|
(Scientists think that a quasar's engine, a black hole pulling in surrounding gas and dust, looks like this. The black hole is buried in the centre.)
|
An ongoing survey of the heavens has spotted the most distant, and therefore earliest, giant black hole in the universe.
The object, a quasar given the catchy name CFHQS J2329-0301, was found with three other extremely distant quasars in the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey.
The survey uses an imaging instrument called the MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
"This is indeed the most distant," says Dr Christian Veillet, director of the CFHT. But he says he wouldn't be surprised if something even more remote turns up soon.
"They are really in the middle of the survey, so there are more to come," he says.
University of Ottawa astronomer Professor Chris Willott presented the team's discovery recently at the meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society in Kingston, Ontario. The previously most distant quasar was sighted by astronomers doing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
"That is an exciting discovery indeed," says Sloan Survey and Princeton University astronomer Professor Michael Strauss. "We knew that our record would have to be broken eventually." Source : ABC Australia
13 billion light-years away
CFHQS J2329-0301 is about 13 billion light-years away, say the scientists.
That figure comes from splitting the quasar's light into a rainbow of colours and seeing how far to the red side of the spectrum some telltale lines have shifted. The greater the red-shift, the greater the distance.
So how can there be any light from a black hole about 500 million times the mass of the Sun? It comes from the superheated material falling into it.
Because the light from the quasar has travelled 13 billion years to reach Earth, it offers two interesting avenues of study.
First, the light suggests something about the nature of the very earliest galaxies, which are generally required to build such gigantic black holes.
The problem is, 13 billion years ago is just 700 million years after the Big Bang. That's generally thought to be a time before galaxies were constructed, says team member Dr John Hutchings of the National Research Council Canada's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. Continue reading the story on ABC Australia |
