3C 454.3
blazar in the constellation Pegasus
3C 454.3 is a blazar (a type of quasar with a jet oriented toward Earth) located away from the galactic plane. It is one of the brightest gamma ray sources in the sky, and is one of the most luminous astronomical objects ever observed, with a maximum absolute magnitude of -31.4. It has the brightest blazar gamma ray flare recorded, twice as bright as the Vela Pulsar in the Milky Way galaxy. It also flares at radio and visible wavelengths – in red light, the blazar brightened by more than 2.5 times to magnitude 13.7 – and it is very bright at high radio frequencies.
It appears in Pegasus, near Alpha Pegasi (Markab). It has been known to occasionally outburst, brightening to a peak apparent magnitude of 13.4 in June 2014.
It is possible that a binary supermassive black hole might lie in the center of 3C 454.3 based on observations. Additionally, it has a bright radio core and radio jet described as one-sided, with its jet components moving in superluminal motion. An arc-structure has also been detected on parsec-scales around the region of its core.
History
In July and August 2007, 3C 454.3 flared to near-historic levels, only two years after its record-breaking 2005 optical flare.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “3C 454.3” is blazar in the constellation Pegasus. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through blazar, constellation and Pegasus, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4636243. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2007 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “3C 454.3” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.