There is a quasar in Virgo, 3C 273, you can see with an 8″ backyard telescope. It looks like a star. Shouldn’t be a surprise, since “quasar” comes from “Quasi-stellar”. They could have called it an “asteroid”, which means “star-like”, except that we think of asteroids as something else now.

Radom thought. If a “plutoid” is something that is “pluto-like”, then is Pluto a “plutoid”? I’d say no. It’s not like Pluto, it is Pluto.

Not that we could see anything; just curious.

You just won the internets from me today. I thought I was the only one here who liked Farscape (and even better, Hynerian speech. Rygel is my fav)

“We must feed….we must feed…we must feed…”*shakes translator*”…you. If you are hungry.”

Over the years I’ve studied some of the most energetic events in the Universe: exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, magnetar flares. These cosmic blasts are so huge they are impossible to fully grasp with our puny minds — understand them, yes, but truly grok them, no — and it’s amazing to me that there are still other things out there that can release such devastating amounts of energy.

^ This! So. Very. True.

Even “ordinary” high mass stars fall into that category.

One fact that struck me early on when learing astronomy and yet still boggles my mind today is how bright some stars are :

Procyon, the “Little Dogstar” is seven times brighter than our Sun emitting as much or more light and heat in a day than our Sun does in a week.

Sirius the Dogstar and the apparent brightest star in our sky shines well over twenty times as bright as our Sun. (Alpha Canis Majoris has about 23 to 27 x the solar luminosity from memory with a few varying figures depending on source.)

Then there is Eta Carinae, perhaps the brightest star in our whole Milky Way Galaxy that is a cosmological lighthouse beaming an unfathomable *five million* times outr Sun’s luminosity into space.

I can’t imagine anything merely twice as brightas our Sun.

Then there are things like that that .. yeah, read the quote above. Awe-inspiring beyond words.

“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.”

But it’s a death worthy of a Dominar.

Indeed Bloom et al. titled the GCN which presented the model as “… mini-blazar analogy” – blazar, because we are looking right into the jet.

@réalta fuar: “Its x-ray flares seem to be on the order of 5 magnitudes or about 100 times brighter than its quiescent state and the timescales of those flares are interesting.”
Wrong. The quiescent X-ray level of this galaxy is unknown but obviously beneath the detection limits of any existing long-term X-ray surveys. The flares peaked at 100 ct/s in Swift XRT, and the quiescent level is very likely beneath 1/1000 ct/s which is already a factor of 1E5.

I will note the transient is not very bright in the optical – it seems to have increased by about one magnitude – and a bit brighter in the NIR. The reason very likely is significant dust extinction, which is also visible in the low energy X-rays.

@kmh5c_mtsu_s11: “Are those flares being caused by other objects “falling” into the black hole?”
That’s actually larger clumps… of the star. It’s being gobbled up like so much spun cotton candy. The accretion disk will be inhomogeneous and unstable, with irregular episodes of high mass-transfer rate. Hence, the flaring.