Carl Peck Jr., age 15, of Burlington, Vt., for his question:

WHAT IS A QUASAR?

A quasar is a galaxy that gives off a great deal of energy. This energy is radiated in the form of light and radio waves.

Some quasars, scientists tell us, are located near the edge of the universe. It takes light, which travels 186,282 miles per second, about 10 billion years to travel from such quasars to the earth.

A quasar can release 100,000 billion times as much energy as the sun does. We don't know how it generates so much power, but some scientists believe the energy results from collisions between fast moving stars in the central part of a quasar.

Quasars were first observed in 1960 by a group of astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California. By the mid 1970s, about 500 quasars had been discovered.