「quasar” has a huge black hole (supermassive black hole) at its center, which shines so brightly that it can be observed even from more than 10 billion light years away. Approximately 1 million quasars have been discovered so far, but only a small number of extremely bright quasars have been discovered.
A research team led by Christian Wolf of the Australian National University said,J0529-4351” is a quasar, and itsThe brightest quasar ever observed, approximately 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun and 200 times brighter than a typical quasar.I found out that it is. J0529-4351 isIn the astronomical catalog, it was incorrectly labeled as “99.98%, a star in the Milky Way.”Therefore, Wolf et al. believe that there are many other extremely bright quasars that have already been observed but have not been noticed.
[▲Figure1:Artist’simpressionoftheextremelybrightquasar”J0529-4351″(Credit:ESO&M.Kornmesser)]
■Extremely bright “quasars” are difficult to find
Among the various celestial bodies in the universe,quasar” is amazing. At its center is a supermassive black hole, which is thought to emit energy as it sucks in large amounts of matter. It is trillions of times brighter than the Sun and thousands of times brighter than a typical galaxy. Quasars are often found in the distant universe, but seeing the distant universe is the same as seeing the ancient universe, so quasars are objects that exist in the young universe. For this reason, quasars are thought to represent the early form of galaxies.
Astronomers have discovered about 1 million quasars since they were first recognized in 1963. However, most of them were not discovered by pointing a telescope at each one. In current astronomy, the common method is to find the celestial object you are looking for from a huge amount of observation data obtained by observing a wide area of the night sky. Since there are literally as many celestial objects as there are stars in the observation data, the celestial objects are automatically labeled using machine learning.
Although this method is useful for organizing vast catalogs of astronomical objects, it also has its problems. The machine learning that is the basis for labeling is trained based on the general properties of the celestial object that is the source of classification. For this reason, if a celestial object exhibits extremely extreme properties, it may be difficult to recognize the correct type and end up labeling it incorrectly. Although such errors are a small number overall, they can be a hindrance to finding objects with extreme properties.
■The object thought to be a “star in the Milky Way” turns out to be the brightest quasar in history!
[▲Figure2:ActualastronomicalphotographofJ0529-4351(bluish-whiteobjectmarkedwithalineintheenlargedsection)ThisobjectwasoriginallyclassifiedasastarintheMilkyWay(Credit:ESODigitizedSkySurvey2&DarkEnergySurvey)
The research team led by Wolf et al.J0529-4351We conducted research focusing on the celestial body called “. This celestial object was listed in the astronomical catalog “Gaia DR3” created using observation data from the space telescope “Gaia” launched by ESA (European Space Agency), but in the catalog it says “99.98% chance that it is a star in the Milky Way galaxy” was labeled.
However, looking at the spectral data of J0529-4351, Wolf and his colleagues believed that it was not a star but a quasar with a strong redshift. It was so distinctive that Wolf et al. wrote in their paper, “An astronomer who is familiar with Gaia’s spectrum would be able to tell at a glance that it is a quasar.” As a result of observations with the 2.3m telescope installed at Siding Spring Observatory (Coonabarabran, Australia), J0529-4351 is located approximately 23.8 billion light years away from Earth, and approximately 12.2 billion years from now. We confirmed that it is a quasar that existed in the previous era (redshift z=3.962)
. Additionally, additional observational data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) (Paranal Observatory, Chile) revealed the exact nature of J0529-4351 as a quasar.
*…This distance is the value of the “comoving distance”, taking into account that the space in which the light traveled has been stretched due to the expansion of the universe. On the other hand, the simple multiplication of the time the light travels is called the “light traveling distance” (or optical path distance).J0529-4351 is an unusually bright object even as a quasar. Its brightness is 2×10 to the 41st power watt (20 positive watts),It is approximately 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun, approximately 40,000 times brighter than the Milky Way, and approximately 200 times brighter than a typical quasar.
It will be. This is the brightest known quasar. It can’t be helped that Gaia’s automatic labeling is incorrect because it is too bright to recognize as a very distant object. Similar misses have been occurring for several decades, and although the object was seen in another survey record (SSS) created in 1980, the oldest record, it had been overlooked until now.This brightness is thought to be caused by the activity of J0529-4351’s supermassive black hole, which heats the accretion disk, which is a disk of matter created around it. J0529-4351’s accretion disk is thought to be about 7 light-years across, making it the largest known accretion disk. The supermassive black hole at its center is said to have a mass approximately 17 billion times that of the sun, which puts it at the top of the black hole mass ranking.In order to explain this brightness, the energy source isWe inhale material equivalent to the mass of almost one sun each day.
It is considered. It also has the highest intake of material (accretion rate) of any known quasar.
■Could there be other unusually bright quasars?With this study, J0529-4351 retains the title of “the brightest quasar in the history of observation,” but it may only hold the top spot for a short period of time.This is because, based on this discovery, in addition to J0529-4351,Many quasars may be sleeping, mislabeled because they are unusually bright.
It’s from. There are multiple comet hunting observation catalogs that record a huge number of celestial objects.For these catalogs
If we search for outlier objects like J0529-4351, we may find many more bright quasars.
J0529-4351 has already been listed in the astronomical catalog with data, and since it has unusual properties even when seen with the human eye, research has begun to confirm that it is a quasar. When this research is referenced in the future, it may be recognized that it was not just the discovery of one particularly bright quasar, but that it led to the discovery of many more bright quasars.
- Source Christian Wolf, et al.
- “The accretion of a solar mass per day by a 17-billion solar mass black hole”. (Nature Astronomy) Christian Wolf, et al.
“Brightest and fastest-growing: astronomers identify record-breaking quasar”. (ESO)
Written by Riri Aya
