The most amazing object visible through a small telescope doesn’t look all that remarkable. In fact, it looks like a faint star. Yet that point of light packs the power of 10 trillion Suns – the power of a quasar.

3C 273 is the first quasar ever discovered. When astronomers first saw it, they thought it was just another star. It looks like a star, and its main ingredient is like a star’s as well. But when they measured its distance, they were astonished: 3C 273 was two and a half billion light-years away. That meant it couldn’t be a star at all. Instead, they classified it as a quasi-stellar object – a quasar.

Astronomers eventually figured out that it’s powered by a black hole at the heart of a giant galaxy. The black hole is about 900 million times the mass of the Sun. Its enormous gravity pulls in huge amounts of gas and dust, and maybe some stars. That material forms a spinning disk around the black hole. The disk is heated to millions of degrees, so it shines brilliantly – bright enough to see from two and a half billion light-years away.

3C 273 is in Virgo. The constellation’s brightest star, Spica, is low in the southeast at nightfall. The quasar stands high above it, about a third of the way up the sky. Despite its great power, it’s too faint to see with the eye alone. But a telescope reveals this deceptive wonder – a monster masquerading as a star.

Script by Damond Benningfield