The recently detected quasar is extremely bright and hot
Astronomers stared deep into the heart of a hungry black hole, only to discover a jet of A X-rays beaming out of it that’s 60,000 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Quasars are black holes with bright energetic jets of electromagnetic radiation beaming out of them from two sides as they feed on cosmic material. The quasar is known as SMSS J114447.77–430859.3 and is the most luminous example of such an object seen in the last 9 billion years of cosmic history. Located at the heart of a galaxy around 9.6 billion light years away from Earth and seen in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Hydra, this quasar is around 100,000 billion times brighter than the Sun.
Quasars like J1144 are so bright that they often outshine the combined light of every star in the galaxies that house them. They are examples of so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN) that are found only at vast distances from Earth, and thus in the early universe. Studying the quasar could offer astronomers a detailed insight into these powerful cosmic events and the effect they have on their galactic surroundings.
Scientists theorise that the reason quasars are found in the early universe is that the galaxies just a short time after the Big Bang were richer in gas and dust. This meant they possessed enough fuel to allow their central black holes to power bright emissions across almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including low-energy radio, infrared, visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, and high-energy X-ray wavelengths. follow up on this discovery, the team, led by Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics PhD candidate Zsofi Igo, combined observations from several spacebased observatories. These include Spektr-RG’s eROSITA instrument, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. This combination of data allowed the astronomers to measure the temperature of the X-rays coming from the quasars, discovering this to be around 350 million degrees Celsius (630 million degrees Fahrenheit). This is a staggering 60,000 times hotter than the temperature at the surface of the Sun.
The team was also able to put a value on the mass of the black hole behind these emissions, finding it to be around 10 billion times that of the Sun. Not only this, but the supermassive black hole of J1144 is feeding so quickly that it is growing at a rate of 100 Suns per year. Not all the gas surrounding this black hole is being fed to it, however. The scientists dis
