Timeline Of Astronomy

Found: A Quasar From the Dawn of Time

It's hard to overstate the shock astronomers felt when the true nature of quasars began to dawn on them in the early 1960s. At first, these mysterious objects seemed like ordinary stars, tucked in the embrace of our familiar Milky Way. But a closer look revealed that they were billions of light-years away, far beyond the confines of our galaxy. To be visible at such vast distances, a quasar must, by itself, have been as bright as an entire galaxy, but somehow squeezed into a pinpoint of light — and nobody knew how such a thing could be possible.

It took a while, but theorists finally agreed that quasars are really giant black holes that lurk in the cores of distant galaxies, sucking in surrounding gases and heating them until they shine halfway across the universe. Meanwhile, in the decades since those first, startling discoveries, scientists have boosted the number of known quasars from a tiny handful to some 200,000 across the sky.

But while quasars are pretty common nowadays, the newest one, reported in the latest issue of Nature , is still a big deal. It's by far the most distant quasar ever discovered, so far away that its light has been en route to Earthly telescopes for 12.9 billion years. That means this remarkable object, with the unremarkable name ULASJ1120+0641, is sending us light from a mere 770 million years after the Big Bang itself.

That alone would be significant if you were looking to score an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. But the new object is far more important than that. For one thing, writes Chris Willott, of the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre in a Nature commentary, "The quasar is a monster." Indeed it is, weighing in at 2 billion times the mass of the Sun. What makes such a big body even more improbable is that it seems to come along too early in the history of the universe to make sense. Says Avi Loeb, a theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "It's difficult to make a black hole this huge so quickly after the Big Bang."

Difficult, but not impossible, says Loeb. Ordinary black holes are created when massive stars run out of fuel and collapse; giant black holes grow from these original seeds, by swallowing gas, or merging with other black holes, or both. That process takes time, however, and the enormous energy that streams outward from the hot, compressed gas in the form of light and other forms of radiation can makes it hard for more gas to fall in quickly. But it's quite possible that the very earliest stars were bigger than anything that exists today — a million times the mass of our Sun.

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