A team of astronomers has discovered two large, mysterious objects blasting out of the brightest black hole in the known Universe.
Key highlights
- The supermassive black hole 3C 273 is a quasar which is a short for “quasi-stellar object”. It was discovered in a 1959 survey of cosmic radio-wave sources.
- While black holes themselves do not emit light, the largest ones are surrounded by gargantuan swirls of gas called accretion disks; as gas falls into the black hole at near-light speed, friction heats the disk and causes it to blaze with radiation – typically detected as radio waves.
- A team of researchers calibrated the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile to separate the radiant glow of quasar 3C 273 from the light emitted by its host galaxy.
- They were left with just the radio-waves emitted by the quasar’s galaxy – revealing two massive and mysterious radio structures never seen before.
What is a quasar?
- A quasar is a very bright, distant and active supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun.
- A quasar gives off powerful radio waves. A quasar is farther away from Earth than any other known object in the universe.
- A quasar is so bright that it drowns out the light from all stars in the same galaxy.
- Quasar 3C 273 is the first quasar ever identified. It is also the brightest, shining more than 4 trillion times as bright as Earth’s Sun while sitting at a distance of more than 2.4 billion light-years away.
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