The galaxy hosting J0313-1806’s is undergoing a spurt of star formation, producing new stars 200 times faster than the Milky Way. … the earliest known example of a quasar sculpting the growth of its host galaxy, making J0313-1806 a promising target for future observations.
The energy released by such an extreme high-velocity outflow is large enough to impact the star formation in the entire quasar host galaxy. Astronomer Jinyi Yang at the University of Arizona – a co-author on the new paper – commented: In addition to weighing the monster black hole, the Keck Observatory and Gemini North observations uncovered an extremely fast outflow emanating from the quasar in the form of a high-velocity wind traveling at 20% of the speed of light. Feige Wang, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Arizona and lead author of the research paper, explained:īlack holes created by the very first massive stars could not have grown this large in only a few hundred million years. Quasar JO313-1806 has a record-setting redshift of z = 7.64.Īstronomers who made this new measurement said that the presence of such a massive black hole so early in the universe’s history challenges theories of black hole formation. What can be measured is the object’s redshift, which correlates to its distance. A distance in light-years can only be inferred, not measured directly. Quasars are typically so distant that astronomers don’t speak of their distances in light-years. The amount of energy emitted by quasars is enormous, with the most massive examples easily outshining entire galaxies. They occur when gas in the superheated accretion disk around a supermassive black hole is inexorably drawn inwards, radiating light across the electromagnetic spectrum. … the feeding frenzies of colossal supermassive black holes … the most energetic objects in the universe. Now, as explained by Keck Observatory, quasars are seen as: That’s when the idea of quasars being powered by supermassive black holes began to take hold.
And astronomers wondered how such distant objects could emit such copious amounts of radiation and still be visible from so far away. But by the 1960s and ’70s, quasars’ spectra had revealed them to be exceedingly distant. In other words, radio telescopes first spotted them, and the first optical telescopes saw them as point-like, like stars. When astronomers first began seeing quasars in the 1950s, they gave them a name that means quasi-stellar (star-like) radio source. The astronomers didn’t just investigate the quasar’s distance they also found a high-velocity wind apparently flowing from the central supermassive black hole at some 20% of light-speed. The 2021 lunar calendars are here! Order yours before they’re gone. Astronomers released this result this week at the January 2021 virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.Ī paper outlining the new work has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available in preprint format on. This object is thought to be powered by what’s now the earliest known supermassive black hole in our universe, weighing in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of our sun. It’s estimated to be some 1,000 times more luminous than our Milky Way galaxy, which is why we can still see it across such a great distance. They said they’re seeing the quasar – labeled J0313-1806 – just 670 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion light-years away. Keck Observatory and NSF’s NOIRLab both announced on January 12, 2021, that astronomers have located an object that sets a new record for being the most distant quasar and thus the most distant supermassive black hole.
Like all quasars, it’s thought to be powered by a supermassive black hole. Artist’s impression of quasar J0313-1806, a highly luminous object in the early universe.
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