An international team of astronauts has yet to find the farthest quasar. The quasar is called J0313-1806, and is as far away as it was when the universe was only 670 million years old. This discovery provides scientists around the world with valuable insights into how giant galaxies and the amazing black holes in their hearts formed early in the universe.
J0313-1806 is 13 billion light years from Earth and is powered by a massive black hole that is over 1.6 billion times larger than the Sun and 1000 times brighter than the entire Milky Way constellation. The speed of the quasar was determined with high precision using ALMA in Chile. Quasars form when the incredibly powerful gravity of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s core pulls in surrounding material, creating an orbiting disk of overheated material around the black hole.
The process releases a lot of energy, making the quasar extremely clear. Often, the quasar takes out the entire galaxy. The central black hole J0313-1806 is twice the size of the black hole in the old plate. Researcher Feige Wang says this is the earliest evidence of how a supermassive black hole affects the galaxy around it.
Wang says scientists knew this had to happen from looking at galaxies not so far away, but it was never seen to happen so early in the universe. The mass of the black hole at the center of J0313-1806 so early in the history of the universe governs two theoretical models for how objects shape.
In the first of these models, large individual stars explode into supernovae falling into black holes that merge into larger black holes. The second model claimed that dense clumps of stars would fall into a large black hole. However, both theories use processes that take too long to make a black hole as large as J0313-1806 at the age we see it from Earth.