Because quasars are so far away, they appear as solitary brilliant points in the sky, much like stars. This is why they are frequently labeled as stars in photographs. To identify the difference between a very distant quasar and a somewhat local star, look at its colors or spectrum in addition to its picture. A star will be blueish while a quasar can be as red as a ruby. Quasars were first discovered by American astronomer Carl Wilhelm Lundburg in 1958, who was studying photos of the night sky taken with his family's telescope. He found several objects that were too bright to be stars but too remote to be galaxies. Today, we know these objects are extremely distant galaxies that exist when the universe was less than 10 million years old. Lundburg called his new discovery "quasi-stellar radio sources" because of their similarity to stellar radio sources such as Cygnus X-1. The word "quasar" comes from the Latin words for "brightest thing of its kind." In 2001, NASA scientists decided to change the name to avoid confusion with other types of astronomical objects called quasars. A quasar is an object that emits energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, including light visible to our eyes. The most powerful source of radiation coming from a quasar is known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN).