Breathtaking blossoms nearly the size of our solar system are strewn across the universe -- hundreds of thousands of them. Quasars are, at the same time, among the most fiery monsters.

Astronomer Maarten Schmidt was the first to discover one and revealed it to the world 50 years ago Saturday in an article in the journal Nature.

His discovery was a sensation in the 1960s and made its way into pop culture. It was the age of the first manned space flights.

"It reverberated," Schmidt recalls. "It drew a lot of attention."

In the popular TV series Star Trek, the original crew of the Starship Enterprise was tasked with inspecting the newly discovered phenomenon close up.

Electronics company Motorola branded a line of televisions Quasar. A decade later Marvel Comics created a superhero with the same name.

Deadly behemoth

Luckily, no quasar is anywhere close to Earth, said Schmidt, who made the discovery at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

If so, "we would all be dead." It would cook the Earth's surface with massive bursts of radiation called gamma rays, he said.

Then, if it were close enough, the quasar would devour our planet, our sun, the whole solar system, in a matter of months, Schmidt said.

The largest ones can eat a hole out of the center of a galaxy. Then their vast gravitational pull makes the rest of the galaxy orbit around it.

'Supermassive' black hole

Quasars have at their core a "supermassive" black hole, which contains as much matter as a billion suns. A typical black hole contains as much as about 10 suns.

The "supermassive" black hole sucks in and crushes any material that comes near it -- whole stars and planets, Schmidt said.

In the process, the material glows infinitely hot and forms a very bright, colorful disc.

That disc, called an accretion disc, often covers an area almost the size of our solar system.

It's what gives a quasar its luminous beauty. "That disc then is brighter than ... a whole galaxy," Schmidt said.

Quasars also shoot off beams called "jets" reminiscent of phaser fire coming from the Starship Enterprise. Jets are made up of subatomic particles racing away from the quasar nearly at the speed of light.

We don't want our planet to get shot by one.

"I think that would be indeed destructive," Schmidt said.