Astronomers have discovered a massive radio structure with no known purpose around the brightest quasar in the universe

 

The first and brightest quasar ever found is still on fire with mysteries.

Astronomers have found two enormous, unexplained objects erupting from the brightest black hole in the universe known to man.

The supermassive black hole known as 3C 273 was found in 1959 during a survey of cosmic radio-wave sources. It is known as a quasar, an acronym for "quasi-stellar object." This is because the light released by these behemoths is strong enough to be confused for starlight. Although black holes do not produce light, the largest ones are surrounded by enormous swirls of gas known as accretion disks. As gas falls into the black hole at speeds approaching the speed of light, friction heats the disk, causing it to blaze with radiation, typically detected as radio waves.

Quasar 3C-273 was discovered to be the very first quasar ever found. It is also the brightest, with a luminosity more significant than 4 trillion times that of the sun that shines on Earth, despite being located more than 2.4 billion light-years away. Scientists over several decades have intensively researched the flaming black hole nucleus; yet, because of the quasar's extreme brightness, researchers have had difficulty exploring the surrounding galaxy that is home to the black hole. Ironically, due to the extraordinary intelligence of quasars, scientists know very little about the influence these objects have on the galaxies that they inhabit.

However, a new study released on April 28 in The Astrophysical Journal might ultimately change that.

The research involved a group of scientists calibrating the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile. The study's objective was to distinguish between the light produced by the quasar 3C 273 and the light produced by its host galaxy. They were only provided with the radio waves emitted by the universe that contained the quasar. Still, these waves revealed two gigantic and intriguing radio structures that had never been seen before.

One of the structures seems to be a gigantic blob of radio light that covers the whole galaxy and continues for tens of thousands of light-years in the southwest direction. This radio fog overlaps with the second structure, a massive energy jet known as an astrophysical jet that extends for tens of thousands of light-years. Together, these two structures make up the third structure.

It is not entirely clear to scientists how or why astrophysical jets exist. However, they are aware that jets are frequently observed in the regions surrounding quasars and other supermassive black holes and that jets likely originate from interactions between a black hole and its dusty accretion disk. Jets are characterized by their ability to approach the speed of light and their composition of ionized (electrically charged) matter.

Depending on the radio frequency at which they are observed, the radiation emitted by these jets can look either brighter or dimmer. However, the vast radio structure surrounding galaxy 3C 273 displays a consistent brightness regardless of the frequency at which it was observed. This leads the researchers to believe that the two radio structures are produced by distinct processes that are not connected.

After putting several hypotheses to the test, the research group concluded that the vast radio fog surrounding the galaxy is caused by hydrogen gas capable of generating stars and being ionized directly by the quasar. According to the researchers, this is the first time that ionized gas has been discovered, extending tens of thousands of light-years around a supermassive black hole. The distance is measured in light-years.

This discovery sheds light on a question that has been puzzling astronomers for a long time: Is it possible for a quasar to ionize such a large amount of gas in its host galaxy that it inhibits the birth of new stars? The researchers wanted to answer this question, so they compared the galaxy's estimated gas mass to that of other galaxies of the same size and kind. They discovered that even though the quasar had ionized a genuinely mind-boggling amount of gas, leaving it worthless for forming new stars, star formation in the galaxy was not visibly depressed. This leads one to believe that thriving and expanding universes are still possible despite the presence of radiation-belching quasars at their centers.

"This discovery provides a new avenue to studying problems previously tackled using observations by optical light," Shinya Komugi, the lead study author and an associate professor at Kogakuin University in Tokyo, said in a statement. "This discovery provides a new avenue to study problems previously tackled using observations of infrared light." We anticipate being able to grasp how a galaxy develops as a result of its interaction with the central core if we apply the same method to other quasars and use them as examples.

 

 

Article source : https://www.livescience.com/radio-structure-brightest-quasar 

Image source   : https://pixabay.com/id/photos/astronomi-cerah-rasi-bintang-gelap-1867616/

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