3C 273

3C 273 is a quasar located at the center of a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. It was the first quasar ever to be identified and is the visually brightest quasar in the sky as seen from the Earth, with an apparent visual magnitude of 12.9, outshining by more than 16 times the entire galaxy that hosts it. The derived distance to this object is 749 megaparsecs (2.4 billionlight-years). The mass of its central supermassive black hole is approximately 900 million times the mass of the Sun.