by Astronomers have imaged a black hole quasar at the 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 over 3 billion times the mass of the Sun located towards the constellation Ursa Major. It was imaged by the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy using its 356 mm (14-inch) aperture robotic unit.
“This is the biggest result, to my knowledge: Never before, in fact, has a 350mm aperture telescope looked so far back in space and time,” Virtual Telescope Project founder and astrophysicist Gianluca Masi told Space.com via email. “It is so far away that its light, observed today from Earth, began its journey almost 12.9 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 900 million years old, compared to the current age estimated by 13.8 billion years.”
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SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 is the most distant visible celestial body in the northern sky that is also visible in visible light, according to the astronomer.
When it was discovered in SDSS J114816.64+525150.3, this quasar was the most distant ever seen. In the last 20 years or so, astronomers have discovered 8 quasars that lie further away. This includes P172+18, which remains the most distant quasar ever seen, located 13.02 billion light-years away, meaning we see it as it was when the universe was only 13.8 billion years old 780 million years 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, but SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 is seen in light that our eyes have changed to see.
Quasars may be the brightest objects in the universe, but seeing them in visible light is a big deal
SDSS J114816.64+525150.3, like all quasars, owes its brightness and status as the most energetic object in the sky to the amazing compact object at its heart: a supermassive black hole that consumes matter from its immediate surroundings.
These black holes can have millions, or even billions of times the mass of the sun. As they consume gas and dust from a flat plate of material around them called an “accretion disk”, their mass center of 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 electromagnetic spectrum.
In addition, magnetic material that does not interfere with the cosmic titan is sent to its poles through powerful magnetic fields. From there, the material is blasted out as jets traveling at light speed. These jets are also accompanied by bright electromagnetic emissions.
Overall, this often makes these regions (also known as active galactic nuclei (AGNs)) brighter than the combined luminosity of all the stars in the entire surrounding galaxy.
But, when they are as far away as billions of light years away, these powerful celestial objects are still difficult to see. For example, as bright and powerful as SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 is, in the sky above Earth, the north star Polaris is still a billion times brighter than seen from our planet.
It is extremely difficult to see any object that far back in time in visible light. That is because as light (electromagnetic radiation) travels, it is re-shifted, moving closer to the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The further the light travels, the more extreme this refraction effect is.
“Due to the expansion of the universe, the electromagnetic radiation experiences the so-called redshift, a cosmological effect that determines a shift towards the red end of the observed wavelength, more significant the longer the source,” said Masi in a statement. “On this quasar the size of the phenomenon is such that almost all the light is transferred into the infrared, with only a small fraction remaining in the red part of the visible domain. the infrared.”
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The detection of this extreme object at these great distances demonstrates the usefulness of the Virtual Telescope Project, established in 2006, and the remotely controlled robotic telescopes.
Among the projects, other observational targets are comets, supernovae, eclipses, and meteor showers, delivering images of these celestial bodies to millions of people around the world. However, the observation of SDSS J114816.64+525150.3 may be the Virtual Telescope Project’s best achievement to date.
“Our instrument has achieved the incredible feat of immortalizing the most remote celestial body in the northern sky visible at visible light wavelengths, at the edge of the universe,” said Masi.
