Astronomers have imaged a feeding quasar powered by a black hole at the very edge of the universe, so far away that it was seen as it appeared less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
The quasar, named SDSS J114816.64+525150.3, is powered by a supermassive black hole of more than 3 billion times the mass of the Sun, located toward the constellation Ursa Major. The image was taken by the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy using its 356 mm (14 in) aperture robotic unit.
“As far as I know, this is a record result: never before has a telescope with an aperture of 350 mm looked so far back in space and time,” Gianluca Masi, founder and astrophysicist of the Virtual Telescope Project, told Space via email .com. “It is so far away that the light observed from Earth today began its journey almost 12.9 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 900 million years old, compared to the current age which is 13.8 billion years is estimated.”
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SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 represents, according to the astronomer, the most distant visible celestial body in the northern sky that is also observable in visible light.
When discovered in SDSS J114816.64+525150.3, this quasar was the most distant ever observed. In the intervening twenty years, astronomers discovered eight more distant quasars. This includes P172+18, the most distant quasar ever seen, located 13.02 billion light-years away, meaning we see it as it was when the 13.8 billion year old universe was only about 780 million years old. was old.
The difference is that P172+18 and the other more distant quasars were identified in radio light and then in ultraviolet (UV) to near-infrared (NIR) light, all invisible to the human eye, while SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 is did. seen in the light our eyes evolved to see.
Quasars may be the brightest objects in the universe, but seeing them in visible light is a challenge
SDSS J114816.64+525150.3, like all quasars, owes its brightness and its status as the most energetic object in the sky to the monstrous compact object at its heart: a supermassive black hole that eagerly eats matter from its immediate environment.
These black holes can have a mass millions or even billions of times greater than that of the Sun. As they consume gas and dust from a flattened sheet of material around them, called an ‘accretion disk’, their immense gravity generates enormous tidal forces in that disk. This heats the accretion disk’s gas and dust to incredible temperatures, causing it to glow brightly in light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Furthermore, matter that is not engorged by cosmic titan is guided towards the poles by powerful magnetic fields. From there, this matter is blown outward like jet planes traveling at nearly the speed of light. These jets are also accompanied by bright electromagnetic emissions.
Taken together, this often makes these regions (also known as active galactic nuclei (AGNs)) brighter than the combined light from every star in the entire galaxy surrounding them.
But even though they are billions of light years away, these powerful celestial bodies are still difficult to observe. As bright and powerful as SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 is, in the sky above Earth, for example, the north star Polaris is still a billion times brighter as seen from our planet.
It is extremely difficult to see an object so far back in time in visible light. That’s because as light (electromagnetic radiation) travels, it becomes red-shifted, bringing it closer to the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The longer the light travels, the more extreme this redshift effect is.
“As a result of the expansion of the universe, electromagnetic radiation experiences the so-called redshift, a cosmological effect that determines a shift towards the red end of the observed wavelength, more pronounced the further away from the source,” Masi said in a statement. “On this quasar, the magnitude of the phenomenon is such that almost all of the light is shifted toward the infrared, leaving only a small portion in the extremely red side of the visible domain. The very few known quasars that lie further away are only observable in the infrared.”
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The detection of this extreme object at these enormous distances illustrates the utility of the Virtual Telescope Project, founded in 2006, and its remote-controlled robotic telescopes.
Other observation targets of the projects include comets, supernovae, eclipses and meteor showers, providing images of these celestial bodies to millions of people around the world. Still, the SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 observation may be the Virtual Telescope Project’s best performance to date.
“Our instrument has managed to immortalize the incredible feat of the most remote celestial body in the northern sky observable at visible light wavelengths, at the edge of the universe,” Masi concluded.