Photographed one of the brightest objects ever seen so far in the universe: it is a quasar, literally a ‘quasi-stellar radio source’, i.e. a galaxy in whose center there is a gigantic, very active black hole, which swallows the surrounding matter with a extraordinary speed. The image was obtained by the international collaboration Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the same that obtained the first photo of a black hole and the first photo of the black hole located at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A *.
The research, which was attended by dozens of scholars from all over the world, is published in The Astrophysical Journal and was coordinated by astronomers Svetlana Jorstad of Boston University and Maciek Wielgus of the German Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
The light from the quasar, called Nrao 530, traveled for 7.5 billion years before reaching the Earth and is the most distant cosmic object so far observed by the EHT collaboration radio telescopes, distributed all over the world. It is a particular type of quasar called blazar, which directs its jet of matter towards the Earth. The images, the most detailed ever seen of a similar object, will help to better understand these cosmic phenomena.
Black holes themselves don’t emit light, but the matter around them can become very bright due to gravity and friction. Some of it is also channeled along magnetic field lines to the poles, from where it is hurled into space as jets of plasma at nearly the speed of light.
Just like the images of the two black holes, the one of the quasar has also required years of work. The first observations date back to April 2017 and, said Wielgus, “thanks to the power of the EHT radio telescopes we were able to observe the structure of the source in detail”.
Source: Ansa
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