27.1 Quasars  (Page 5/9)

Think about what such a change in luminosity means. A quasar at its dimmest is still more brilliant than any normal galaxy. Now imagine that the brightness increases by 30% in a few weeks. Whatever mechanism is responsible must be able to release new energy at rates that stagger our imaginations. The most dramatic changes in quasar brightness are equivalent to the energy released by 100,000 billion Suns. To produce this much energy we would have to convert the total mass of about ten Earths into energy every minute.

Moreover, because the fluctuations occur in such short times, the part of a quasar that is varying must be smaller than the distance light travels in the time it takes the variation to occur—typically a few months. To see why this must be so, let’s consider a cluster of stars 10 light-years in diameter at a very large distance from Earth (see [link] , in which Earth is off to the right). Suppose every star in this cluster somehow brightens simultaneously and remains bright. When the light from this event arrives at Earth, we would first see the brighter light from stars on the near side; 5 years later we would see increased light from stars at the center. Ten years would pass before we detected more light from stars on the far side.

How the size of a source affects the timescale of its variability.

Even though all stars in the cluster brightened at the same time, the fact that the cluster is 10 light-years wide means that 10 years must elapse before the increased light from every part of the cluster reaches us. From Earth we would see the cluster get brighter and brighter, as light from more and more stars began to reach us. Not until 10 years after the brightening began would we see the cluster reach maximum brightness. In other words, if an extended object suddenly flares up, it will seem to brighten over a period of time equal to the time it takes light to travel across the object from its far side.

We can apply this idea to brightness changes in quasars to estimate their diameters. Because quasars typically vary (get brighter and dimmer) over periods of a few months, the region where the energy is generated can be no larger than a few light-months across. If it were larger, it would take longer than a few months for the light from the far side to reach us.

How large is a region of a few light-months? Pluto, usually the outermost (dwarf) planet in our solar system, is about 5.5 light-hours from us, while the nearest star is 4 light-years away. Clearly a region a few light months across is tiny relative to the size of the entire Galaxy. And some quasars vary even more rapidly, which means their energy is generated in an even smaller region. Whatever mechanism powers the quasars must be able to generate more energy than that produced by an entire galaxy in a volume of space that, in some cases, is not much larger than our solar system.