Quasars really do release insane amounts of energy — we're talking about some of the most extreme objects in the entire universe! These aren't ordinary stars; quasars are powered by supermassive black holes (millions to tens of billions of solar masses) at the centers of distant galaxies. As huge amounts of gas, dust, and even stars fall toward the black hole, they form a super-hot accretion disk that spirals in at nearly the speed of light. Friction and magnetic fields convert gravitational energy into radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum — from radio waves to gamma rays. The result? A quasar can shine hundreds to thousands of times brighter than its entire host galaxy, which might contain hundreds of billions of stars. The quasar's tiny core (often just light-days to light-years across) completely outshines all the stars in the galaxy combined, making the host galaxy hard to even detect in many cases. To put the numbers in perspective: A typical quasar like 3C 273 (one of the closest and best-studied) is about 4 trillion (4 × 10¹²) times more luminous than the Sun. Many quasars reach tens to hundreds of trillions of solar luminosities. The current record holder, quasar J0529-4351 (discovered/confirmed in 2024), blasts out over 500 trillion times the Sun's luminosity — and it's powered by a black hole eating the equivalent of one Sun's worth of material every single day! Other monsters like TON 618 hit around 140 trillion solar luminosities. Your "trillion times brighter than the Sun" is spot-on — and for the brightest ones, it's hundreds of trillions! That's why, from billions of light-years away, they still appear as bright point sources, like super-luminous "stars" in our telescopes. Mind-blowing, right? These beasts were way more common in the early universe (when galaxies were chaotic and full of gas to feed them), and they're basically cosmic searchlights revealing the violent youth of galaxies.