Astronomers wonder if galaxies are falling into this super black hole

The Hubble Space Telescope captured strange, unknown objects in the most detailed images ever taken in a flash. space around the quasar.

Quasarsshort for “quasi-stellar objects,” galaxy cores were unusually bright in the early universe. Although these very distant objects look like stars in the sky, they are the result of light from the sun supermassive black holes.

Telescope, partnership in between NASA and the European Space Agency, zooming in on the quasar 3C 273, about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth. What he saw inside the quasar was amazing and will inspire more research in the years to come.

“Our colleagues are excited because they have never seen this much detail before,” said Bin Ren, an astronomer at the Université Côte d’Azur in France. statement.

While “blobs” may not sound very scientific, that’s how Ren and his team of researchers describe what they saw. in their paperpublished in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics earlier this year. Along with various blobs, they saw a mysterious L-shaped object. I Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which runs Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopeannounced the findings this week.

So what could these things be?

Scientists have suggested that at least some of the factors could be small spiral galaxies on the way to the central black hole, which is what powers the quasar. All these objects were found within 16,000 light years of the black hole.

But that’s just an educated guess. Astronomers may be able to better identify those strange objects with follow-up observations using the Webb telescope, the world’s leading observatory that detects light at infrared wavelengths.

Astronomers used the coronagraph, an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope, to blot out the quasar’s bright light so they could study its surroundings.
Credit: NASA / ESA

Black holes are some of the most volatile objects in space. They have no place, like a planet or a star. Instead, they have a border called “event horizon,” or the point of no return. If something changes too closely, it will eventually come innever escape the gravity clutch in the hole.

How supermassive black holes the form is not even available. Astronomers believe that these invisible giants are hiding in the center of almost every galaxy. The latest Hubble observations of him it strengthened the theory that they start at the dusty edges of exploding galaxies, where new stars are formed quickly, but scientists still scoff at that.

Quasar 3C 273, the first to be discovered, is as bright as 4 billion suns or 100 times more luminous. Milky Way.

“For Hubble, staring at quasar 3C 273 is like looking directly into a blinding headlight and trying to spot an ant crawling around the edge,” according to the Space Telescope Science Institute.

When astronomer Maarten Schmidt discovered it in 1963, it looked like a star but was too far away for a single star to be the source. Since then scientists have discovered that quasars are remnants of the earliest times in the universe.

The nearest quasars to Earth are only a few hundred million light-years away, which means they are seen now as they were seen hundreds of millions of years ago. That quasars are not found close to home is a clue that they existed when the universe was very young.

Since Schmidt’s discovery, many other quasars have been discovered. Scientists continue to study them because they provide insight into the evolution of the universe.

The jet from the supermassive black hole of the quasar appears to accelerate the farther it travels from the source.
Credit: NASA / ESA / J. Olmsted illustration

To see the ant shining the light, the research team used the Hubble instrument to turn off the light source, such as solar eclipse blocks the face of the sun with monthto reveal the surroundings of the quasar. This so-called coronagraph allowed scientists to look eight times closer to the black hole than before.

In addition to seeing the mysterious blobs, the researchers got a better look at the light-year-long jet of material from the quasar. What they found revealed the opposite possibility: The farther the plane traveled from the black hole, the faster it traveled.