The scene developed, two mysterious spots of radio light were discovered in space

3c 273 is an extremely bright quasar star, and the first planet ever discovered. It is 3 billion lunar years from Earth, but they calculated that if it was 32 light years away it would light up our sky as much as the Sun (which is 8 light minutes away).

Its nature has been problematic for two main reasons: its extreme brightness has always prevented us from studying the galaxy around it, and until a few decades ago we weren’t quite sure what it really was.

We know today that it might be a very large black hole surrounded by huge swirls of gas that falls into the hole at the speed of light and creates friction that makes them shine like this.

Moreover, a new study was also able to observe what surrounds the quasar, isolating the brightness of the galaxy thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope.

In this way, two mysterious and huge radio structures that had never been seen before were discovered. One of the structures appears to be a huge patch of radio light enveloping the entire galaxy, so it stretches tens of thousands of light-years to the southwest. This radio fog interferes with the second structure: a giant jet of energy, known as an astrophysical jet, that also spans tens of thousands of light-years.

They found that while the quasar had ionized a huge amount of gas, rendering it useless for building new stars, star formation was not visibly suppressed in the galaxy as a whole. This suggests that growing and growing galaxies may still exist, with quasars spewing radiation at their centre.

“This discovery offers a new avenue for studying problems previously addressed using optical light observations,” senior researcher Shinya Komoji, assistant professor at Kogakuen University in Tokyo, said in a statement.

“By applying the same technology to other quasars, we expect to understand how the galaxy evolves through its interaction with the central core.”

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