S5 0014+81
quasar in the constellation Cepheus
S5 0014+81 is a distant, compact, hyperluminous, broad-absorption-line quasar, or blazar, located near the high declination region of the constellation Cepheus, near the North Equatorial Pole.
Characteristics
The object is an OVV (optically violent variable) quasar, a type of blazar. It belongs to the most energetic subclass of active galactic nuclei, which are produced by the rapid accretion of matter by a central supermassive black hole, changing gravitational energy to light energy that can be visible across cosmic distances.
In the case of S5 0014+81, it is one of the most luminous quasars known, with a total luminosity of over 1041 watts, equal to an absolute bolometric magnitude of −31.5. If the quasar were at a distance of 280 light-years from Earth, it would give out as much energy per square meter as the Sun does at Earth, despite being 18 million times more distant. The quasar's luminosity is therefore about 3 × 1014 (300 trillion) times that of the Sun, or over 25,000 times as luminous as all the 100 to 400 billion stars of the Milky Way combined, making it one of the most energetic objects in the observable universe. However, because of its huge distance of 12.1 billion light-years it can only be studied by spectroscopy. The central black hole of the quasar devours an extremely huge amount of matter, equivalent to 4,000 solar masses of material every year.
The quasar is also a very strong source of radiation, from gamma rays and X-rays down to radio waves. The quasar's designation, S5, is from the Fifth Survey of Strong Radio Sources, 0014+81 was its coordinates in epoch B1950.0.
“S5 0014+81” enters the record as quasar in the constellation Cepheus. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what quasar, constellation and Cepheus can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“S5 0014+81” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, quasar, constellation and Cepheus provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18377837. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1041 and 1014.
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This entry incorporates text from “S5 0014+81” 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.