Hubble Telescope Captures Brightest Quasar

Once again with the help of Hubble telescope, astronomers have discovered an interesting abject in our universe. It is a brightest quasar and is 12.8 billion light years away from our Earth. The age of our universe is 13.799 billion years. Hence, the quasar’s light captured by the Hubble might have formed when the universe was one billion years old. The newly found quasar is catalogued as J043947.08+163415.7. In 1950s, the astronomers discovered radio waves coming from star-like objects using radio telescopes. So, they named those objects as ‘quasi-stellar radio sources’ or shortly ‘quasars’. Generally, the quasars are young galaxies with a highly active supermassive black hole in the middle. The materials rotating around the black holes emit heat and light which make the quasars bright. 

(The brightest quasar captured by Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Courtesy: ESA/NASA, NASA M. Kornmesser)

According to Hubblesite, the astronomers have been searching for such quasars for more than twenty years. Interestingly, a galaxy near to the Earth helped the astronomers to find this brightest quasar. That galaxy produced a gravitational lensing effect and magnified the brightness of the quasar 50 times and its size 3 times. They have observed that the light of the quasar is equivalent to 600 trillion Suns through the gravitational lensing. If you remove the magnification effect of the gravitational lensing, the brightness of the quasar would be equivalent to 11 trillion suns. They have calculated that about 10,000 stars are forming in the quasar-galaxy each year. Currently, our home galaxy, Milky Way forms one star each year.

(Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Courtesy: NASA, Wikipedia)

The newly found quasar was also observed using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Actually, the astronomers have used several telescopes to observe this quasar and used Hubble to confirm it. The research team is now using European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to find chemical composition and other properties of the gas from the early universe. They are also using Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and planned to use NASA’s future James Webb Space Telescope to study the quasar. 

Thus, a large team of astronomers are working on quasars and ancient black holes to understand our universe. We hope to get more amazing news like this from their research.