Astronomers have used the unique capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope to peer into the heart of a massive black hole powering a quasar. It was able to look at a number of structures that had previously escaped the attention of researchers.
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe. They represent the nuclei of galaxies in which a black hole is exceptionally active in absorbing the surrounding matter, forming an accretion disk around itself, which is a source of the most powerful radiation.
Hubble’s target was quasar 3C 273, located at a distance of 2.5 billion light-years from Earth. It is considered to be the first quasar identified with a visible object (it happened in 1963). Since it still looked like a star even in the strongest telescopes of the time, astronomers used the term quasar, derived from the words quasi-stellar (“quasi-stellar” or “star-like”).
Since then, science has made huge progress and has given astronomers the opportunity to look at the quasar. The Hubble telescope was used for this purpose. However, even for it, obtaining an image of the quasar was still a challenge. 3C 273 emits thousands of times more energy than all the stars in the galaxy. If it were a few tens of light-years away from Earth, it would be as bright in the sky as the Sun.
Therefore, astronomers used the Hubble coronagraph to block out the glare from the center of 3C 273. As a result, they were able to view many strange objects in its vicinity, including several spots of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure. All of them are within 16,000 light-years of the black hole. According to astronomers, some of these objects may be small satellite galaxies falling into the black hole and thus supplying it with new raw materials.
Scientists have also studied the jet emitted by the quasar. It consists of glowing plasma that is ejected into intergalactic space at near-light speed. The length of the jet is 300,000 light-years, which is three times the diameter of the Milky Way.
In the future, astronomers hope to study 3C 273 with the James Webb Telescope. In total, there are at least 1 million quasars scattered across the sky. Almost all of them are very far away. This is because collisions between galaxies supplying food for black holes were much more common when the Universe was young.
Provided by NASA
