NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Has Peered Deeper Than Ever Into A Quasar, Revealing Some Weird Features
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has peered deeper than ever into a quasar, revealing a bunch of “weird” features in its vicinity.
A quasar is a galactic center that glows brightly and is powered by supermassive black holes consuming material.
The one that Hubble studied is called 3C 273. It is extremely bright, and it would be as bright as our own sun if it weren’t billions of light-years away from us.
A new instrument has helped reduce the glare of 3C 273, allowing the telescope to get a closer look at the quasar.
Hubble’s imaging spectrograph was used to investigate 3C 273 more closely. The instrument acted like a coronagraph, a cover that astronomers use to block the sun’s photosphere so they can observe the outer atmosphere or corona.
Since the imaging spectrograph blocked the bright light coming from the center of the quasar, Hubble was able to catch a glimpse of the structure around the black hole in a way that had never been done before.
“We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure,” said Bin Ren of the Côte d’Azur in France. “This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole.”
Some of the objects could be small satellite galaxies falling toward the black hole, supplying it with materials in the form of gas and dust that power the quasar.
Around one million quasars are scattered throughout the skies, but these supermassive black hole-powered events became increasingly common about three billion years after the Big Bang. Supermassive black holes with large masses are thought to be located at the center of all large galaxies.
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However, not all galaxies contain a quasar because not all supermassive black holes are surrounded by an abundance of gas, dust, and stars to feed on.
When supermassive black holes are surrounded by an accretion disk, which is a flattened cloud of gas and dust, their gravity causes the black hole to heat up and glow brightly.
In addition, material that does not get eaten up by the black hole is directed toward its poles by intense magnetic fields that accelerate these particles to nearly the speed of light.
Then, this superheated gas or plasma erupts as two astrophysical jets that can extend hundreds of light-years into space, accompanied by a strong stream of light. As a result, the regions known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), or quasars, are extremely bright.
The new Hubble observations have revealed information about the 300,000-light-year-long jet streaming out of 3C 273.
The researchers compared the new images of 3C 273 to images from 22 years ago. They concluded that the jet moves faster when it is at a greater distance from the supermassive black hole within the quasar.
“Our previous view was very limited, but Hubble is allowing us to understand the complicated quasar morphology and galactic interactions in detail,” Ren said.
“In the future, looking further at 3C 273 in infrared light with the James Webb Space Telescope might give us more clues.”
You can view the quasar photos from NASA here.
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