Quasar Astronomy Forty Years On

Forty years ago, the unexpected discovery of quasars showed astronomers just how
surprising the Universe could be, and set us on new journeys of exploration in directions
few could have foreseen. Finding the first examples required a partnership between radio
astronomy and more traditional research with the world's (then) largest optical telescope,
on Palomar Mountain. Credit for the final leap identifying these objects as being at high
redshifts, and therefore the most powerful objects we know in the Universe, goes to
Maarten Schmidt, recorded in an appropriately "cosmic" portrait on the cover of Time
magazine for March 11, 1966. Efforts to understand these powerhouses included many
idea that sounded like sheer science fiction, and all of them were at the edge of our
understanding. Indeed, the very word "quasar" now carries a whiff of the mysterious and
exotic. It can be found as a brand, company, or project name in such disparate fields as
television sets, software development, publishing, consulting, diamond trading, Internet
service providers, and the bicycle my older son recently won as a door prize.
Astronomers have been studying quasars and related phenomena intently for forty years
now. Has our understanding reached the level of maturity that we associate with turning
forty?
It became clear during the 1960s that quasars fall within a context including other, related
kinds of objects. These are all collectively known as "active galactic nuclei" or AGN, and
are linked by showing powerful energy release from a small area in the center of a galaxy,
well beyond what ordinary stars and their lifecycles (including supernovae and neutron
stars) can account for. Among these, the defining properties of quasars are a large redshift
(implying great distance and high luminosity), and that they appear starlike in ordinary
telescopic photographs (so that the nucleus outshines any surrounding galaxy). The
original derivation of "quasar" was from the acronym QSRS for quasi-stellar radio
source, since the first few known were all found as a result of their radio emission.
However, similar objects with very weak (or undetectable) radio emission outnumber the
radio-loud quasars; all these together are known as quasistellar objects or QSOs, but
"quasar" is often employed to mean the whole bunch of them when the distinction about
radio emission is not relevant. The spectra of quasars are quite different from those of
ordinary galaxies, showing broad emission lines of gas excited to high levels, and an
underlying blue continuous spectrum lacking the absorption lines from ordinary stars. A
similar pattern is seen, at lower power levels, from the nuclei of Seyfert galaxies, which
contain tiny active nuclei that are less brilliant than quasars but otherwise share many of
their properties. There are also galaxies which share the jets and twin lobes of radioemitting material seen in radio-loud quasars; some of these show similar spectral lines,
but some show only normal starlight, so the action is either invisible or hidden to optical
light. In one subset of AGN, the BL Lacertae objects or blazars, the spectrum shows a
featureless continuum, well understood if we are looking right down the jets. The
beaming of radiation from material moving close to the speed of light means, in these
objects, that the jet's light is boosted to overwhelm everything else, even the powerful
emission lines from the nucleus.

Some of the family resemblances among active galactic nuclei have led to a standard
consensus picture for their energy generation, one which admittedly owes its popularity
partly to the fact that no other scheme can explain what we see any better, although the
direct evidence in its favor remains limited. The variability in light output (and, for that
matter, radiation from gamma rays to radio wavelengths) shows that most of the radiation
in active nuclei must be coming from tiny regions, no more than light-hours in extent.
Otherwise, we couldn't see the objects vary as rapidly as we do, with our view of the
whole object smeared by the time it takes light to cross it. A strong gravitational field
would help explain how the spectral lines could be so greatly broadened by Doppler
shifts, often indicating gas moving around at velocities in excess of 5000 km/s, without
having long ago left the nucleus completely. High temperatures, or other ways of
imparting large amounts of energy to the emitting material, are needed to account for the
strong X-rays seen from all kinds of AGN. Finally, the extent of neatly collimated radio
jets, some of which stay on the straight and narrow for a couple of million light-years out
from the nuclei, shows that the central source has both preferred directions to throw
material out (and do so near the speed of light), and a memory spanning millions of years
as to which directions these are.
Among the objects known or reasonably theorized about in astrophysics, the best
explanation of all these facts seems to lie in an enormous black hole and its surroundings
- a black hole incorporating not the paltry few solar masses from a collapsed star, but
millions or billions of solar masses, grown in the dense core of a galaxy. Gas close to
such a monster would follow the same pattern as particles in a planetary ring, gas and
dust around a young star, or gas in a forming galaxy, flattening into an accretion disk
orbiting the black hole. Collisions among atoms in this disk would naturally heat them to
very high temperatures, especially close to the black hole where orbital velocities rise
toward the speed of light. As a bonus, several sets of calculations have shown that even
small interstellar magnetic field could be amplified in such a disk, so that they would
launch some of the matter in twin jets perpendicular to the disk, at nearly the speed of
light. This general picture of active nuclei - hot accretion disks around supermassive
black holes - is widely accepted, but we have some trouble connecting specific pieces of
it to phenomena we can actually see. In a general way, we expect the X-rays to come
from the hot inner parts of the disk, and ultraviolet and visible continuum radiation to
come from farther out where the disk is cooler. The strong emission lines must come
from clouds of gas lit up by the ultraviolet and X-ray emission from closer in. The radio
jets have an obvious connection; in some cases, radio interferometry has traced them to
within a light-year of the core, not much bigger than the scale of the accretion disk. As
we will see, though, while dynamical signs of the massive black holes are abundant,
direct evidence of the accretion disk remains elusive.

The galaxy connection

Clues to the nature of active nuclei have long been sought from their environments,
especially the surrounding host galaxies. If a direct assault on their physics proved
difficult, perhaps their favorite haunts could yield some of their secrets. From their

definition, it is clear that surveying galaxies around quasars will be difficult, since they
show no such galaxies on ordinary pictures. Thus, for decades, looking at the host
galaxies of AGN meant Seyfert and radio galaxies. These offered rich pickings, with
many objects available and some quite nearby and furnishing us with detailed views.
Seyfert nuclei occur mostly in spirals having a large, bright central bulge, galaxies
informally known as "early" in Hubble type. A suspiciously large number of Seyfert
nuclei lie within galaxies that are strongly disturbed or closely paired with another
galaxy. While it makes intuitive sense that such a gravitational disturbance could "wake
the dragon" and trigger powerful activity, a connection has proven elusive to demonstrate
statistically.
Radio galaxies, in contrast, favor elliptical galaxies, or close relatives. Many radio
galaxies lie in quite normal-looking ellipticals, with some to be found in galaxies which
look like ellipticals that have recently digested some kind of gas-rich galaxy. Radio
galaxies are statistically more likely to have close neighbors or slight disturbances from a
perfectly elliptical form than are ellipticals without radio emission, leading to a suspicion
that external interactions make it easier for a galaxy to show this kind of activity.
Something about ellipticals makes it easier to launch and sustain the long jets and
extensive lobes of energetic particles giving rise to the radio emission. This may be the
relative lack of dense gas between their stars, which gives the fast but fragile jets a
clearer path to the outside than they would have in the crowded interstellar medium of
spiral galaxies.
Detailed images, particularly with the Hubble Space Telescope, have shown that many,
perhaps most, radio galaxies show unusual dust structures, which are usually good tracers
of interstellar gas as well. It is common to see a thin dusty disk around the nucleus,
perpendicular to the radio jets. This is in the right orientation for the expected accretion
disks, but these disks have sizes of tens of light-years rather than a light-month. They
might be connected - the accretion disk is being fed from _somewhere_, after all - but are
not yet the hot, active accretion disk that we suspect produces the fireworks. If it turns out
that these dust features are really more common among radio galaxies than among
ordinary ellipticals, the difference may be a signal that many radio galaxies have recently
acquired large amounts of gas in hostile mergers and acquisitions.
As we look at more and more distant radio galaxies, seen farther and farther back in
cosmic time, they start to look more peculiar and less like the familiar, symmetric
ellipticals we see here and now. At high redshifts, we see radio galaxies aligned with the
radio sources, often showing very patchy and irregular forms. This empirical difference
probably combines several effects. In ordinary visible-light imaging, we are seeing light
which left the galaxy at shorter wavelengths when we look at large redshifts; eventually
we see what started out as ultraviolet radiation, which will be strongly affected by any
population of young stars or scattering by dust grains. This can be remedied, if
imperfectly at present, by observing in the infrared, so we measure the same piece of the
galaxies' starlight spectrum both near and far. On top of this shift, many of the radio
galaxies we see at high redshift are more powerful, and hence more violently active, than
any we see in the local Universe. If we have identified, say, the ten most powerful radio

galaxies in the observable Universe, the nearest will most likely still be five billion lightyears away, so that we cannot tell whether its properties are due to some evolution with
cosmic time or the peculiarities of being such a rare and luminous galaxy. Finally, the
most interesting possibility, one that we can test with larger numbers of more modest
radio galaxies, is that we are seeing genuine evolution of radio galaxies with cosmic time,
perhaps as they slowly settle into today's smooth and symmetric forms after a tumultuous
youth in which galaxy collisions and formation of stars as the radio jets collide with gas
played important parts.
But what of host galaxies around quasars themselves? When observed with the most
precise ground-based techniques, a handful of bona fide quasars had shown the kind of
"fuzz" that would be expected for typical galaxies. Proving this to be starlight was a
formidable challenge, since the light was faint and located very close to the enormously
bright quasar light. Spectra of a handful of these "fuzzballs" have been obtained, with a
variety of results. Some show the absorption features of old stars, as in elliptical galaxies.
Some show the distinct pattern of young stars, which are bright enough to outshine older
populations. And some show only emission lines from gas illuminated by the quasar core,
tens of thousands of light-years away. Improved imaging techniques, going into the
infrared or using the very best optical observing conditions, also yielded detections of
fuzz around many quasars, and in a few cases clear structures resembling spiral galaxies.
But the real breakthrough to see what kinds of galaxies surround quasars was expected to
come with the Hubble Space Telescope. Its crisp images, free of atmospheric blurring,
should reveal even small and faint galaxies around quasar cores, and show us enough
details to tell what Hubble types the galaxies are. This has indeed happened, though this
project had to await the first servicing mission and corrective optics that restored the
telescope's expected performance.
At the outset, we might have expected to see a distinction similar to what we find for
Seyfert and radio galaxies - with radio-loud objects in elliptical galaxies, and radio-quiet
objects behaving like beefed-up Seyferts and lying mostly in spirals. With the first batch
of quasar images from Hubble, this simple picture became more complicated. Many
quasars at redshifts z=0.1-0.5, corresponding to distances roughly 1.5-6 billion lightyears, were selected for observation, with these low redshifts favored to get the best
sensitivity for the surrounding galaxies. A wide variety of host galaxies showed up,
confounding any simple scheme. Radio-quiet QSOs can occur in any kind of galaxies spiral, elliptical, or merging systems. Radio-loud quasars occur in elliptical galaxies, but
also in merging systems whose narrow tidal tails suggest that the original galaxies must
have been spirals.
From the first batch of images obtained by John Bahcall and collaborators, it seemed that
some quasars might be orphans, with no important surrounding galaxy. This would be an
enormous step, and led to speculation that the black holes in quasars might predate the
surrounding galaxies and in fact might be the seeds to start galaxy formation in the early
Universe. However, reality may well be more prosaic. Observations using more closely
tailored instrument settings (such as those by Mike Disney's group) turned up detections
of small, though fairly bright, galaxies around a few of these "orphans". More telling has

been the immediate environment of QSO galaxies as seen with Hubble. Over one third of
the QSO host galaxies, of whatever kind, have small, close companions. This is the
strongest single piece of evidence that galaxy encounters can trigger nuclear activity.
These companions include many of a very particular type - galaxies that are very small,
as if they represent the remnant cores of disrupted systems which started out in a more
normal way. More typical galaxies could not fit so close to the quasar cores; there's
simply not room. This may be telling us that particular kinds of gravitational disturbance
are most effective at feeding the beast within. Also, this tells us that quasar activity in
today's Universe largely happens in relatively brief episodes. A galaxy encounter this
close must be brief - within a few hundred million years, the intruder will either escape or
find itself absorbed by the larger galaxy. If we see a link between quasars and these
companions, the quasar must appear as such for a span of time not much greater than the
duration of the galaxy collision. Thus, today's quasars would be rare rejuvenations of
objects which were perhaps more active in the early Universe.
And what of the high-redshift quasars, when they were much more numerous and more
powerful than today? Seeing their host galaxies remains a formidable challenge even with
Hubble's capabilities. Several factors conspire to make these distant galaxies all but
invisible in the glare of their nuclei. Sheer distance makes their images huddle closer to
the core, so the glare of the nucleus obliterates larger and larger regions. Most of their
starlight will be seen in the near-infrared due to their large redshifts, which means that we
will observe it with worse resolution, as the diffraction limit for even a perfect telescope
becomes larger with wavelength. And finally, the expansion of the Universe makes the
surface brightness we observe decline rapidly, as the fourth power of (1+z). Thus, we do
not expect to see any kind of normal galaxy around the highest-redshift quasars, and
typical ground-based infrared images seldom show any "fuzz" beyond about redshift z=1.
Still, arguments and expectations are poor substitutes for looking, and there have been
attempts to find galaxies around high-redshift quasars with Hubble and with the new
generation of large ground-based telescopes. At redshifts z=2-3, Susan Ridgway and
colleagues have used Hubble with the NICMOS infrared camera to detect a few host
galaxies, some of them no brighter then the hosts of nearby quasars. In fact, they are faint
enough to suggest that these galaxies would have to grow significantly, either by
accretion of gas or mergers with smaller galaxies, to become typical galaxies today.
Looking for more extreme kinds of stars in the host galaxies, a group led by Matthew
Lehnert examined the ultraviolet light from hosts in this same redshift range, finding that
some show knots and clumps of light from star-forming regions. The history of star
formation in the galaxies around quasars may tell us their history, particularly how the
brightness of the nucleus and growth of the galaxy might be linked.
Since exceptions often tell us about the rules they defy, it is interesting to find that there
may even be an exception to the strong distinction between hosts galaxies of Seyferts and
radio galaxies. In a survey of hundreds of radio galaxies in clusters, a group including
Frazer Owen, Michael Ledlow, and myself, turned up a powerful double-lobed radio
galaxy in a highly flattened disk galaxy. If this is indeed a spiral, it's the only such case
known, and presumably can teach us interesting things about just what a galaxy needs to

do to entertain such long-lasting and powerful phenomena. The galaxy turns out to be
exactly edge-on, as shown nicely in this recent image from the 8-meter Gemini-South
telescope (courtesy of the Gemini Observatory). It's hard to get a very exact galaxy type
when it is so exactly edge-on, but the dust structure is irregular enough to suggest it's
really a spiral instead of an arm-free S0 galaxy. New Hubble ACS images may be
showing show us clusters of young stars, quite literally resolving the matter.
Galaxies and their black holes; or vice versa
My graduate advisor, Joe Miller, once mused, during a drive back and forth to Lick
Observatory, that we didn't know whether quasars were merely interesting, or actually
important. For many scientists, no such distinction exists, but what Joe meant was that it
wasn't clear that the phenomena of active galaxies stood in the path that led to the most
precious of all cosmic phenomena - life. Do they reflect the same properties of the
Universe that allow us to exist, or could our existence have been substantially the same
had the Universe been such as not to bring forth these powerhouses? The recent findings
on how many galaxies seem to contain dead quasars suggest that the answer may be "yes"
on both counts. Quasar activity may be an important part of the development of every
luminous galaxy.
For many years, quasars were the only objects that we could trace to the large redshifts
that tell us about early cosmic history. Thus, many cosmologists entertained fond, if
implicit, hopes that quasars really were closely connected to the formation of galaxies.
Now we find evidence that they really are connected to the history of galaxies, in several
ways, so that there is a close connection between the bits of cosmic history we can trace
with quasars and the development of galaxies (including our own). Massive black holes
in galaxies, which show up as active nuclei when they are accreting material at high
enough rates, are basic features of galaxies, and first occurred in very particular
environments.
It has been a long-standing curiosity that quasar spectra look much the same whatever the
quasars' redshifts. Nearby objects and those seen at early cosmic times show much the
same intensities of emission lines, which tell us about the relative abundances of such
heavy elements as oxygen, nitrogen, aluminum, and iron. These are produced in massive
stars and supernovae, with somewhat different ratios depending on the mass and age of
stars involved. We can now examine quasars at redshifts as great as z=6.4, which is
within about 800 million years of the beginning for the most likely cosmological
parameters. The gas illuminated by the central engines of these quasars is no less rich in
the products of stellar fusion than what we see here and now. In fact, if anything, the
products of the most massive stars are relatively more common in these early quasars
than today. Fred Hamann and collaborators have shown that this situation makes sense if
quasars reside in regions that are special, even beyond the uniqueness of possessing
supermassive black holes. They must also have hosted early and intense bursts of star
formation. These must have been intense to have produced the masses of heavy elements
seen, and early in order for supernovae to have already produced the heaviest of these
elements and blown them back into interstellar space where they form part of the material

seen as the quasar's emission lines. In fact, certain elements are notable by their relative
rarity, which gives a further clue. Type Ia supernovae (the kind useful for cosmology
because their luminosities are so nearby the same) produce much greater amounts of
atomic nuclei near iron in the periodic table than either fusion in the cores of red giants or
the type II supernovae that result from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their
lifetimes. These elements are relatively deficient in high-redshift quasars, indicating that,
while star formation and deaths of massive stars has been brisk, type Ia supernovae have
not played a role. Since type Ia supernovae are thought to result from mergers of binaries
containing white dwarfs, a process with a time scale upwards of a billion years, this
makes sense. No matter how brisk the star formation might have been for several hundred
million years, no Type Ia supernovae and their iron-peak excess would appear for about a
billion years. Still, there is a serious issue in just how early such star formation could
have begun, tied up with the history of galaxy formation.
All this seems most palatable if the presence of an intense burst of star formation and the
enormous central black hole are somehow connected, either with one causing the other or
both as byproducts of events as the surrounding galaxy takes shape. Indeed, a strong
connection between central black holes and the surrounding galaxies has emerged as we
developed the techniques to find quiescent black holes. Unlike the flamboyant active
nuclei, which advertise the central engine everywhere from radio waves to hard X-rays,
black holes that are quiet can be found only be their gravitational effects on surrounding
objects. In the same way as an ordinary companion star can betray the existence of a
black hole formed from a single star, the motions of stars near a galaxy's center can tell us
of the presence of the kind of concentrated mass that we interpret as a supermassive black
hole. The earliest hints of such a monster came from observations of the radio galaxy
M87 in Virgo, presented in by Peter Young, Wallace Sargent, and their collaborators,
including one of the earliest applications of then-new charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to
astronomical research. They found that the stars very near the core of M87, in which the
radio emission and powerful jet show ample evidence of unusual activity, are more
strongly concentrated than in other elliptical galaxies, and that their typical speeds
increased so rapidly towards this core that no amount of normal matter could account for
the required gravity without being visible. They thus proposed that the nucleus of M87
contains a black hole of about 5 billion solar masses. (Further observations, including the
motions within a disk of gas revealed most clearly by HST observations, have
strengthened this conclusion.)
The M87 observations pushed the state of the art, and such measurements have remained
at the limit of what one could do from the Earth's surface. Definitive evidence of black
holes in galactic nuclei had to wait for the Hubble Space Telescope, and in particular for
the installation of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) during the second
servicing mission in early 1997. This instrument could measure the spectra of galaxies,
not only with higher efficiency than its predecessors, but two-dimensionally, measuring a
slice through a galaxy all at once rather than one point at a time. STIS has proven its
value as a black-hole meter par excellence, delivering so many measurements of black
holes in galaxies that we can now examine their demographics instead of their mere
existence. It is important to do these measurements using the motions of stars rather than

gas, even though the emission spectrum of ionized gas is much easier to measure.
Interstellar gas can be shoved around by many things other than gravity - magnetic fields,
shock waves from supernovae, and heating by ultraviolet radiation can play roles. Stars,
in comparison, act almost as inert particles in tracing the galactic gravitational field.
In our own Galaxy, it has now become possible to do this experiment with stars, and do it
one-by-one rather than statistically. Speckle interferometry, and later adaptive optics,
have revealed stars in the innermost few light-years around the nucleus of the Milky Way,
and shown their locations so accurately that their orbital motions are manifested over
only a few years. Beautiful results by Andrea Ghez and collaborators at Keck and by
Reinhard Genzel's group using the 3.5-meter New Technology Telescope at La Silla,
Chile, and more recently using adaptive optics at the 8-meter VLT, make it clear that stars
near the galactic center are affected by an invisible object of about one million solar
masses, located right where the tiny central radio source appears. In the same way as
Master Yoda and his disciples saw through an attempt to wipe a planet from the Jedi
archives, we can discern the existence of this object through its gravitational signature.
Our galaxy's central object proves to be quite modest by the standards of many other
galaxies we can observe. In these more distant cases, we use the amount of broadening of
the spectral lines due to the different Doppler shifts of stars seen in each region to map
the mass. As shown most clearly by John Magorrian and co-workers, the HST data show
a surprising relation between the mass of the central object and the properties of the
surrounding galaxy. In virtually every case, the black hole comprises about 0.5% of the
mass of the stars in the spheroid of the galaxy. This is the roundish central bulge of
spirals, or the whole galaxy for ellipticals, and in each case is thought to represent the
results of a rapid early epoch of star formation. So either the growing galaxy knew about
the central black hole, or the black hole knew about the surrounding galaxy's stars, in
some way that allowed one to control the other.
This so-called Magorrian relation might mean either that the black holes were there first,
and always attracted a closely proportional amount of material to make stars, or that the
galaxy was there first and always grew a central black hole to a constant fraction of the
stellar mass. There is such a clear theoretical explanation of the second alternative that it
seems vastly more likely than the "magic" needed if the black holes were there first. If we
imagine a galaxy with a modest central black hole, say one made by merging only a
single cluster's worth of stars, the black hole initially has little dynamical impact on its
surroundings. As it grows, however, it eventually comes to dominate its immediate
surroundings gravitationally, and alter the orbits of surrounding stars. Once the black hole
reaches a particular maximum mass, according to calculations by David Merritt and
Gerald Quinlan, it shuts down its own growth, by forcing the orbits of nearby stars to be
more circular and thus keep them safely out of its reach. Their calculations give results
that track the Magorrian relation in an interesting way, although they do show the black
hole shutting its growth down at a mass fraction several times higher than the 0.5%
typical of bright galaxies. If this is what happened in the lives of most galaxies, as
suggested by the prevalence of quiet central masses in most of the galaxies so far
observed with STIS, then quasars may indeed by important as well as interesting. Most

galaxies must have undergone a bright quasar-like phase when the black hole was
growing, ingesting material and surrounded by gas to produce the quasar symptoms. The
presence of the central black hole may well be an unavoidable part of a galaxy's
formation and evolution.
The statistics of quasars can tell us how long this took, and when most of the action
happened in the cosmic calendar. The census is easiest using X-rays, for several reasons.
Quasars have fewer other kinds of starlike objects to hide among in X-rays, compared to
visible light or the infrared. X-rays of enough energy are not blocked by intervening dust
or gas, so we are not biased by these in a quasar's environment. The very deep and very
sharp X-ray images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory have allowed Amy Barger and
colleagues to ask when most of the X-rays from quasars began their journey toward our
detectors, and thus when massive black holes were growing and radiating most
powerfully. Combining the X-ray intensities with redshifts measured for many of the
objects in the optical, they show that the typical active nucleus has spent about 500
million years (or 5% of its lifetime) "on". Much of this must have happened in the early
Universe to fit what we know of the populations of quasars at various redshifts. This
fraction of 5% matches the fraction of bright galaxies that host Seyfert nuclei today,
although there must be a wide range in the "duty cycles" of various galaxies. It has long
been clear that activity must turn on and off, simply because keeping the most powerful
quasars going continuously for the age of the Universe would consume entire galaxies
and leave more massive black holes than we see anywhere. This also makes sense with
the observation that many quasars in the local Universe have close interacting
companions, which, as noted above, suggests that quasar activity occurs in relatively
short episodes.
Quasar hosts at high redshift must have been very special places - the first galaxies to pull
themselves together enough to begin forming stars in a dense core, the same ones that
could grow a central black hole most rapidly. Even with numerical models showing how
the growth of a central black hole can interact with the dynamics of the surrounding stars,
there remains a considerable mystery about original formation and early growth of these
black holes. They could grow rapidly, by disrupting passing stars and accreting some of
their matter, only when already massive enough to exercise strong tidal forces across
interstellar distances. How did they grow so massive, in the relatively short times
available when we see the earliest quasars? This might be understood if the black holes
started out that way, some kind of primordial relics of a chaotic time in the early
Universe, perhaps the mass concentrations that seeded and accelerated the formation of
galaxies. This notion was popular for several years, when it seemed that Hubble images
showed some quasars with little or no surrounding galaxy. However, as further
observations showed that all nearby quasars do have a substantial surrounding galaxy,
and in the light of the tight correspondence between the mass of the central object and the
surrounding stellar spheroid, it appears more likely that the black hole has grown along
with the surrounding galaxy's development. Thus we are driven to look elsewhere for a
way to bridge the gap from black holes made by single collapsing stars, and ones
powerful enough to shred other passing stars for breakfast.

The most massive black hole that we can understand from the collapse of a single star
would have perhaps 100 solar masses, and that only if the star had been one of the first
generation of stars in the Universe. (Because the final explosions of such stars are so
powerful, we actually don't expect to find their remnants within today's galaxies). This
falls well short of the 100,000 or so needed to start accreting mass from other stars, which
form a much richer fuelling source than gas at the centers of most galaxies. One way that
this gap might be bridged lies in the properties of relativistic star clusters. These are
clusters which are so compact that we need relativity to properly describe the motions
and interactions of their constituent stars. If we imagine taking a rich present-day star
cluster, turn its members into neutron stars or black holes, and squeeze the whole group
into a volume a couple of light-years across, that starts to become a relativistic cluster.
Forming such a cluster would have to start with an extraordinarily intense and compact
burst of star formation, followed by dynamical interactions once some of the member
stars had ended their lives by becoming neutron stars or black holes. The most massive
objects will tend to settle to the center in the ordinary course of interactions among stars,
a process which accelerates as the cluster becomes relativistic. In fact, a long-standing
theoretical problem has been the stability of relativistic star clusters. Is it inevitable that
such a cluster will fall together until its central members form one enormous black hole,
or can such a cluster last for long cosmic times? There is at this point no clear-cut verdict;
for some starting conditions, the cluster will collapse, while others appear to be longlasting. The reason for even considering such extreme (and, at this point, unobserved)
assemblages is that we do see regions of very intense star formation, loaded with massive
stars, in nearby galaxies that most nearly mimic our pictures of nascent galaxies at early
times, and this kind of environment also matches what we need to fit the chemical
makeup of the gas in quasars. Still, this is an area ripe for further study, and more data on
conditions in early galaxies will certainly help.
Just where is the accretion disk?
The "standard" model of the central powerhouse in an active nucleus features a very
massive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk, and it is in fact that accretion disk to
which we might attribute most of the radiation we can actually see. But, to this point, the
accretion disk has proven very shy, and observational tests for direct signatures of the
disk have come up negative or ambiguous. This has held true with features in the optical
spectrum, the overall shape of the ultraviolet spectrum, and lines from very hot matter
seen in the X-ray spectral region. Searches for some feature that comes directly from the
accretion disk rely either on the characteristic pattern of motions in a thin, orbiting disk,
or on that fact that it will be heated by internal collisions and will thus be hot - like a
large, hot, and very strangely shaped star.
The profiles of emission line in the spectra of most AGN are centrally peaked, telling us
that only minor fractions of this light come from material at very high velocities. This
sounds more like an amorphous cloud, or maybe a spherical distribution of clouds, than a
thin, organized disk. Thus there was excitement when a class of quasars and radio
galaxies turned up showing "twin peaks" - double emission-line profiles, with most of the
radiation either redshifted or blueshifted compared to the center. Generically, this is just

what we expect from a disk, and it is also just what we see from the hot disks around
white dwarfs or neutron stars that are accreting gas from a companion. The first to be
examined in detail was Arp 102B, part of an interacting galaxy pair that first seemed
interesting based on an X-ray detection. A dedicated survey by Michael Eracleous and
Jules Halpern turned up more of these objects, suggesting that they comprise nearly 10%
of radio-loud objects if you look carefully enough. The double-peaked profiles did seem
to show some of the right features to represent light coming directly from the accretion
disk. In particular, the blue peak was often a little sharper and brighter than the red peak,
effects predicted from relativity as the light from the approaching side is boosted in our
frame of reference. Life was not to remain so simple, though - it turned out that the red
and blue peaks in some of these spectra can vary independently, whereas the two halves
of an accretion disk should remain coupled to each other within hours as material follows
its independent orbits.
Instead of emission lines, the accretion disk might well emit only continuum radiation in
the optical range. If so, its signature might be such a broad spectral pattern that it would
show up only when comparing data ranging from the ultraviolet into the infrared. Matt
Malkan and Wallace Sargent carried out a widely-quoted study of this kind, showing that
the broad emission pattern known as the Big Blue Bump does look like the kind of
distorted stellar atmosphere that an accretion disk could give. It also showed some of the
kinds of changes from one object to another that would result from effects of relativity as
the central mass and viewing angle changed, according to calculations by Wei-Hsin Sun.
So far so good. But the idea didn't pass other tests that these results suggested. In
particular, the light output of such an object (including the surface of a supergiant star,
which we understand rather better) should change dramatically at the Lyman limit in the
ultraviolet, where radiation on the blue side of the limit can ionize hydrogen atoms. This
change would be either a step in intensity or a change in polarization, unless the disk
were carefully constructed to cancel these signals. Robert Antonucci and several sets of
collaborators have tested this ideas, and find that they do not correspond with what we
actually see in quasars and radio galaxies. As they suggest in a recent paper, if such
quasars do exist, they are the ones we can't observe in the ultraviolet because the outer
parts of the disk are so broad that they block our view. This is not only a suspiciously neat
coincidence, but it violated the very small number of objects as powerful as quasars but
showing only narrow emission lines (as if we don't see the core region at all).
The exploration of detailed spectra of X-rays from active nuclei has become a rich field,
first with the Japanese ASCA satellite, and more recently with NASA's Chandra and
ESA's XMM-Newton observatories. These can now show us structures in the velocity of
hot X-ray emitting matter that we could formerly find only if it also gave off emission
lines in the optical or ultraviolet ranges. Some of these emission lines, now from gas so
highly ionized that it must be at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees, showed the
kinds of velocity structure that we might expect for a disk. Some even showed what
looked like distinct double peaks. But, again, more data have clouded the situation. There
are several distinct contributions to the X-ray spectrum in the crucial energy ranges, so
that it is not completely clear how much of a broad bump comes from a particular
spectral line and therefore what its velocity structure is. And in some cases, the apparent

double structure has gone away as better data accumulated. The answer to this one should
become clear, as Chandra and XMM-Newton continue observations and the community
becomes more experienced at their interpretation.
Disklike structures have indeed been seen in many nearby active galaxies, radio galaxies
and Seyferts alike. These are most often seen as dark features from dust absorption in
Hubble images, and span diameters of 50-500 light-years. In many radio galaxies, these
disks have just the orientation we would expect - closely perpendicular to the radio jets.
There is no doubt that these are disks, and that they are related to the central activity, but
they are not "the" accretion disks in these objects as postulated in the standard scheme.
These disks are much too large and much too cold. The active accretion disk must be hot
precisely because it is so dense, and so close to the central mass, that orbital energy is
shed outwards into heat, allowing parcels of gas to fall ever closer to the core until no
stable orbit is possible, and it vanishes through the black hole's event horizon.
Some theorists have risen to the challenge posed by recent observations, by noting that a
significant level of accretion could happen more quietly - a situation known in the jargon
as advection-dominated accretion. If this is happening, a disk geometry may exist farther
from the core, as we often see in dust or gas disks, but break down close to the central
black hole. The energy release would still occur in this volume, of course, and there may
be hope of testing this idea's predictions as coordinated observations of quasars from the
gamma-ray to radio windows become more precise and more common. Still, the notion
of an inner disk makes a great deal of sense in accounting for the radio jets in active
nuclei. There is hope that upcoming instruments using optical interferometry - such as
NASA's Space Interferometry Mission - would be able to detect disks by their shapes,
independent of any particular kind of spectral signature.
We may be missing traces of the central engines because we lump together quite
dissimilar objects. Active nuclei span a wide range in power, radio/optical ratio, and
dynamics as judged by their spectral lines. How many kinds of objects are there?
Investigators have tried for years to produce the AGN counterpart of the HertzsprungRussell diagram for stars - a simple plot, involving straightforward quantities, that
separates physically different kinds of objects (such as red dwarf and red supergiant
stars), leading to a comprehensive theory as successful as our understanding of stellar
evolution has become. Some groupings have emerged by considering such quantities as
the relative strength of the X-rays, whether an object is a strong radio source, and how
symmetric the emission line profiles are. Attempts by Tod Boroson at the National
Optical Astronomy Observatory, and a multinational conglomerate headed by Jack
Sulentic, now suggest that key features in how a quasar appears may be the central blackhole mass and the rate at which it is accreting mass. There may be a critical accretion rate
at which the structure of the whole emitting region changes. Oddly enough, these
properties don't seem to correlate in a way that fits the otherwise well-supported notion
that much of what we see in quasars depends on our viewing direction with respect to the
disk. This is a surprise that is still percolating through our mental picture.
High-redshift quasars and their foregrounds

A recurring theme in quasar astronomy has been the quest to find them at ever-higher
redshifts. This goes beyond the desire to have a record, however fleeting, and the
associated bragging rights. Very distant objects tell us interesting things about cosmic
history, first by their very existence, and in addition by what the reveal about the
otherwise invisible Universe in front of them.
It has long been clear that the quasars we can observe evolve strongly with cosmic time,
having gone through a peak about 12 billion years ago when a large fraction of bright
galaxies must have hosted quasars, and with their number falling dramatically down to
the present day. Going outward in redshift and farther back in time, the number of
quasars (at least the very powerful ones that we could find so far away) declines above
redshift z=4, with progressively fewer and fewer up to the current record at z=6.4. Either
we are watching the population of quasars "turn on", or for some reason we can't find
most of the high-redshift quasars that were there.
As quasars at higher redshifts are found, their existence places more and more stringent
constraints on how rapidly such compact objects formed in the early Universe. The Sloan
Digital Sky Survey has yielded quasars at z=6.4, only about 800 million years after the
beginning in the most popular cosmological scheme. In this time (during which our
Galaxy would rotate only three and a half times at the Sun's distance) at least a few
galaxies must have formed, collected enough material to make a fairly massive black
hole, and had enough formation of massive stars in its immediate environs to produce the
heavy elements seen in quasar spectra. For example, finding quasars at redshifts so high
that they are seen at half this cosmic age would be a real problem, showing that there was
something very basic about early cosmic history that we don't understand (ignoring for a
moment the high probability that there is indeed something important about galaxy and
quasar formation that we are blissfully unaware of not understanding). The Sloan survey
will be able to find very luminous quasars to about z=7, and less luminous but more
common objects should turn up in deep infrared surveys. We would also be alerted to
QSOs at very high redshift by their X-ray emission, a helpful addition to the toolkit since
absorption by interstellar gas is strong only for those X-rays that we already lose because
of the objects' redshift.
Given that these quasars do exist, at least in small numbers, at high redshifts, we can
make extensive use of them to study the material in front of them through its effects on
the quasar light, even if the foreground material is otherwise invisible. This makes use of
the absorption by foreground gas, virtually the only way to trace the tenuous gas between
galaxies, and gravitational lensing by any kind of mass concentration in front of the
quasar.
Gas in front of any bright background source will absorb certain, very narrow,
wavelength ranges of the background light. The wavelengths depend on the chemical
mix, density, and temperature of the gas, and we will observe them shifted by any relative
motion between the absorbing gas and ourselves. With quasars as the background
lighthouses, we see gas in distant galaxies close to our line of sight (galaxies that are
often too dim to detect directly) and the widespread gas between galaxies - the

intergalactic medium. As we look across cosmological distances, various clumps of gas

will appear at different wavelengths because the quasar's light encountered them at
different redshifts, allowing us to map this tenuous material in space and time. This is
how we came by virtually everything we know about the intergalactic medium.
As soon as quasars could be observed at redshifts above about z=2, a new spectral feature
became apparent - a whole series of very narrow absorption lines, appearing blueward of
every quasar's own Lyman alpha emission line. Lyman alpha is a very special spectral
line, the strongest transition of hydrogen, itself the most abundant chemical element. The
match of these new features with Lyman alpha was too close to be coincidence, leading
Roger Lynds in 1971 to identify these absorption features as the same line, seen at
smaller redshifts from material in the foreground. The lines would naturally cease at the
quasar's redshift, since more distant material would be behind the quasar and not
affecting its light. The "Lyman alpha forest" appears in the spectrum of every highredshift quasar, and the statistics of these features have been mapped in great detail. For
almost two decades, this industry proceeded with the goal of connecting these clouds to
galaxy formation, perhaps with the Lyman alpha clouds representing pre-galactic gas
which was condensing over time to make galaxies or being accreted into galaxies. This
certainly fit with the number of clouds seen at various redshifts - the density of Lyman
alpha absorption features increases dramatically with redshift, which means that they are
vanishing rapidly with cosmic time. It was a bit of a surprise to see, from early Hubble
Space Telescope spectra in the deep ultraviolet, that a few of these absorbers survive to
the present day, revealed only when space telescopes could look for them at small
redshift, and thus still in the ultraviolet, at the kinds of sensitivity that has long been
available using large ground-based telescopes at high redshifts.
Two other things were known from the Lyman alpha forest. One was that the gas we can
see is only a small fraction of what must be there. To produce Lyman alpha absorption, or
indeed absorption in any of its possible spectral lines, hydrogen atoms must be neutral that is, in their ordinary state including an electron. Ionized hydrogen, in which the
electrons have been separated from the nuclei, will not produce absorption lines.
Comparison of the small widths of the absorption lines, indicating how large the internal
motions can be in the absorbing gas, with the amount of gas needed to produce the
absorption we actually see, tells us that the gas we measure doesn't have enough gravity
to hold itself together. Furthermore, at redshifts and thus locations near quasars, we
observe a near-complete disappearance of the Lyman alpha forest. This fits in the same
picture, since the quasars are copious sources of ultraviolet and X-ray emission which can
ionize such rarefied gas for millions of light-years around. So we had a general picture of
hot, mostly ionized clouds of gas floating between the visible galaxies, vanishing over
time as they either formed into galaxies or were acquired by existing galaxies.
This scheme underwent a complete overhaul in the 1990s, one which almost wiped out
some of the traditional goals of studying the Lyman alpha forest and presented us with a
much richer and more complete view. A series of numerical simulations of intergalactic
gas, especially work presented by Renyue Cen at Princeton, demonstrated that a pair of
biases resulting from the behavior of patchy gas in an expanding Universe could produce

what we see without the gas being held together in small, distinct clouds, but instead
resulting from the same pattern of large-scale structure that encompasses clusters and
superclusters of galaxies.
Efforts to understand the formation of galaxies and clusters have included simulations of
how matter behaves at the temperatures and densities encountered in the early Universe,
starting from the tiny fluctuations derived from the cosmic microwave background and
watching what happens as the Universe expands, the matter cools, and the state of the
cooling gas changes. The results have been described as a cosmic web, with the densest
material, most likely to begin galaxy formation, tracing sheets and long filaments through
space. The properties of the Lyman alpha forest can be understood beautifully as part of
this same structure, made to appear even more clumpy and spiky than it really is by two
amplifying effects. First, even if most of the gas is very hot and ionized, the fraction that
is neutral, and thus shows up in absorption lines, is much higher in denser regions. This
comes about because electrons and atomic nuclei are more likely to collide and form
neutral atoms (in a process known as recombination) where there are more of each. In
fact, the rate of this process increases as the square of the gas density, so that the
amplitude of fluctuations in Lyman alpha absorption would look like the square of the
fluctuations in the actual gas density from this process alone. Moreover, the structure in
the gas is not static - it is influenced by gravity, which will draw material into denser
regions and further evacuate the emptiest areas. This motion means that, as we look
through a sheet or filament traced by the absorbing gas, it will appear narrower in redshift
than we would expect for its actual depth in space. The gas on the front side will be
falling in away from us, so its redshift is a little too high for its actual position; while the
opposite is true for material on the far side. Putting these effects together, Cen and others
have shown convincingly that the Lyman alpha forest is the observed guise of a richer,
and much more pervasive, web of gas pervading the Universe than we thought only a
decade ago.
Hard work, and new instruments, have turned up additional species that trace this
intergalactic web. Helium has an absorption line which corresponds precisely to Lyman
alpha, produced by helium which has been ionized so that only one of its two electrons
remains. This line falls even further into the ultraviolet than the hydrogen line, so it can
be observed only from high-redshift quasars and then only deep in the ultraviolet. This is
because there is so much cool hydrogen in most galaxies, including our own, that
radiation in a broad swath of the ultraviolet spectrum is completely absorbed in ionizing
some of that hydrogen. This produces a piece of the spectrum shortward of 912
Angstroms (known as the Lyman limit) where we cannot see very far through our Galaxy,
and cannot see outside it at all. Thus, to see so deep in a quasar's ultraviolet spectrum, we
must see it at such a high redshift that its helium Lyman-alpha line, starting at 304
Angstroms, enters the Milky Way at 912 Angstroms or longer. To make this measurement
more challenging, the quasar's light also cannot pass through any other galaxy's
neighborhood along the way, since the hydrogen in that galaxy will absorb the ultraviolet
radiation. Finding this absorption - known as the He II Lyman alpha absorption - has been
a major project, connected with the history of heating of the intergalactic gas as well as
its structure. It has involved extensive work with the Hubble Space Telescope, the shuttle-

borne HUT experiment, and the FUSE satellite, supported by spectra of the matching
hydrogen lines from the largest ground-based telescopes. This phase of helium, which
can be ionized only by radiation four times more energetic than needed for hydrogen, is
plentiful in the intergalactic realm. Despite that fact that helium is generally only about
3/10 as common as hydrogen, the He II forest is stronger than that seen in hydrogen;
some weak lines can be detected only in helium. This is because a larger fraction of the
helium is observable than for hydrogen, since a large fraction of the hydrogen is ionized
and does not produce absorption lines. The He II feature also occurs more frequently in
less-dense regions, farther from the major concentrations of gas, where small levels of
radiation from quasars or galaxies can keep the gas more completely ionized.
Adding to the excitement was the discovery that, as well as the hydrogen and helium that
were left over from the first few minutes of cosmic history, the intergalactic gas includes
elements which must have been synthesized in massive stars and scattered in their final
supernova explosions, providing evidence of an early and widespread episode of
starbirth. Key evidence came, again, from quasar spectra. Using Hubble Space Telescope
spectra, a group led by Todd Tripp found that there is another absorption-line forest, this
one from O VI (that is, oxygen which has been stripped of 6 of its 8 electrons), seen from
a pair of absorption lines in the deep ultraviolet. There is not yet a good estimate of just
how much mass these lines arise from, since additional oxygen could be hiding with
either more or fewer electrons, and it is not clear how much of other elements such as
carbon and nitrogen might also be present. However, even conservative assumptions on
these issues suggest that the amount of such processed gas between galaxies may be
comparable to what we find in the galaxies' stars themselves - a significant reservoir
indeed. In the light of simulations of the formation of the first stars as well as galaxies,
we see hints not only of what the intergalactic medium is like, but how this all-butinvisible player has interacted with the galaxies we see.
The first stars, forming from pure hydrogen and helium, would be quite different from the
ones we see around us today, which began with a small but important salting of heavy
elements synthesized in the cores of earlier stars. The first stars (sometimes called
"population III" by analogy with the two populations of stars we see today) would have
been very massive and hot, exploding with more violence than today's supernovae. These
stars, with hundreds of solar masses, would have scattered their yield of heavier elements
thinly but widely as each exploded, destroying the surrounding gas clouds in the process
and forcing galaxy formation to start over, but now with star formation proceeding as we
still see it thanks to the cooling effects of heavier elements. And we conclude all this from
narrow bands of missing light in quasar spectra.
Looking for broader gaps in quasar spectra can also tell us important things, now about
the cosmic history of mass and energy on the largest scales. In standard cosmology, the
cosmic microwave background represents the radiation travelling at the time when the
overall gas became neutral and hence transparent at most wavelengths, so that this
radiation was free to travel. We still see some of it today, redshifted by a factor of more
than a thousand. However, something else must have happened to the intergalactic gas
since that time - from the Lyman alpha, He II, and O VI forests of absorption lines, we

see that intergalactic gas is mostly ionized today and has been since the time
corresponding to at least redshift z=5. What else has happened?
James Gunn and Bruce Peterson pointed out in 1965 that any important amount of gas in
a cool, neutral form would absorb a large "trough" against quasar spectra, since smoothly
distributed gas would occur at all redshifts. It soon became clear that we do not see such
Gunn-Peterson troughs in available quasar spectra, something that remained true until
quite recently. As we have seen, what gas there is in intergalactic space is very patchy
(producing narrow absorption lines instead of broad troughs) and mostly ionized (so that
the absorption is much weaker). Gunn-Peterson absorption has finally been seen in the
spectra of the very highest-redshift quasars known, found by the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey (see the technical journal paper). The density of neutral intergalactic gas declined
dramatically from z=6.3 to z=5.8 (corresponding to a time interval of about 100 million
years, very short for such a universal transition) and has been unobservable since that
time. We may finally be seeing the tail end of the epoch of reionization, the event that
ionized the cosmic gas and has kept it so since. The most important energy source, based
on the amount of energy required, seems to have been the initial birth of ordinary stars in
galaxies - not the rare, if brilliant, population III stars, but the most massive and hottest
stars formed when today's galaxies began their careers. Since then, the small fraction of
quasar radiation has become more important in maintaining the ionization of intergalactic
gas. As the Universe expands, the gas requires less radiation to keep it ionized, as
electrons and atomic nuclei encounter one another less often, and the overall rate of star
formation in galaxies has declined dramatically for several billion years. Once again,
quasars have provided important clues to otherwise invisible aspects of galaxy history.
This graphic (right), courtesy of George Djorgovski at Caltech, illustrates the GunnPeterson effect as seen in the spectrum of a high-redshift quasar from the Sloan survey.

Finally, quasars have been important probes of mass concentrations, seen or unseen, in
the distant Universe, through gravitational lensing. One of the striking immediate
successes of Einstein's general theory of relativity was the observation of the "bending"
of light paths by a massive object (such as the Sun). The light from a distant quasar can
find itself similarly redirected, by the curvature of spacetime, on passing such massive
objects as galaxies or clusters of galaxies. We see this effect, when it is large enough, as a
splitting of the quasar into multiple images on different sides of the massive "lens" The
first clear example of this was the quasar 0957+561 in Ursa Major. The two images show
virtually identical spectra, an important fact in deciding whether such a pair is lensed or
an actual double quasar. By now, about 50 such lensed quasars have been established (see
the WWW compendium run by the CASTLES project). Analysis of their statistics can tell
us such things as how large the cosmological constant might be, and how many clusters
or galaxies are much fainter than the average we've come to expect. Such lenses can also
be used to measure the Hubble constant independent of such traditional techniques as
Cepheid variable stars, when the quasar is variable enough that we can see the same
variations in both images and trace the time delay between images, caused by the
different path lengths for light on the two paths. So far, the error bars are no better than

for other techniques, but it is a powerful confirmation that our knowledge of the Hubble
constant can't be, say, wrong by a factor of 2, since such utterly different techniques show
reasonable agreement.
Quasars and their kin have proven to be interesting, in ways from testing relativity
through probing intergalactic gas and tracing the history of galaxies. There are signs that
they may even be important, and that the next 40 years of our exploration will yield a yet
richer view than we can conceive of now.