radio-quiet quasars, which feature only weak core radio emission and make up the remaining 90% of quasars.radio-loud quasars, which host powerful relativistic radio jets and make up roughly 10% of the quasar population, and.These distant beasts tend to fall into two general categories: Quasars, the most luminous type of active galactic nuclei, are powered by the accretion of material onto the supermassive black holes located at the centers of the galaxies. A new study explores whether this difference could be due to how quickly the supermassive black holes at their centers are spinning. Some distant active galaxies are louder in radio wavelengths than others.
The name “quasar” is a shortening of “quasi-stellar radio source”, though we now know that only a small fraction of quasars are radio-loud. A cloud of gas surrounds the distant quasar SDSS J102009.99+104002.7 in this image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope.
