Astronomers have discovered the flickering of the oldest quasar in the universe
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- Astronomers have discovered the flickering of the oldest quasar in the universe
Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have recorded the flickering of a quasar that existed just 850 million years after the Big Bang, the oldest flickering quasar ever discovered. This was reported in the magazine on June 8. Phys.org .
Quasars are the most active and brightest objects in the universe: supermassive black holes that absorb gas and dust with such intensity that their glow exceeds the total light of the entire surrounding galaxy.
To the surprise of the researchers, the disc of the discovered quasar turned out to be thin and flat — such a structure had previously been observed only in mature black holes from a relatively recent epoch of the universe. According to established ideas, young black holes should have a looser and more chaotic disk.
"This means that all the disorderly phases of rapid growth that we expect all black holes to go through happened very, very early — even before we see them as bright, luminous quasars," explained co-author of the study, associate professor of physics at MIT Anna-Kristina Ailers.
The technical difficulty of the search was that the farther away an object is from us in time and space, the more its light is distorted. The expansion of the universe "stretches" light waves to the infrared range and at the same time slows down the observed flicker: a flash lasting several weeks looks like an oscillation every few months from a distance of billions of light-years.
Scientists have been working with data from the NEOWISE infrared telescope, which has been continuously scanning the sky for 14 years. In the reworked archive of these observations, the team found a signal confirmed as the flickering of a quasar from cosmic Dawn. The brightness of the object is comparable to the total radiation of 12 trillion Suns, and the oscillation amplitude is about 20%.
Gene Leng, a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Institute of Astrophysics, said that scientists have observed random fluctuations in the brightness of the quasar for 14 years, comparing this phenomenon to a candle flame that flickers without any steady pattern.
On April 28, Science Daily magazine announced the creation of the most detailed map of the universe. It includes the coordinates of more than 47 million galaxies and quasars, as well as 20 million stars.
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