Quasar 3C 273

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the core of quasar 3C 273. A coronagraph on Hubble blocks out the glare coming from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar. This allows astronomers to see unprecedented details near the black hole such as weird filaments, lobes, and a mysterious L-shaped structure, probably caused by small galaxies being devoured by the black hole. Located 2.5 billion light-years away, 3C 273 is the first quasar (quasi-stellar object) ever discovered, in 1963.

About the colours

These images were acquired by the WFPC2 and STIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to a monochromatic (grayscale) image. For WFPC2, the assigned colors are: Cyan: F450W, Orange: F606W and for STIS, a blue hue was assigned to the image.

About the data

The image was created from Hubble data from the following proposals: 05099 (J. Bachall) and 16715 (B. Ren)