Starting from the cooler, outer edges of the accretion
disc, you fly up and in towards the centre, where you can see the `monster'
lurking at the heart of every quasar - a supermassive black hole with the mass
of approximately 100 million Suns. The gas which forms the accretion disc
eventually spirals down until it becomes part of the black hole itself - and
releasing up to half of its rest-mass energy in doing so. This is the most
efficient form of energy generation known in the Universe.
Back to the Quasar Tour
This page written by Liz Puchnarewicz
(emp@mssl.ucl.ac.uk).
Last modified 17th March 1998