Artists impression of a quasar. Credit: Artist illustration: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/ J. da Silva
Scientists have observed the X-ray emissions of the brightest quasar ever tape-recorded in the past 9 billion years of cosmic history. This quasar, known as SMSS J114447.77-430859.3 or J1144 for short, offers new insights into the inner operations of quasars and their interaction with the surrounding cosmos. Their findings are reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Located in a galaxy around 9.6 billion light years far from Earth, somewhere between the Centaurus and Hydra constellations, J1144 has immense luminosity, shining with a brightness 100,000 billion times higher than the Sun. This quasars proximity to Earth, compared to other similarly luminescent objects, has granted astronomers an opportunity to get insight into the black hole powering the quasar and its surrounding environment.
The study was led by Dr. Elias Kammoun, a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP), and Zsofi Igo, a Ph.D. candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE).
Quasars are amongst the brightest and most remote things in the recognized universe, powered by the fall of gas into a supermassive great void. They can be referred to as active galactic nuclei (AGN) of really high luminosity that release large amounts of electromagnetic radiation observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray wavelengths. J1144 was at first observed in noticeable wavelengths in 2022 by the SkyMapper Southern Survey (SMSS).
For this study, scientists combined observations from numerous space-based observatories: the eROSITA instrument on board the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) observatory, the ESA XMM-Newton observatory, NASAs Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and NASAs Neil Gehrels Swift observatory.
The group used the data from the four observatories to measure the temperature level of the X-rays being emitted from the quasar. They found this temperature to be around 350 million Kelvin, more than 60,000 times the temperature at the surface area of the Sun. The group likewise found that the mass of the great void at the quasars center is around 10 billion times the mass of the Sun, and the rate at which it is growing to be of the order of 100 solar masses per year.
The X-ray light from this source varied on a time scale of a couple of days, which is not generally seen in quasars with great voids as large as the one living in J1144. The typical timescale of irregularity for a black hole of this size would be on the order of months or even years. The observations likewise showed that while a part of the gas is swallowed by the black hole, some gas is ejected in the type of very powerful winds, injecting large quantities of energy into the host galaxy.
Dr. Kammoun, lead author of the paper, states “We were very shocked that no previous X-ray observatory has actually ever observed this source despite its extreme power.”
He includes, “Similar quasars are typically discovered at much larger distances, so they appear much fainter, and we see them as they were when the Universe was only 2-3 billion years of ages. J1144 is a very rare source as it is so luminescent and much closer to Earth (although still at a substantial distance!), providing us a distinct glimpse of what such effective quasars appear like.”
” A new tracking campaign of this source will begin in June this year, which might expose more surprises from this unique source.”
Recommendation: “The very first X-ray take a look at SMSS J114447.77-430859.3: the most luminescent quasar in the last 9 Gyr” by E S Kammoun, Z Igo, J M Miller, A C Fabian, M T Reynolds, A Merloni, D Barret, E Nardini, P O Petrucci, E Piconcelli, S Barnier, J Buchner, T Dwelly, I Grotova, M Krumpe, T Liu, K Nandra, A Rau, M Salvato, T Urrutia and J Wolf, 3 April 2023, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.DOI: 10.1093/ mnras/stad952.
Researchers have observed the X-ray emissions of the brightest quasar ever recorded in the previous 9 billion years of cosmic history. Quasars are among the brightest and most remote things in the recognized universe, powered by the fall of gas into a supermassive black hole. The group likewise discovered that the mass of the black hole at the quasars center is around 10 billion times the mass of the Sun, and the rate at which it is growing to be of the order of 100 solar masses per year.
The X-ray light from this source varied on a time scale of a couple of days, which is not usually seen in quasars with black holes as big as the one residing in J1144.
