![]() "This detection is a surprising and major discovery for decades we thought that these lensed quasars in the early universe should be very common, but this is the first of its kind that we have found," said Fabio Pacucci, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University who observed J043947.08+163415.7 with Fan at Keck Observatory. "We can even look for gas around the black hole and what the black hole may be influencing in the galaxy." "Without this high level of magnification, it would make it impossible for us to see the galaxy," said co-author Feige Wang, a physics postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His team got lucky with finding J043947.08+163415.7, because the quasar is so bright it drowns out the starlight from the especially faint foreground lensing galaxy. Fan proposes that many other remote quasars have been missed due to this light contamination. As a result, they may be overlooked in quasar searches because their color is diluted to resemble that of a normal galaxy. However, because very distant quasars are identified by their red color (due to absorption by diffuse gas in intergalactic space), sometimes their light is "contaminated," and looks bluer because of the starlight of an intervening galaxy. The quasar would have gone undetected if not for the power of gravitational lensing, which boosted its brightness by a factor of 50. The quasar existed at a transitional period in the universe's evolution, called reionization, where light from young galaxies and quasars reheated the obscuring hydrogen that cooled off not long after the Big Bang. The detection provides a rare opportunity to study a zoomed-in image of how such black holes accompanied star formation in the very early universe and influenced the assembly of galaxies. An immense amount of energy is emitted as the black hole consumes material around it. Shining with light equivalent to 600 trillion suns, the quasar is fueled by a supermassive black hole at the heart of a young galaxy in the process of forming. ![]() The super-bright quasar, cataloged as J043947.08+163415.7, could hold the record of being the brightest in the early universe for some time, making it a unique object for follow-up studies. "We don't expect to find many quasars brighter than that in the whole observable universe," said lead investigator Xiaohui Fan, Regents' Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. Though researchers have searched for these very remote quasars for over 20 years, a rare and fortuitous celestial alignment made this one visible to them. This effect is called gravitational lensing. The gravitational field of the closer galaxy warps space itself, bending and amplifying the distant quasar's light. Though the quasar is very far away - 12.8 billion light-years - astronomers can detect it because a galaxy closer to Earth acts as a lens and makes the quasar look extra bright. The results are published in today's issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters and were announced this afternoon during a press conference at the 233rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii Island, as well as the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS1) operated by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy on Haleakala, Maui - the researchers discovered that the brilliant beacon is a quasar, the core of a galaxy with a black hole ravenously eating material surrounding it. ![]() With the help of multiple, world-class telescopes in Hawaii - Gemini Observatory, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), United Kingdom Infra-Red Telescope (UKIRT), and W. Maunakea, Hawaii - Astronomers have discovered the brightest object ever seen at a time when the universe was less than one billion years old. This object is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early universe. Video: This animation shows an artist's impression of J043947.08+163415.7, a very distant quasar powered by a supermassive black hole. ![]()
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