London, June 30 (ANI): A team of European astronomers has discovered the most distant quasar to date - a finding that could further help our understanding of a universe still in its infancy following the Big Bang.
The brilliant and rare beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet found from a time when the Universe was less than 800 million years old - just a fraction of its current age.
The object that has been found, named ULAS J1120+0641, is around 100 million years younger than the previously known most distant quasar.
It lies at a redshift of 7.1 which corresponds to looking back in time to a Universe that was only 770 million years old, only five percent of its current age.
"Objects that lie at such large distance are almost impossible to find in visible-light surveys because their light is stretched by the expansion of the universe. This means that by the time their light gets to Earth, most of it ends up in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum," said Dr Simon Dye The University of Nottingham.
"It took us five years to find this object. We were looking for a quasar with a redshift higher than 6.5. Finding one this far away, at a redshift higher than 7, was an exciting surprise. This quasar provides a unique opportunity to explore a 100 million year window of the cosmos that was previously out of reach," he added.
Quasars are very bright and distant galaxies that are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes at their centres. Their great brilliance makes them powerful probes to help study the period in the history of the Universe when the first stars and galaxies were forming.
The discovery is detailed in Nature. (ANI)
|
|
Comments:
