The brightest quasar of early universe shines with the light of 600 trillion suns

Scientists have discovered the energy core of a distant galaxy that breaks the record for the brightest object in the early universe, which sparked, corresponding to 600 trillion suns.

The researchers identified the object – an object driven by a black hole, called quasar, among the brightest inhabitants of the universe – due to a random alignment with a smoke galaxy closer to the Earth, which increased its light.

Quasar is 12.8 billion light-years away and shines in the heart of a galaxies in the early part of the history of the universe, called the epoch of reionization, when the first stars and galaxies began to burn the nebula of neutral hydrogen through the cosmos. The researchers released their discovery on January 9 at the Winter Meetings of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. [Watch: The Brightest Quasar of the Early Universe Explained]

"This is something we've been searching for a long time," said Xiaohui Fan, a researcher at the University of Arizona, and the lead author of the new work, in a statement by the Hubble Space Telescope Group. "We do not expect to find many quasars that will be brighter than those in the entire observational universe!"

Several powerful telescopes and Hubble Space Telescope combined their observations of the facility, now designated as J043947.08 + 163415.7, to learn more. The quasar gets its brightness from a supermassive black hole: the material from the gas disk that surrounds the black hole falls into, leading to an explosion of energy at different wavelengths, according to the claim. The quasar probably brightened when the universe was less than a billion years old, but some of its light has now only reached the Earth. According to new observations, the black hole that supplies this quasar is hundreds of millions of times larger than the mass of the sun.

Despite the intense light, the distance to the quasar is so large that it would not be visible if not for a lucky positioning trick. Through the process called gravity treatment, the light from the quasar around the object and the Earth bends around the galaxy, which increases our view: the quasar appears three times larger and 50 times lighter than it would otherwise be said. . It was even noticed because the intermediate galaxy was sufficiently dimmed not to extinguish the light from the ultra-distant quasar.

Learning more about this quasar, which also produces 10,000 stars per year, can teach researchers more about this distant but crucial time in history when the first stars and galaxies were blown up and shaped by the universe as we know it today. More telescopes join the search in order to try and get to know more about the system.

"This discovery is a surprising and great discovery; for decades we thought that these quasars in the early universe should be very common, but this is the first thing we found," Fabio Pacucci, a researcher at Yale University, co-author at work and chief the author in the quasar's follow-up article is written in the Keck Observatory statement. "It gives us tips on how to find" phantom quasars "- sources that are out there but can not be detected.

"Our theoretical study predicts that a large part of these" phantom quasars "may be missing," Paucci added. "If they are really numerous, it would revolutionize our idea of ​​what happened immediately after the Big Taco, and even changed our look at how these cosmic monsters are grown up in the masses. "

The new work was described in detail on January 9 in the Astrophysical Journal.

Send email to Sarah Lewin at [email protected] or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Original article on Space.com.