Active Galaxies

When the universe was younger, some galaxies produced a lot more radiation than galaxies do
today. A typical galaxy shines with the energy from billions of stars and is tens of thousands of light
years (or more) across. A peculiar group of galaxies are extremely luminous but very compact. The
light from these active galaxies is produced by a strange process in the centers of the galaxies.
Sometimes starburst galaxies are grouped with these peculiar galaxies, but here I will consider an
``active galaxy'' to be a galaxy with a very luminous nucleus. The great luminosity of starburst
galaxies is not confined to their nucleus.
Quasars
The two basic things used for studying the far away galaxies are (1) the data encoded in the light
received; and (2) our creative minds to interpret what is seen using the laws of physics. Some blue
star-like objects appeared to violate those rules. Stars do not produce much energy in the radio
band, so when strong radio emission coming from some blue stars was spotted in 1960,
astronomers quickly took spectra of the stars in the visible (optical) band to find out the conditions
in these strange objects. However, the pattern of lines did not match any of the lines seen in
thousands of stellar spectra gathered over a hundred years. Furthermore, the spectra of the blue
radio sources did not have absorption lines, but broad emission lines! What a mystery!

Maarten Schmidt solved the mystery in 1963. In order to figure out the structure of the atoms
producing the bizarre spectra, he set out to construct an energy level diagram from the pattern of
the emission lines. He made some mistakes in his calculations because his calculations were not
showing the regularity he could clearly see in the spectrum of a radio source called 3C 273 (the
273rd object in the third Cambridge catalog of radio souces). As a test of the regularity he compared
the spectrum of 3C 273 with the spectrum of hydrogen. He was shocked because the pattern was
the same but greatly redshifted! 3C 273 is moving at a speed of 47,400 kilometers/second (almost
16% the speed of light!). The Hubble Law says that this blue radio object is far outside the Galaxy.
The other radio ``stars'' were also at great distances from us. They are called quasi-stellar radio
sources or quasars for short. Later, some other blue star-like objects at large redshifts were
discovered to have no radio emission, but they are also called quasars.
What is strange about the quasars is not their great distance, but, rather, their incredible
luminosities. They are hundreds to thousands of times more luminous than ordinary galaxies. Yet,
all of this energy is being produced in a small volume of space. Their luminosity varies on time
scales of a few months to as short as a few days. Remember from the discussion of pulsars and
black holes in the stellar evolution chapter that the light fluctuation time scale from any object gives
you an estimate of the maximum possible size of the object. The maximum size = (speed of light)
(light fluctuation time interval). The quasars that vary their light output over a few months are
about the size of our solar system. This is tens of thousands of times smaller than a typical galaxy!

The shape of the continuous part of a quasar spectrum is also quite unusual. Stars are luminous in
primarily the visible (optical) band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The hottest stars also emit a
significant fraction of their light in the ultraviolet band and the coolest stars emit a significant
fraction of their light in the infrared band. Regardless of the star, though, the spectrum of a star,
and, hence, the spectrum of a normal galaxy, rises to a peak at some wavelength determined by the
temperature (remember Wien's law?) and drops off at wavelengths shorter or longer than the peak
wavelength. Such a spectrum is called a thermal spectrum because it depends on just the
temperature.

Quasars have a decidedly non-thermal spectrum: they are luminous in the X-rays, ultraviolet, visible,
infrared, and radio bands. They have about the same power at all of the wavelengths down to the
microwave wavelengths (shortwave radio wavelengths). The spectrum looks like the synchrotron
radiation from charged particles spiralling around magnetic field lines at nearly the speed of light
(remember the emission from pulsars?).
Perhaps the quasars are not as far away as the Hubble Law says from their redshifts. If their large
redshifts are due to some powerful explosive event that shot the quasars out at some tremendous
speed, then you would not have to worry about the tremendous luminosities. That would be nice,
but unfortunately (or fortunately, if you like a good mystery) that does not appear to be the case.
Quasars are found in clusters of galaxies. The galaxies are much fainter than the quasars so only the
largest telescopes can gather enough light to create a spectrum for those far away galaxies. Their
spectra also have the same large redshift of the quasars in the cluster. Also, some quasars are close
enough to us that some fuzz is seen around them. The color of the fuzz is like that of normal
galaxies. The spectra of the fuzzy patches around the bright quasar shows that the light from the
fuzz is from stars.
In addition, the gravitational lensing of quasars by distant galaxies is only possible if the lensed
quasars are farther away than the galaxy bending the quasar's light. Quasars are the exceptionally
bright nuclei of galaxies!


Not all active galaxies blaze with the strength of a quasar. They do exhibit a non-thermal spectrum
that has no peak and does not depend on the temperature. Also, their energy is generated in the
nuclei of galaxies. The active galaxies are less energetic cousins of the quasars. Their luminosity is
between the luminosities of typical galaxies and the powerful quasars. Whatever is going on in
quasars, is going on in active galaxies to a lesser extent.
One type of active galaxy is the Seyfert galaxy, named after Carl Seyfert who was the first to
discover the peculiar spectra of these types of galaxies. A Seyfert galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a
compact, very bright nucleus that produces a non-thermal continuous spectrum with broad (fat)
emission lines on top. Some of the emission lines are produced by atoms that have several electrons
removed from them. Such highly ionized atoms are found only in regions of intense energy. Many
Seyfert nuclei are in disks with distorted spiral arms and a companion galaxy nearby that is
probably gravitationally interacting with the galaxy.
Another type of active galaxy is the radio galaxy, which emits huge amounts of radio energy. The
radio emission comes from the core AND from very large regions on either side of the optical part
of the galaxy called ``radio lobes''. The radio lobes can extend for millions of light years from the
center of the galaxy. The radio emission from normal galaxies is thousands to millions of times less
intense and is from the gas between the stars. Most radio galaxies are elliptical galaxies. The
spectrum of the radio emission has the same non-thermal (synchrotron) shape as the quasars and
Seyferts. The radio lobes are produced from electrons shot out from the nucleus in narrow beams
called jets. When the electrons in the beam hit the gas surrounding the galaxy, the beam spreads out
to form the lobes.
Some lobes are swept out into arcs behind the galaxy. This is probably caused by the galaxy moving
through the gas around the galaxy. A third type of active galaxy called BL Lacertae objects (BL Lac
objects for short) are probably radio galaxies with their jets pointed right at us. The energy from BL
Lac objects varies very quickly and erratically.