• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“Weird Things” Around Enormous Black Hole Spotted By Hubble

December 12, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The supermassive black hole 3C 273 is a wonder. It is the first object identified as a quasar, a black hole that is eating stuff so voraciously the process outshines its own galaxy. It is so bright that even at 2.5 billion light-years away, it can be seen with a small telescope. To observe its details, however, scientists had to get clever with the Hubble telescope – and they found something weird.

This campaign of observations used a coronagraph, a system that creates little eclipses by blocking the light of stars. In this case, the coronagraph blocked the light of the supermassive black hole, which weighs a whopping 886 million times the mass of the Sun.

Advertisement

That approach finally revealed the anatomy of the jet of material leaving the surroundings of the supermassive black hole at almost the speed of light; within the 300,000-light-year-long jet, there are complex structures.

“We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure. This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole,” Bin Ren, of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, said in a statement.  “Thanks to Hubble’s observing power, we’re opening a new gateway into understanding quasars. My colleagues are excited because they’ve never seen this much detail before.”

The new observations were combined with older images. In the results, the team not only saw peculiar structures but also discovered that the jet was moving faster the farther away from the quasar it got. It is possible that the peculiar L-shape is due to the presence of smaller galaxies that this quasar is feeding on.

“With the fine spatial structures and jet motion, Hubble bridged a gap between the small-scale radio interferometry and large-scale optical imaging observations, and thus we can take an observational step towards a more complete understanding of quasar host morphology,” Ren explained. 

Advertisement

“Our previous view was very limited, but Hubble is allowing us to understand the complicated quasar morphology and galactic interactions in detail.”

The team hopes to follow up these observations with JWST, which could provide more details compared to Hubble thanks to its larger mirror, with different insights given that it looks at the universe in longer wavelengths.

3C 273 is an outstanding object. Back in 2017, estimates of its temperature were placed in the tens of trillions of degrees, challenging physical models of how we understand quasars and what they can do. This latest work is a step further in expanding that knowledge.

The study is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. German SPD extends lead over Merkel’s sliding conservatives
  2. Pakistani security official urges U.S. to engage with Afghanistan
  3. Jerusalem Syndrome: The Unusual Psychiatric Condition Affecting Visitors To The “Holy City”
  4. It Takes Three Zebrafish To Make A School, Two Won’t Do

Source Link: “Weird Things” Around Enormous Black Hole Spotted By Hubble

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version