Sometimes it happens that astronomers, during observations, come across an object that should not theoretically be where they are observing it. That was when astronomers first discovered a gas planet that was orbiting extremely close to its star, the so-called hot Jupiter. And it is the same nowwhen a huge quasar appears in the data, which was basically not when it was created.
Quasars are one of the most energetic objects in the universe. Although they resemble stars in the pictures of the largest telescopes, they are actually very bright centers of active galaxies with supermassive black holes that absorb huge amounts of matter from their surroundings. The gas, dust and stars approaching the black hole become very hot, making the black hole’s surroundings glow brighter than the entire galaxy and are visible from cosmological distances.
In the center of the quasar cataloged under the designation J1007 + 2115, and then called Pōniuā’ena, there is a supermassive black hole with a mass of 1.5 billion solar masses.
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How is this quasar different from others?
Preliminary calculations indicate that the quasar radiation needed 13.02 billion years to reach Earth. This means that we are observing this object as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
Since 700 million years after the Big Bang, there were already black holes weighing over a billion solar masses, current theories cannot explain their origin. Such massive black holes cannot form during the collapse of a single star and the absorption of surrounding matter – there was not enough time for it.
One theory says that this object must have been the original black hole, which was formed 100 million years after the Big Bang and had a minimum mass of 10,000 solar masses from the beginning.
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The beginnings of the universe were not conducive to the emergence of such monsters
According to our present knowledge, just after the Big Bang, the atoms were too far apart to interact with each other, making them able to form stars or galaxies. The first facilities of this type began to be built only 400 million years after the Big Bang, in the so-called the era of regionalization.
Only when the universe lit up the first stars, did their radiation ionize the surrounding gas, stripping hydrogen atoms from electrons.
The mere fact of discovering the Pōniuā quenar so deeply in the era of regionalization gives us hope that it will shed new light on both the process of quasar formation and other processes occurring in this unique initial period of the history of the universe.
Pōniuāʻena is not a record holder
Two years ago, astronomers discovered the most distant quasar to date. J1342 + 0928 is two million years older than Pōniuāʻen. By the way, this is an amazingly small difference: For a distance of 13.02 billion light years, precision up to 2 million light years is admirable.
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