U.K. IDSS: earliest quasar, 0.77 billion years old
Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 12:58 pm
'Monster' driving cosmic beacon
BBC News | Science & Environment | Jonathan Amos | 2011 Jun 30
Yesterday, the BBC reported,
BBC News | Science & Environment | Jonathan Amos | 2011 Jun 30
Yesterday, the BBC reported,
The newly identified quasar has been designated ULAS J1120+0641. It is not the most distant object seen in the Universe - that record probably goes to a gamma-ray burst (GRB), the light from an exploded star. But the quasar is hundreds of times brighter than the GRB....
The light from ULAS J1120+0641 displays the characteristic signature of neutral gas, indicating that, at 770 million years after the Big Bang, the process of re-ionization had some way to go before the process was complete.
Dr Mortlock told BBC News: "This is the first time we have seen a quasar that we are sure is sitting in a significantly neutral Universe - it might be 10%, it might be 50% of the hydrogen is neutral - but all the other ones we've seen, even a 100 million years later, had a fraction of the neutral gas we see in our quasar. Others we've detected had more like 1% or 0.1% of neutral hydrogen. So we see this quasar before the epoch of re-ionization has ended."