Astronomers have found the farthest quasar seen so far and, like a handful of others at this distance, it presents a huge problem (literally): the black hole that feeds it is too large for the time it takes. exists.
The quasar is named after its coordinates in the sky, J031343.84−180636.4 (call it J0313 for short). It was found in a sky survey using Pan-STARRS, the panoramic survey telescope and the rapid response system, a relatively modest 1.8-meter telescope that nevertheless takes very deep images of the sky, inspecting the sky. using different filters to get color information. about objects. Very distant quasars are usually bright red, but emit very little light at blue wavelengths, making them a little easier to spot.
Once J0313 was identified as a candidate, the much larger Magellan and Gemini telescopes took on a spectrum confirming the immense distance: the light we see from this object traveled more than 13 billion years to get here, that is, we see it about 670 million years after the Big Bang itself.
And that is a problem. A quasar is an object we call active galaxy. All large galaxies have a supermassive black hole in their core, and in some cases this black hole actively feeds, swallowing gas and dust and stars around them. This material forms a huge flat disk around it, which heats up infernally. It shines so fiercely that it can easily surpass the stars of the rest of the galaxy combined.
To make matter more intense (again, literally), the disk’s magnetic field climbs into twin vortices, like tornadoes, that rip the matter from the disk and destroy it just outside the black hole. If these beams are more or less pointed in our direction, they make the galaxy even brighter. This is what makes the galaxy a quasar.
Given the brightness of J0313 sight and its distance, astronomers measure its total brightness (how much energy it gives off) as 36 billions times that of the Sun.
This is … brilliant. It’s almost three thousand times brighter than our Milky Way. Oof.
So what about the supermassive black hole that feeds all this? In the case of J0313, the deep spectra of Magellan reveal the mass of the black hole. As matter revolves around the disk, some of the matter moves away from us, so that its light moves toward red and others toward us, which moves toward blue. The amount of this colored stains can be used to determine the mass of the black hole and the number they obtained is shredder: 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun..
We know of many black holes with this mass, and some even larger ones. But these have taken billions of years to reach this size. At best, the J0313 is 670 million years old and actually a little less. How did it grow to such enormous proportions so quickly?
This is an ongoing problem in cosmology. We have seen other quasars at about this distance, and they also have immense black holes, larger than we think they can get in the short time (galactically speaking) they have gone through.
The problem is that black holes can only eat material so quickly. Matter tends to form these disks around it, and the disk is so hot that the exploding radiation hits the material that falls into the black hole and makes it fly. For a given black hole in mass, the speed at which it can eat is balanced by the radiation it emits, called Eddington limit. Eat too fast and cut off your own food supply.
In turn, this means that it is very difficult to get a black hole with more than a billion solar masses so quickly. There are several ideas on how to fix this, though. Perhaps smaller black holes (with thousands or hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the Sun) are formed – black holes of seeds – and these grow rapidly and melt into the nascent galaxy. This can help a lot, although they still have to grow very fast.
But it is not clear how this process works. We don’t know many quasars at this distance (it’s a big sky, there aren’t that many from a distance and it can be hard to pick them from a crowded area), but the fact that from the handful to see, they all have huge central black holes that it means they grow somehow. I will notice that there may be quasars with black holes of lower mass and less powerful emissions, but they are weaker and harder to find. And finding them would only point out that black holes of too low and safe mass can be formed, but it still leaves the problem of how truly monstrous ones do it.
The galaxy itself surrounding the black hole apparently pulls out of the stars at a rate a couple of hundred times what the Milky Way does, making it what we call starburst galaxy. This may be related to the mass of the black hole; there is a lot of material to make stars and feed a hungry beast in its core.
It is important to 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 extremely young and still in its infancy. In addition, the light from these distant objects passes through objects closer to us on their way here, and how they affect this light tells us even more about the not-so-distant universe.
Now that we know it exists, J0313 will be a prime target for many follow-up observations for more information. These quasars pose a big problem, and the more we know about it, the more likely we are to discover the solution.