3C 273 is a quasar located at the center of a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. It was the first quasar ever to be identified and is the visually brightest quasar in the sky as seen from Earth, with an apparent visual magnitude of 12.9. [ 2 ]

2023年4月17日 · This image from Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is likely the best of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin).

2024年12月5日 · For Hubble, staring into the quasar 3C 273 is like looking directly into a blinding car headlight and trying to see an ant crawling on the rim around it. The quasar pours out thousands of times the entire energy of stars in a galaxy. One of closest quasars to Earth, 3C 273 is 2.5 billion light-years away.

2024年12月5日 · A two-panel image of quasar 3C 273, taken by different Hubble instruments. The top panel is a WFPC2 image of 3C 273. It looks like a bright white car headlight. There’s a linear orange-white smoke-like feature stretching to the 4 o’clock position, an extragalactic jet …

Known as 3C 273, this was the first quasar to be identified and the optically-brightest at magnitude +12.9. It is the extremely luminous core of an active galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole and lies a staggering 2,443 million light-years distant, receding from us at 14.6 percent of the speed of light.

This image from Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is likely the best of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin).

The bright quasar 3C 273 is one of the best studied active galactic nuclei (AGN) in all spectral bands. The aim of this site is to provide a consistent and as complete as possible database of observations to study the long-term variability of the source across the electromagnetic spectrum.