Quasars

A quasar found by SDSS

One of the principal goals of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is to find the most distant objects ever observed. The light from these distant objects has taken billions of years to reach us. So when we look at them, we are seeing them as they appeared billions of years ago. We are effectively looking backward in time. Looking at these objects can tell us about the early history of the universe.

But at such enormous distances, the only objects we can see at all are the very brightest objects. In this project, you will learn about the most distant, brightest objects in the universe: quasars. You will learn what they are, what provides their enormous power, and what they can tell us about the early universe.