Thanks to the duet of the natural lens and the Hubble space telescope, astronomers discovered the brightest quasar J043947.08 + 163415.7 (or J0439 + 1634) in the early Universe, which gives an additional idea of the birth of galaxies in less than one billion years after the Big Bang.
If it were not for the natural space telescope, then the light from an object that reached the Earth would be 50 times weaker. The discovery shows that the heavily lensed quasars do exist, despite the fact that we have been looking for them for more than 20 years and have never met at such great distances before.
-Xiaohui Fan, lead author of the University of Arizona (USA)
Quasars are extremely bright cores of active galaxies. The powerful glow of such objects is created by a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk. Gas falling into a space monster emits an incredible amount of energy that can be observed at all wavelengths.
The detected object, cataloged as J043947.08 + 163415.7 (J0439 + 1634), is no exception to this rule – its brightness is equivalent to about 600 trillions of suns, and the supermassive black hole that creates it is 700 million times more massive than our star.
However, even the sharp eye of Hubble alone cannot consider such a bright object located at a great distance from the Earth. And here he comes to the aid of gravity and luck. Dim galaxy, located directly between the quasar and the telescope, bends the light from J0439 + 1634 and makes it 50 times brighter than it would have been without the effect of gravitational lensing.
The data obtained in this way showed that, first, the quasar is located at a distance of 12.8 billion light years from us, and, secondly, its supermassive black hole not only absorbs gas, but also provokes the birth of stars with amazing speed — up to 10,000 luminaries per year. For comparison, in the Milky Way for this period of time only one star is formed.
The properties and remoteness of J0439 + 1634 make it the main target in studying the evolution of distant quasars and the role of supermassive black holes in the process of star formation.
-Fabian Walter, co-author of the study from the Astronomy Institute of the Max Planck Society (Germany)
Objects similar to J0439 + 1634 existed in the era of the reionization of the young Universe, when the radiation of young galaxies and quasars heated up the hydrogen, cooled down over 400,000 years since the Big Bang. Thanks to this process, the Universe has turned from a neutral plasma into an ionized one. However, it is still not clear which objects provided reionizing photons, and similarly open quasars can help uncover a long-standing mystery.
For this reason, the team continues to collect as much data as possible about J0439 + 1634. She is currently analyzing a detailed 20-hour spectrum obtained by the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, which will allow them to identify the chemical composition and temperature of intergalactic gas in the early Universe. In addition, the ALMA radio telescope array and the future NASA space telescope “James Webb” will be used for observations. Using the collected data, astronomers hope to examine the vicinity of a supermassive black hole within a radius of 150 light years and measure the effect of its gravity on gas and star formation.
Brightest quasar of the young universe
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