This artist’s conception of a quasar shows a thick doughnut-shaped torus surrounding a small bright inner region of hot swirling gas. The inner region is about the size of our solar system and is called an accretion disk. At the very center is a supermassive black hole that steadily consumes, or accretes, the surrounding gas. As illustrated here, some quasars have strong jets beaming away perpendicularly to the disk of swirling matter. While the outer torus can sometimes block much of the light emitted by the interior, when the interior light is visible, it can be a hundred thousand times as bright as our Milky Way Galaxy!
(NASA/CXC/M.Weiss)