Quasars are apparently the bright inner core of galaxies where a supermassive Black Hole is accreting material.  As the material orbits around the Black Hole it is heated to great temperatures, producing an enormous amount of energy.  The brightness of most quasars is variable over a relatively short period of days.  This tells us that they must be very small, because an object cannot vary in brightness coherently faster than the time it takes for light to travel across it.

PHL 1811 appears to vary between about 13.5 to 14.0 magnitude, making it almost as bright as its famous cousin when caught near maximum light.  The redshift of PHL 1811 is 0.192, which corresponds to a light travel time of 2.4 Gyr (assuming H=65 km/s/Mpc and Omega = 0.1).   3C 273 has a redshift of 0.16, which corresponds to 2.0 Gyr.  What this number means is that when you look at PHL 1811, the light you are seeing took 2.4 Billion years to reach your eye.  That is over half the age of the Earth!

Like all quasars, PHL 1811 looks like just another faint star in the eyepiece.  Some might gaze upon it as little more.  But to others, it is the idea of what we are seeing that is so appealing.  We are seeing light which has traveled such an enormous distance and time only to end its journey to be captured by our eyes.  As our eyes capture the light, our minds capture concept of a supermassive black hole.  Perhaps the only idea more grand is that we are capable of doing so at all.

The field in an 6-inch f/8 at 50x.  North is down and east is to the right.

Discovery reference: Astronomical Journal, June 2001 (AJ, 121, 2889-2894 (2001))