ALMA | NRAO | NAOJ | 2021 Jan 12
An international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant quasar yet found — a cosmic monster more than 13 billion light-years from Earth powered by a supermassive black hole more than 1.6 billion times more massive than the Sun and more than 1,000 times brighter than our entire Milky Way Galaxy.
The quasar, called J0313–1806, is seen as it was when the Universe was only 670 million years old and is providing astronomers with valuable insight on how massive galaxies — and the supermassive black holes at their cores — formed in the early Universe. The scientists presented their findings to the American Astronomical Society’s meeting, now underway virtually, and in a paper accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The new discovery beats the previous distance record for a quasar set three years ago. Observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile confirmed the distance measurement to high precision. ...
The black hole at the core of J0313–1806 is twice as massive as that of the previous record holder and that fact provides astronomers with a valuable clue about such black holes and their affect on their host galaxies. ...
The Earliest Supermassive Black Hole and Quasar in the Universe
NSF | NOIRLab | 2021 Jan 12
A Luminous Quasar at Redshift 7.642 ~ Feige Wang et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 907(1):L1 (2021 Jan 20) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/abd8c6
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2101.03179 > 08 Jan 2021