Astronauts have yet to see the farthest quasar, and, like a few others found at this distance, it’s a big problem (literally): The black hole that powers it is far too big for so as long as it has been around.
The quasar is named after its coordinates in the sky, J031343.84−180636.4 (let’s call it J0313 for short). It was found in a survey of the skies using Pan-STARRS, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and the Rapid Response System, a relatively medium-sized 1.8-meter telescope nonetheless gives very deep images of the skies. heavens, exploring the skies using different filters to get color information about objects. Long-distance quasars are usually bright in red but emit very little light at blue waves, making them a little easier to see.
Once J0313 was identified as a candidate, the Magellan and Gemini telescopes took on a much larger spectrum confirming the extreme speed: The light we see from this object traveled away. over 13 billion years to get here, meaning we’ll see it as it was about 670 million years after the Big Bang itself!
And that’s a problem. Quasar is what we call active galaxy. Every giant galaxy has an enormous black hole, and in some cases that black hole is actively feeding, sticking down gas and dust and the stars around it. This material forms a large flat disk around it, which becomes interestingly hot. It shines so wildly that it can send out the stars in the rest of the galaxy together!
To make a case more intense (again, literally) the magnetic field in the disk goes up to twin vortices, such as tornados, which pull a case from the disk and blow it away from just outside. the black hole. If these behaviors are more or less marked in our direction they make the galaxy even brighter. That’s what makes the galaxy quasar.
Given the apparent brightness of J0313 and its speed, astronomers measure its total brightness – how much energy it delivers – as 36 trillion times of the sun.
That’s … clear. It almost is three thousand times lighter than our own Milky way. Oof.
So what about the supermassive black hole powering all this? In the case of J0313, the deep spectacles that Magellan captured show the mass of the black hole. As the business goes around the disk, some of the business is gone from us, so its light is shifted to red, and some towards us, which is moving blue. The degree of smearing out of colors can be used to determine the mass of the black hole, and the number obtained is soul-squeezing: 1.6 billion times the mass of the sun.
We know a lot of black holes with that mass, and some even bigger ones. But those have taken billions of years to grow to that size. At best the one in J0313 is 670 million years old, and in fact slightly smaller. How did it grow to such large levels?
This is an ongoing problem in cosmology. We’ve seen other quotas near this distance, and they also have incredibly black holes in them, larger than we think they’ll get in the short (galaxy speaking) time they’ve been around.
The problem is, black holes can only eat stuff so fast. The subject tends to form these discs around them, and the disc is so hot that the radiation it erupts hits the falling material towards the black hole and blows it away. For a given large black hole, the amount at which it can eat is balanced by the radiation it emits, called the Eddington Allowance. Eat too fast, and cut off his own food supply.
That then makes it very difficult to find a black hole with over a billion solar supplies so quickly. There are a number of ideas on how you can get around this, however. Smaller black holes may form (with thousands or hundreds of thousands of times the sun) – black seed holes – and these will grow rapidly and converge in the nascent galaxy. That can help a lot, although they still need to grow very fast.
It is not entirely clear how this process works, however. We do not know many quasars at this distance (it is a large sky, there are not many so far away, and it can be difficult to pick them out of a densely populated area), but with the number that ‘s what we have, they all have big black holes that make them grow somehow. I note that there may be quasars out there with lower volume black holes and less powerful distributions, but they are narrower and harder to find. And finding them would just indicate that there may be lower black holes, but it still leaves the problem as to how the really monstrous ones do.
The galaxy itself around the black hole appears to emit stars at a rate or two of what the Milky Way does, leaving it what we call it galaxy starburst. This could be related to the mass of the black hole; lots of stuff to make stars and feed a hungry beast in his heart.
It is important that you understand all of this. For one thing, we know that galaxies and their black holes grow together, so understanding one means understanding the other. But it also tells us what the conditions were like when the Universe was very young and still in its infancy. Moreover, the light from those distant objects passes by objects closer to us on its way here, and how they react to that light tells us even more about the world not so far away.
Now that we know it’s out there, J0313 will be a prime target for a lot of follow-up ideas to learn more about. These quotas are a big problem, and the more we know about them, the more likely we are to find the solution.