A team of astronomers from the University of Arizona reports the discovery of the farthest brightest quasar to date, J0313-1806.
Astronomers have discovered a new quasar J0313-1806, the most distant quasar to date, which existed at a time when the Universe was 670 million years old.
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It contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of 1.6 billion solar masses, which imposes serious restrictions on the models of formation of “germs” of black holes in the early Universe.
A team of astronomers led by Feige Vaughn of the University of Arizona reports the discovery of the farthest brightest quasar to date, J0313-1806. Initially, the candidate was found during the analysis of data from ground-based surveys of the sky Pan-STARRS1, DELS (DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys), VHS (VISTA Hemisphere Survey), as well as the catalog data from the Space Telescope WISE, were subsequently carried out spectroscopic observations of the quasar with the ALMA radio telescope system and Gemini telescopes, Keck Observatory and the Magellan telescopes, reports nplus1.ru.
The redshift of J0313-1806 was z=7.642, which means that it existed at a time when the age of the universe was only 670 million years. It represents the core of a galaxy that is actively producing stars at a rate of 200 solar masses per year. It has already accumulated a vast stock of dust with a total mass of 7×107 solar masses. The bolometric luminosity of the quasar is estimated at 1.4×1047 ergs per second, it contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of (1.6±0.4)×109 solar masses, actively absorbing matter.
The existence of such a supermassive black hole only 670 million years after the Big Bang imposes serious limitations on models of the formation of black hole “embryos. In addition, observational data show that early black holes exhibited active growth rates, characterized by a large Eddington coefficient. Astronomers believe that J0313-1806 is an ideal target for further, more detailed observations with the ALMA system and the future James Webb Space Telescope.
What are quasars
Quasars are some of the brightest astronomical objects in the visible Universe, the cores of distant galaxies at an early stage of formation, in which supermassive black holes actively absorb matter from the surrounding accretion disk and can generate high-speed jets. Finding and observing the most distant such objects makes it possible to test theories of supermassive black hole formation by determining the mass of their “embryos” in the early Universe and estimating their growth rate. To date, there are very few observational data for very distant quasars, only two such objects have been detected at redshift values z≥7.5.