There is something both fascinating and disturbing about quasars. These supermassive black holes surrounded by a disk of incandescent matter give off the most intense brightness in the universe which is fueled by the surrounding matter they engulf.
The first quasar was identified in 1963. Named 3C 273, it is one of the closest quasars to our planet, located 2.5 billion light years away. “ If it were very close, a few dozen light years from Earth, it would appear as bright as the Sun in the sky », Explains NASA.
Diving into the gorge of a “monster energy black hole”
In fact, a team of astronomers from the Côte d'Azur Observatory and the Côte d'Azur University in Nice, plunged into the heart of quasar 3C 273 like never before. Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, they observed very closely “ the throat of a monster energetic black hole that powers a quasar ”, in the words of NASA.
This work was the subject of an article published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. According to Bin Ren, a researcher at the Côte d'Azur Observatory and Côte d'Azur University, Hubble images of the quasar's environment show many ” weird things “.
“ We have a few spots of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filament structure. All this within a radius of 16,000 lumens. All of this is within 16,000 light years of the black hole », Explains the researcher.
© © NASA, ESA, Bin Ren (Université Côte d'Azur/CNRS); Acknowledgment: John Bahcall (IAS); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Image of the core of quasar 3C 273 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. © NASA, ESA, Bin Ren (Université Côte d’Azur/CNRS); Acknowledgment: John Bahcall (IAS); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Small galaxies that feed the quasar
According to the team, some of these objects could be small satellite galaxies around the black hole whose matter feeds the quasar.
NASA explains that, for the Hubble telescope, “ Looking at quasar 3C 273 is like looking directly into a blinding car headlight and trying to see an ant crawling around the edge. »
This is the STIS instrument (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) of Hubble which served as a coronagraph to block the light coming from the quasar. Thanks to it, astronomers were able to observe the black hole eight times closer than before.
A jet of matter that extends 300,000 light years
In particular, they were able to see the extragalactic jet of material from the quasar, which extends over 300,000 light years and which crosses space at a speed close to that of light, specifies the American space agency.
“ Our previous view was very limited, but Hubble allows us to understand in detail the complex morphology of quasars and galactic interactions », Continues Bin Ren. “ In the future, observing 3C 273 in infrared with the James Webb Space Telescope could give us more clues », he thinks.
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