Most Distant Quasar Discovered Sheds Light On How Black Holes Grow (phys.org) 11
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona has observed a luminous quasar 13.03 billion light-years from Earth -- the most distant quasar discovered to date. Dating back to 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% its current age, the quasar hosts a supermassive black hole equivalent to the combined mass of 1.6 billion suns.
In addition to being the most distant -- and by extension, earliest -- quasar known, the object is the first of its kind to show evidence of an outflowing wind of super-heated gas escaping from the surroundings of the black hole at a fifth of the speed of light. In addition to revealing a strong quasar-driven wind, the new observations also show intense star formation activity in the host galaxy where the quasar, formally designated J0313-1806, is located. The researchers will present their findings, which have been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, during a press conference and a scientific talk at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which will be held virtually Jan. 11-15.
In addition to being the most distant -- and by extension, earliest -- quasar known, the object is the first of its kind to show evidence of an outflowing wind of super-heated gas escaping from the surroundings of the black hole at a fifth of the speed of light. In addition to revealing a strong quasar-driven wind, the new observations also show intense star formation activity in the host galaxy where the quasar, formally designated J0313-1806, is located. The researchers will present their findings, which have been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, during a press conference and a scientific talk at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which will be held virtually Jan. 11-15.
which will be held virtually Jan. 11-15. (Score:3)
...starting the day before yesterday. Don't miss it! :)
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Redshift makes more sense (Score:5, Insightful)
At the end of the article it shows the relevant information: redshift = 7.642.
When you go that far in the past, distances given in billion of light-years do not have much use, as the universe has changed in the time it took for the light of the quasar to reach us.
Still, a detection at a redshift of 7.6 is indeed impressive.
A Luminous Quasar at Redshift 7.642, arXiv:2101.03179 [astro-ph.GA] arxiv.org/abs/2101.03179
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Reasonably well-read people who are not astrophysicists know what a light-year is, and probably have some idea of scale for it -- that the star nearest to our sun is about 4 light-years away, and that our galaxy is on the order of tens of thousands light-years across. How many people know what scale corresponds to a redshift of 7.6?
Redshift may make more sense as a reported measure for astronomers, which is why it's in the title of the paper, but it makes much less sense as a measure reported to a much bro
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I'm pretty sure that the redshift is reported because it is the measurement of distance we have the most confidence in with the smallest error bar, it can be directly measured from the emission spectrum. It also has the feature of directly impacts the processing of the data more so than the distance. Events at higher redshifts take longer and other components like the velocity measurements get shifted.
I do agree light years is way better for media reporting, redshifts are almost meaningless for everyone oth
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Makes you wonder how big that black hole is now.
If it is so distant... (Score:2)
...the light-shedding must be minuscule.
3C273 (Score:2)
Neat. The only quasar I've seen with my own eyes is 3C273, a faint bluish "star" in Virgo. Right on the limit of what I could see in an 8" SCT under dark skies, the most distant object I'm likely to see.
The next night I went searching for the nearest star and identified Alpha Centauri C (aka Proxima Centauri) in a busy Milky Way field. Alpha Centauri A and B are a nice double star.
...laura