Page 28 - Life beyond the Karman

Quasar
A quasar is an astronomical object of very high luminosity found in the centre of some galaxies and powered by gas spiralling at high velocity into an extremely large black hole. The brightest quasars can outshine all the stars in the galaxies in which they reside, which makes them visible even at distances of billions of light-years. Quasars are among the most distant and luminous objects known.
Pulsars
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that blast out pulses of radiation at regular intervals ranging from seconds to milliseconds.
Pulsars have strong magnetic fields that funnel particles along their magnetic poles, accelerating them to relativistic speeds, which produces two powerful beams of light, one from each pole. Because the poles of the magnetic field aren’t aligned with the axis of spin of the pulsar, the beams of particles and the light they produce are swept around as the pulsar rotates.
The periodicity of pulsars is caused by these beams of light crossing the line of sight on Earth, with the pulsar appearing to ‘switch off’ at points when the light is facing away from us. The time between these pulses is the ‹period› of the pulsar.
Centaur
Centaurs are icy planetesimals located between Jupiter and Neptune. They cross the orbits of one or more of
the giant planets in their journey around the sun, and interactions
with these outer planets cause the orbits of centaurs to be inherently unstable. For this reason, they are thought to be transitory objects that have been scattered out of the Kuiper Belt (perhaps more specifically the scattered disk) and will soon be ejected from the solar system or are in the process of transitioning from Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) to Jupiter-family comets.
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LIFE BEYOND THE KÁRMÁN LINE - OUTER SPACE