13 Billion-Year-Old Quasars !
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have made groundbreaking observations of supermassive black hole-powered quasars dating back 13 billion years.
Artist’s impression of the record-breaking quasar J0529-4351
A quasar 500 trillion times brighter than the sun has taken the title of the brightest known object in the universe. It appears to be powered by a supermassive black hole that is devouring a sun-sized amount of mass every day.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
Artist's impression of a quasar like P172 + 18.
A central supermassive black hole attracts neighboring gas. This swirls through an accretion disk at high speed into the black hole. The gas is heated to very high temperatures by friction, which leads to the release of intense UV radiation.
Twisted magnetic fields create focused jets above and below the accretion disk, which carry away part of the hot, ionized gas.
These jets are a source of the strong radio emission.
Image: ESO / M. Grain knife
Next week, Europe’s star-mapping Gaia mission will release a new celestial reference frame, built from the positions of 1.6 million quasars.
Credit: ESA/ATG MEDIALAB; ESO/S. BRUNIER.
An artist’s impression of the Wolfe Disk, a giant rotating disk galaxy in the early universe. The galaxy was discovered when the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, a radio telescope in Chile, examined the light from a more distant quasar, top left.
Credit...NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello
Quasar Tsunami!
Credits: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)