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A newly discovered quasar of the early universe is the most distant found to date that shoots powerful radio jets.
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently discovered the quasar, called P172 + 18, which is so far away that it takes about 13 billion years for light from this quasar reaches Earth, where we observe the object as it was when the universe was only 780 million years old. While the new discovery is not the farthest quasar ever detected, it appears to be the farthest radio-strong quasar, or quasar emitting radio jets.
Quasars are extremely bright celestial objects powered by supermassives black holes which are at the center of certain galaxies; sometimes quasars are so bright that they eclipse the very galaxies that contain them. Radio-strong quasars emit powerful jets which are strong sources of radio wavelength emissions. 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.
“As soon as we got the data, we inspected it with the naked eye, and we knew immediately that we had discovered the most distant radio-strong quasar known to date”, Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute for astronomy in Germany, who led this discovery alongside ESO astronomer Chiara Mazzucchelli, said in a press release.
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The distant quasar that shoots jets is fueled by a supermassive black hole that is about 300 million times more massive than our sun and is growing rapidly, attracting and swallowing surrounding matter with its gravity.
“The black hole is consuming matter very quickly, increasing in mass at one of the highest rates ever seen,” Mazzucchelli said in the same statement.
Researchers believe there may be a link between the rapid growth of black holes like this and jets that shoot out from radio-noisy quasars like P172 + 18, the statement said. In particular, astronomers believe that these powerful jets could interact with the gases nearby in a way that pushes the gases into the gravitational grip of these black holes, thus increasing the amount of gas that falls into them.
So, as they uncover more details about this quasar, scientists will also continue to learn more 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 an additional cornerstone for understanding the Early Universe, where we came from, and ultimately ourselves,” Mazzucchelli said.
In addition to the VLT and the Magellan Telescope, which helped scientists originally identify the radio signal they now know to be a quasar, the team also used facilities such as the Very Large Array (VLA) of the National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO) in New Mexico. and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii.
This work was described in an article published March 8 in The Astrophysical Journal.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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