A newly discovered kwasar from the early universe was found the farthest to date that emits powerful radio emitters.
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Southern Telescope (VLT) recently discovered the quasar, called P172 + 18, which is so far away that it takes about 13 billion years before the light of this quasar enters Earth. reach, where we observe. the object as it was when the universe was only 780 million years old. While the new find is not the farthest quasar ever detected, it appears to be the radio-loudest quasar or the radio-radiating quasar.
Quasars are extremely bright celestial objects driven by supermassive black holes which lies in the center of some galaxies; sometimes quasars are so bright that they obscure the galaxies they contain. Radiohard quasars emit powerful rays that are strong sources of radio wavelength. This quasar was first identified as a radio source when scientists using the Magellan telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile detected these powerful jets.
“Once we got the data, we examined it with a view and we immediately knew we had discovered the farthest radio-hard quasar known so far,” led Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Germany. discovery with ESO astronomer Chiara Mazzucchelli, said in a statement.
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The distant jet-shooting brush is powered by a supermassive black hole that is about 300 million times more massive than our sun and grows rapidly, absorbing and swallowing the surrounding material with its gravity.
“The black hole eats up matter rapidly and grows in mass at one of the highest rates ever observed,” Mazzucchelli said in the same statement.
The researchers think there may be a link between the rapid growth of black holes like these and the jets that shoot out of radio-hard quasars like P172 + 18, according to the statement. In particular, astronomers think that these powerful jets can communicate with nearby gases in a way that pushes the gases into the gravity of these black holes, thus increasing how much gas falls into them.
As they discover more details about this quasar, scientists will also continue to learn about the supermassive black hole that accompanies it far into the universe.
“I find it very exciting to discover ‘new’ black holes for the first time, and to provide another building block to understand the primeval universe, where we come from, and ultimately ourselves,” Mazzucchelli said.
In addition to the VLT and the Magellan Telescope, which helped scientists originally identify the radio signal that they believe is now a quasar, the team also used facilities, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii.
This work was described in a paper Published March 8 in The Astrophysical Journal.
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