These are hypothetical types of stars that could have existed in the early universe, when the first generation of stars formed from primordial gas clouds.
These beasts would have been so massive and luminous that they would have collapsed under their own gravity, forming black holes at their cores.
However, the radiation pressure from the accretion disk around the black hole would have prevented the star from collapsing completely, creating a quasi-star that could have been as large as a solar system.
According to some theoretical models, a quasi-star could have had a radius of about 10 billion kilometers, or about 70 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
That's huge. To put it in perspective, if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you about 33 minutes to cross the diameter of a quasi-star.
In contrast, it would take you only about 8 minutes to cross the diameter of the Sun, or about 1 second to cross the diameter of the Earth.
A quasi-star would have been so big that it would have engulfed all the planets in our solar system, except Pluto (which is not a planet anyway).
No one has ever observed a quasi-star, and they may not even exist at all. Some scientists argue that such stars would have been unstable and short-lived, or that they would have been prevented from forming by other processes.
If they did exist, they would have been among the most spectacular and mysterious objects in the cosmos, shining brighter than a million suns and harboring a dark secret at their hearts.
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