A radiant "quasar" fueled by a supermassive black hole 1.6 billion times larger than the sun lurks in a vast area of space, more than 13 billion light-years away. The interstellar beast was recently discovered by astronomers, making it the oldest of its kind.
An international team led by researchers at the University of Arizona has named the ancient quasar J0313-1806, which is known as a light, large, remote active galactic nucleus emitting massive quantities of energy. It dates from 670 million years after the Big Bang when the planet was just 5% of its present age.
As a result, it is the most distant (and therefore the oldest) known quasar. The experts found the previous record-holding quasar in 2017.
A paper describing the finding is titled 'The discovery of a highly accreting, radio-loud quasar at z=6.82' and is published in The Astrophysical Journal.
What Are Quasars?
Quasars are areas of galaxies with many gas and dust near the supermassive black hole that most large galaxies have at their core. Space.com explained that the material spirals through the black hole, forming an accretion disk of superheated material that often blasts out in a jet.
The term "quasar" comes from the fact that they are "quasi-stellar objects," emitting the same amount of light as a trillion stars while covering a region of space smaller than our Solar System. Quasars frequently outshine the galaxies that house them due to their high energy.
Scientists look for ancient quasars billions of light-years away and learn about the early universe's environments and how galaxies developed and changed over time. Quasars will also help physicists gain a greater understanding of the interaction between galaxies and the black holes at their centers.
What Is This This Quasar Trying to Tell The Astronomers?
A team of scientists found the quasar using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope. The cosmos is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, implying that this galaxy was among the first to form when the universe was just 780 million years old.
P172+18 is the name given to the recently discovered quasar. Although more distant quasars have been detected in the past, this is the first time astronomers have detected radio jets from one this far away.
In fact, only about 10% of all quasars emit light at detectable radio frequencies and are classified as "radio noisy."
Eduardo Bañados, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and lead author of the new study, said in a statement that they had found the most distant radio-loud quasar known to date.
The discovery of the quasar and its associated black hole gave scientists new insight into how black holes evolve their size very early in the universe, in just a short time since the Big Bang.
Astronomers hope to discover more of these far-flung quasars to study their interactions with their black hole companions and learn more about how these celestial beasts evolve and expand in the universe.
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