Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 2018 Aug 16
Bright light from black hole in a feeding frenzy had been obscuring surrounding galaxies.
MIT scientists have uncovered a sprawling new galaxy cluster hiding in plain sight. The cluster, which sits a mere 2.4 billion light years from Earth, is made up of hundreds of individual galaxies and surrounds an extremely active supermassive black hole, or quasar.
The central quasar goes by the name PKS 1353-341 and is intensely bright — so bright that for decades astronomers observing it in the night sky have assumed that the quasar was quite alone in its corner of the universe, shining out as a solitary light source from the center of a single galaxy.
But as the MIT team reports today in the Astrophysical Journal, the quasar’s light is so bright that it has obscured hundreds of galaxies clustered around it.
In their new analysis, the researchers estimate that there are hundreds of individual galaxies in the cluster, which, all told, is about as massive as 690 trillion suns. Our Milky Way galaxy, for comparison, weighs in at around 400 billion solar masses. ...
The Clusters Hiding in Plain Sight (CHiPS) Survey: A First Discovery of a
Massive Nearby Cluster around PKS 1353−341 ~ Taweewat Somboonpanyakul et al
- Astrophysical Journal 863(2):122 (20 Aug 2018) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aace55
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1806.05676 > 14 Jun 2018