Astronomers have found the earliest supermassive black hole and quasar in the universe

Almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, millions or billions of times larger

larger than the size of the Sun.Although there is still much to learn about these objects, many scientists believe they are critical to the formation and structure of galaxies. What's more, some of these black holes are particularly active, collecting stars, dust and gas into glowing accretion disks that emit powerful radiation into space as they consume matter around them. Such objects are called quasars - they are among the most distant objects that astronomers can see. Recently, scientists set a new record - they explored the farthest ever observed.

A group of researchers led by formerUC Santa Barbara doctoral student Fage Wang announced the discovery of J0313-1806, the most distant quasar discovered to date. The distant quasar, which appeared more than 13 billion years ago, is also the earliest discovered. This allows astronomers to understand the formation of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The team's findings were announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 2021 and published inAstrophysical Journal Letters.

Quasars are the most energetic objectsin the Universe. They occur when gas in the superheated accretion disk around a supermassive black hole is pulled inward, dissipating energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. This releases enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation, with the most massive examples easily eclipsing entire galaxies.

Quasar J0313-1806 is 13 billion lightyears from Earth and appeared just 690 million years after the Big Bang. It is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which, despite its early formation, still weighs more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Object J0313-1806 dwarfs the present-day Milky Way 1,000 times.

The presence of such a massive black hole on suchearly in the history of the universe challenges theories of their formation. As lead author Feige Wang, a NASA researcher, explains, "Black holes created by the very first massive stars could not have grown to this size in just a few hundred million years."

The quasar in the researchers' data looks like nothing more than a blur. Credit: FEIGE WANG ET AL.

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Termaccretion disk(BP) is usually used to meangas disk around a massive (compared to the disk) compact object. The latter include white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. The defining feature of AD is the transition of gravitational energy during the accretion (fall) of matter into heat with subsequent radiation.

A doctoral student is a scientist attached to a scientific institution to prepare a doctoral dissertation.