[ad_1]
Astronomers have discovered around 750,000 quasars, which are among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe. Despite its irrelevant designation, J0313-1806 stands out from other quasars. This newly spotted object is the oldest known quasar in the universe, with a supermassive black hole more than 13 billion years old. In fact, it’s so old and huge that scientists aren’t sure exactly how it could have been formed.
The first quasars were discovered in the mid-20th century, but it wasn’t until decades later that we began to understand what these objects were. A quasar is an active galactic nucleus in which the supermassive black hole that anchors the galaxy shoots into matter to form a gas accretion disk. All of this matter spiraling into the black hole releases a torrent of electromagnetic energy that is used as a trademark of these objects. J0313-1806, for example, shines 1000 times brighter than our entire galaxy.
J0313-1806 is far away – 13.03 billion light years to be exact. This means that we see this object as it was barely 670 million years after the Big Bang, and it is again huge. Astronomers estimate that J0313-1806 has about 1.6 billion solar masses as an observed age. This isn’t out of place for a supermassive black hole elsewhere in the universe, but they’ve had more time to suck up matter and get bigger. J0313-1806 shouldn’t have had time in the early universe to get so big.
The team used ground-based instruments such as the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) to spot J0313-1806 last year. He broke the former record holder of the oldest quasar, which is about 20 million years younger. Current models of black wedge formation assume that a star collapses to form a singularity, but the “seed mass” for J0313-1806 should have been at least 10,000 solar masses to reach 1.6 billion if quickly.
The supermassive M87 black hole imagined in 2019.
The study proposes a hypothesis to explain the existence of this bizarre quasar, known as the direct collapse scenario. In this model, it was not a collapsing star that formed the supermassive black hole. Instead, a huge cloud of cold hydrogen gas collapsed inward to form a much larger black hole than any stellar source could produce. This could explain why astronomers see so many gigantic black holes in the early universe.
Unfortunately, J0313-1806 is so far away that we cannot pull together much more detail with current technology. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, however, could be precise enough to image objects such as J0313-1806. After many years of delays, NASA plans to launch the Webb Telescope in late 2021.
Now read:
[ad_2]
Source link