths atmosphere blurs our views of celestial objects, looking at a
quasar through a telescope on the ground is loosely similar
to driving directly into a sunset with a dirty windshield.
Glare blinds us from seeing anything close to the dominant light source. HSTs vantage from Earth orbit preempts this atmospheric blurring, allowing the telescope to
concentrate a quasars light into a much tinier spot, thus
revealing the dimmer galaxy that lies beneath the glare.
Now that we can successfully channel the torrent of
light from a quasar and limit how much it contaminates
our pictures, astronomers are getting their first good look
at quasar host galaxies. Before HST, many astronomers
believed that quasars lived largely in spiral galaxies because that is where we find the majority of active galactic
nuclei. However, HST is revealing that quasars are not
particularly choosy about where they reside; they inhabit
elliptical galaxies more commonly than expected. In addition, many of the host galaxies surrounding these
quasars appear to be disturbed by collisions with other
galaxies, adding credence to a long-held conjecture that
interactions between galaxies are somehow involved in
energizing the objects at their centers.
The idea that galaxy collisions initiate quasar activity

galaxies, often fail to find the bright, pointlike emission characteristic of quasars. Instead, such observations have sometimes found that the cores of
these galaxies hold nothing more exotic than the
remnants of exploding stars (S &T: April 1998, page
19). One notable exception is the galaxy Markarian
231, the dusty aftermath of a galaxy merger whose
center displays all the hallmarks expected of a
quasar buried deep within a blanket of obscuring
Nearly next door in cosmological terms, the two galaxies of the Antennae (NGC
4038 and 4039 in Corvus) are spawning numerous stars as they collide a
process that has revealed itself in infrared images like the one from the Infrared Space Observatory (lower right) and in visible-light frames from the Hubble Space Telescope (right). Only time will tell if a quasarlike glow is to follow
tens or hundreds of millions of years hence.

JASON SURACE / CALTECH

NASA

a swirling disk that circulates

gradually inward in an extremely violent death spiral.
The same awesome gravitational pull that prevents light from escaping a black hole
accelerates anything in its vicinity to near-light speeds.
When gas clouds traveling at such phenomenal speeds
collide, they heat one another to temperatures measured
in millions of degrees. The glutted disk of gas orbiting a
supermassive black hole therefore grows searingly hot and
radiates enormous amounts of energy.
This model successfully accounts for the profuse luminescence of quasars, but proving it correct is another
matter. Demonstrating conclusively that black holes indeed lie at the hearts of quasars is challenging because
the holes themselves are invisible. To find black holes we
need to look for the disturbances they create with their

LAURENT VIGROUX / CENTRE DTUDES DE SACLAY

How Quasars Shine

The discovery of quasars immediately
posed astronomers with a major cosmic
riddle: how do such compact objects generate so much light? Theorists Edwin
Salpeter and Yakov B. Zeldovich independently guessed the likely answer a few
months later, laying the blame on supermassive black holes. In one of natures
more extreme paradoxes, black holes
which are themselves absolutely dark
can cause infalling matter to generate
light with extraordinary efficiency. According to the
now-standard model for the quasar phenomenon, supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies attract gas
clouds from surrounding interstellar space. As these
clouds accumulate around the black hole, they settle into

FRANOIS SCHWEIZER / CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON

dust: powerful infrared emission, pointlike

radio emission, and gas flowing at several
percent of the speed of light. Perhaps
more quasars will spring to life within
some of these luminous colliding galaxies
over the next few hundred million years.

Can you spot the quasar? Markarian 231 (opposite page) and
Arp 220 (left) are both ultraluminous galaxies that give off
copious far-infrared radiation evidence, some say, for
quasarlike nuclei buried deep within mantles of dust. But
deeper scrutiny suggests that Arp 220s glow almost certainly
is fueled by prodigious star formation alone, while Markarian
231 harbors a bona fide quasar at its heart.

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope May 1999

43

SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Seeing the unseen.

Here space artist Dana
Barry has depicted an
accretion-fed galactic
nucleus like those
believed to lie at the
hearts of quasars.

immense gravitational fields. The most convincing signature of a black hole would be a group of objects rapidly
orbiting something extremely massive but completely invisible. However, the zone within which a supermassive
black holes gravity dominates a galaxys central regions is
comparatively small, amounting to less than 1 arcsecond:
the apparent width of a single star in our own Milky Way
on a good night of ground-based observing.
The number of active galactic nuclei that have yielded
strong evidence for a central black hole can still be
counted on one hand, but progress in the last decade has
been swift. Our current best case for a supermassive
black hole rests on some remarkable observations of the
galaxy M106, also known as NGC 4258 (S &T: April
1995, page 10). Orbiting the active nucleus of this galaxy
are gas clouds whose water molecules, stimulated by Xrays from the nucleus, are sending out intense microwave signals quite similar to laser beams. Using a

continent-wide network of radio telescopes, astronomers in Japan and the United States have been able to
pinpoint the sources of these beams and to measure
their motions with mind-boggling precision. These
water-bearing gas clouds which as a group span less
than 0.0003 arcsecond in the sky orbit a dark object
weighing 36 million Suns in nearly perfect circles mere
light-months across. Either the object theyre circling is a
black hole, or its something so inconceivably strange
that it has so far defied the grasp of human imagination.
Seeking Dormant Monsters
Quasars are much less common today than they once
were, but their relics should still be with us. Once created, black holes are virtually impossible to destroy. If gigantic black holes truly powered a multitude of quasars
some 10 billion years ago, then these holes must linger
on, lurking hidden at the centers of normal-looking
galaxies throughout the universe.
Evidence that our own Milky Way contains a now-dormant black hole has grown much stronger during the past
few years. Time-lapse infrared pictures taken by Andreas Eckart and Reinhard Genzel (Max Planck Institute,
Germany) with the New Technology Telescope in Chile
and more recently by Andrea Ghez (UCLA) at Keck Observatory in Hawaii clearly show that stars at the center
of our galaxy are orbiting an invisible concentration of
matter. From the orbital speeds of these stars the scientists
deduce a mass between two and three million times our
Suns for the unseen object. Again, the central object must
be either a black hole or something even more exotic.
Exactly why the black hole at our galaxys core doesnt
glow like a quasar remains a mystery. Perhaps it has run
out of interstellar gas to consume, but some theorists
argue that most of the radiation generated in its vicinity
gets swept into the hole along with the infalling gas. As-

JAPANESE NATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY

Our current best case for a supermassive

black hole rests on some remarkable
observations of the galaxy M106.

Deep within the core of M106 (left) lies a warped disk of molecular gas clouds
(artists impression above). Their motions, traced with radio telescopes, betray
the presence of an invisible, compact object 36 million times more massive than
our Sun. That object is almost certainly a black hole that powers the galaxys
mildly active nucleus and it may have powered a quasar in the distant past.
Kunihiko Okanos visible-light CCD image was taken with a 12-inch reflector.
44

May 1999 Sky & Telescope

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

1996

1997

1998

ANDREA GHEZ

1995

massive is needed to balance the books. Because these

observations do not require the source of this extra
gravity to be especially compact, the case for a black
hole in any particular one of these galaxies is not overwhelmingly strong. But with strong evidence now in
hand for black holes at the centers of galaxies like M106
and the Milky Way, the collective evidence for black
holes in dozens more has become easier to accept.
The prospects look bright for additional black-hole
discoveries in the near future. Astronomers in search of
these slumbering monsters recently gained a powerful
new tool with the installation of the Space Telescope
Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) into HST in February
1997. Situated high above the Earths distorting atmosphere, STIS is ideally suited to measuring the orbital
motions of stars and gas within the centers of galaxies
because it can discern orbiting material up to 10 times
closer to a black hole than most ground-based instruments can. During the next few years both the number
and the precision of black-hole mass measurements
should rise. And as these discoveries roll in, astronomers
hope to progress from mere discovery to a useful census
of the black holes in our corner of the universe.
Measurements of black holes in distant quasars will
have to wait a little bit longer, but the necessary technology is rapidly developing. Dissecting galactic nuclei that
lie billions of light-years away will require instruments
able to pick out details 100 times finer than Hubble
currently resolves. Because its unlikely that well ever build a telescope
100 times bigger than Hubble, as-

This sequence of 1-arcsecond-wide near-infrared images,

taken with the Keck I telescope, shows the motions of individual stars over a 4-year time frame: motions that betray the
presence of a black hole in the center of our galaxy.

trophysicist Ramesh Narayan (Harvard-Smithsonian

Center for Astrophysics) and others have shown that
when black holes are put on a diet, very little energy escapes from the trickle of gas that does flow in. According
to such models, the black hole at the center of our galaxy
currently devours small portions of matter in relative secrecy, leaving few clues behind for astronomers to decipher. However, its hibernation may be only temporary. If
some cosmic event were to dump a new load of gaseous
fuel into our galaxys core, the central black hole would
almost certainly flare back up, shining brightly as an active galactic nucleus for millions of years.
Three million Suns may sound like a lot of mass, yet
for a supermassive black hole, its relatively puny. The
black holes that once powered quasars must now weigh
at least 100 million times more than the Sun. To find
them we need to peer into the hearts of our neighboring galaxies, looking for commotion in their cores. But
two factors complicate this quest. Dormant black holes
in other galaxies usually do not conveniently illuminate
orbiting gas clouds, and their large distances prohibit us
from measuring the motions of individual stars. Hence,
instead of focusing on dramatic motions within a few
light-years of a black hole, astronomers seek out subtler
disturbances in the orbits of the myriad stars that lie
tens to hundreds of light-years from galaxy nuclei. Generally speaking, they have done so with spectroscopes
on large ground-based telescopes. They then have pursued high-resolution HST images to see how tightly
packed these stars are around each galaxys nucleus.
If no black hole is present, then the stars we see in
the HST images should generate enough gravity to explain the orbital motions we observe from the ground.
By and large, they do not. In almost every galaxy where
astronomers have looked hard enough, motions in
galaxy cores cannot be accounted for with the gravitational forces from stars alone. Something else dark and

GARY BOWER / NASA

300 200 100 0 100 200 300

Velocity of gas (km per sec)

AURA

A taste of treats to come? The Hubble Space Telescopes new

imaging spectrograph, STIS, handily obtained this black-holerevealing spectrum (inset) of ionized gas in M84, an elliptical
galaxy roughly 60 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster. Future STIS observations may help establish whether dormant quasar engines are ubiquitous in galaxy cores.

500
lightyears

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope May 1999

45

108

107

106
108

M87

Astronomers have found that black holes seem to know something about the galaxies they
live in, since the most massive galaxies tend to harbor the most massive holes. Could this be a
clue to the origin and fate of quasars? Courtesy Douglas Richstone.

mers interest in potential links between galaxy formation and the quasar phenomenon.
Quite possibly, the formation of a massive central
black hole was a necessary consequence of galaxy birth.
According to currently favored cosmological theories,
galaxies originally formed from collapsing clouds of primordial hydrogen gas. These clouds, subject to the crushing force of their own gravity, shrank, fragmented, and,
during the first few billion years after the Big Bang,
formed the stars we see today in elliptical galaxies and in
the bulges of spirals. However, star formation is never
100 percent efficient. Some gas is always left over, and in
a collapsing protogalactic cloud this gas might have settled to the center without forming stars. If this central
concentration of gas was massive enough and hot
enough, it would not have been able to fragment into
star-forming clouds as it continued to collapse. Without
any clear alternative, some theorists believe that the inexorable pull of gravity destines such a dense cloud of leftovers to become a supermassive black hole.
These speculations about black-hole formation in
collapsing primordial clouds remain unverified. But our
deepest surveys of the cosmos are revealing a curious
correspondence between the formation of stars in the uniQuasars and Galaxy Evolution
STIS observations of supermassive black holes possi- verse and the production of quasars. Images like the Hubbly the one-time sites of now-quiet quasars were ble Deep Field show us galaxies at many different distances
postponed in order to make the best use of HSTs near- and hence at many different epochs in the past. By measinfrared camera, NICMOS, whose coolant evaporated uring the starlight emanating from galaxies at a variety of
prematurely in January. But the ground-based mass distances, we are beginning to reconstruct the universes
measurements described above, while preliminary, al- star-formation history. Star production has clearly been
ready show an intriguing trend: the size of a galaxys declining for the last 5 billion years or so, but its less clear
black hole is related to the size of the galaxy itself. More when the production rate peaked. Early results from these
precisely, a black hole in a spiral galaxy has a mass pro- surveys indicate that most of the stars in the universe
portional to that of the galaxys bulge, its oldest popula- formed between 3 and 7 billion years after the Big Bang,
tion of stars. Similarly, a black hole in an elliptical an era that partly overlaps the golden age of quasars.
Perhaps this coincidence of the era of quasars with the
galaxy, which consists entirely of old stars, has a mass
proportional to that of the galaxy as a whole. John Kor- primary era of star formation is just a red herring. But
more and more astronomers are
mendy (University of Hawaii),
Redshift
betting that it is not. Because obDouglas Richstone (University of
0.1
0.3
0.6
1.2
3.6
servations of such distant happenMichigan), and their colleagues
ings are so difficult, we may not
have found that a supermassive
know the truth for some time to
black hole weighs roughly 200
come. Nevertheless, astronomers
times less, on average, than the
are hopeful that the interplay becombined mass of the old stars in
tween the study of quasars and ulthe galaxy around it. This emergtradeep imaging surveys will solve
ing relationship, unlikely to be
some of the mysteries surrounding
accidental, has renewed astronothis remarkable epoch, when the
universe as we know it was most
The latest evidence suggests that
actively under construction.
quasars peaked in abundance some

tronomers are applying the

techniques of interferometry, long a staple of radio
astronomy, to visual and
infrared observing. Some
of the worlds largest telescopes including the
Milky Way
twin 10-meter Keck reflectors on Mauna Kea and
109
1010
1011
European Southern ObBulge luminosity (Suns)
servatorys four 8-meter
telescopes on top of Cerro
Paranal, Chile have been designed to work in concert,
capitalizing on the wavelike properties of light to see as
clearly as a single telescope nearly 200 meters across.
As these major ground-based facilities refine infrared
interferometry during the next decade they will be
joined by NASAs Space Interferometry Mission, a visible-light mission slated for launch in 2005. This technological leap will bring distant quasars into much clearer
view and may even show us how supermassive black
holes have developed over time.

2 to 4 billion years after the Big

Bang, partially overlapping the universes golden age for star formation
(though both curves will remain in
doubt until laborious surveys, now
in progress, are completed). Courtesy Patrick Osmer.
46

May 1999 Sky & Telescope

Quasar luminosity density (relative units)

109

Black Holes in
Galaxy Cores

Stellar heavy-element formation rate (relative units)

Black-hole mass (Suns)

1010

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Lookback time (universes age)

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

G. Mark Voit is an astronomer at

the Space Telescope Science Institute
and a coauthor of The Cosmic Perspective, a college-level astronomy
textbook published last December by
Addison-Wesley.