Legendary Active Galaxy Contains a Monster Black Hole
Amateur astronomers can observe an extraordinary celestial object known as 3C 273, the most distant target visible through a standard backyard telescope. Shining with the light of trillions of suns, 3C 273 is located over two billion light-years away. Today, we recognize it as the brilliant core of an active galaxy, powered by a supermassive black hole consuming vast amounts of material.
In 1963, however, 3C 273 was a mystery. Astronomer Maarten Schmidt studied it after noticing its powerful radio emissions. Through the most advanced telescope of the time, it resembled a star, but its light exhibited strange characteristics. The expansion of the universe had stretched its light into red wavelengths, a phenomenon called cosmological redshift. This placed 3C 273 at a staggering 2.5 billion light-years away—too distant for an ordinary star. Schmidt’s discovery introduced a new class of objects: quasars, or quasi-stellar objects. Their immense brightness and energy output were unlike anything seen before, challenging our understanding of the cosmos.
Decades earlier, in 1929, astrophysicist Sir James Jeans theorized that the bright centers of galaxies might act as “white holes,” funneling matter into our universe from another dimension. However, we now know the reality is the opposite. Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes that voraciously consume surrounding material. They are part of a broader group of active galactic nuclei and are essential to understanding galaxy formation and evolution.
Recent observations using the Hubble Space Telescope have provided new insights into quasars. Hubble’s sharp imaging has captured unusual structures within 16,000 light-years of 3C 273’s black hole, including filaments, lobes, and a mysterious L-shaped formation. Some of these may be remnants of small satellite galaxies falling into the black hole, which has a mass of nearly 900 million suns. With at least one million quasars scattered across the sky, these brilliant objects remain a vital area of study. It all began with 3C 273, the first quasar ever discovered, which opened a gateway to understanding the universe’s most energetic phenomena.
NASA’s Hubble Takes the Closest-Ever Look at a Quasar
Astronomers have harnessed the extraordinary capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to take an unprecedented look into the heart of a quasar, a luminous galactic center powered by a supermassive black hole consuming nearby material.
These new Hubble observations reveal intriguing and unexpected features around the quasar. Bin Ren, of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, described the findings as “weird,” noting the discovery of several blobs of varying sizes and a peculiar L-shaped filamentary structure. All of these features are located within 16,000 light-years of the black hole, offering fresh insights into the chaotic environment surrounding these energetic cosmic phenomena.
Insights Into Quasar Composition and Activity
Some of the objects could be small satellite galaxies around the black hole, and so they could offer the materials that will accrete onto the central supermassive black hole, powering the bright lighthouse. “Thanks to Hubble’s observing power, we’re opening a new gateway into understanding quasars,” said Ren. “My colleagues are excited because they’ve never seen this much detail before.”
Quasars look starlike as point sources of light in the sky (hence the name quasi-stellar object). The quasar in the new study, 3C 273, was identified in 1963 by astronomer Maarten Schmidt as the first quasar. At a distance of 2.5 billion light-years, it was too far away for a star. It must have been more energetic than ever imagined, with a luminosity over 10 times brighter than the brightest giant elliptical galaxies. This opened the door to an unexpected new puzzle in cosmology: What is powering this massive energy production? The likely culprit was material accreting onto a black hole.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Bin Ren (Université Côte d’Azur/CNRS), John Bahcall (IAS), Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Historical Context and Technological Advances
In 1994 Hubble’s new sharp view revealed that the environment surrounding quasars is far more complex than first suspected. The images suggested galactic collisions and mergers between quasars and companion galaxies, where debris cascades down onto supermassive black holes. This reignites the giant black holes that drive quasars.
For Hubble, staring into the quasar 3C 273 is like looking directly into a blinding car headlight and trying to see an ant crawling on the rim around it. The quasar pours out thousands of times the entire energy of stars in a galaxy. One of the closest quasars to Earth, 3C 273 is 2.5 billion light-years away. (If it was very nearby, a few tens of light-years from Earth, it would appear as bright as the Sun in the sky!)
Hubble’s STIS instrument can serve as a coronagraph to block light from central sources, not unlike how the Moon blocks the Sun’s glare during a total solar eclipse. Astronomers have used STIS to unveil dusty disks around stars to understand the formation of planetary systems, and now they can use STIS to better understand quasars’ host galaxies. The Hubble coronograph allowed astronomers to look eight times closer to the black hole than ever before.
Advances in Quasar Imaging and Future Prospects
Scientists gained rare insight into the quasar’s 300,000-light-year-long extragalactic jet of material blazing across space at nearly the speed of light. By comparing the STIS coronagraphic data with archival STIS images with a 22-year separation, the team led by Ren concluded that the jet is moving faster when it is farther away from the monster black hole.
“With the fine spatial structures and jet motion, Hubble bridged a gap between the small-scale radio interferometry and large-scale optical imaging observations, and thus we can take an observational step towards a more complete understanding of quasar host morphology. Our previous view was very limited, but Hubble is allowing us to understand the complicated quasar morphology and galactic interactions in detail. In the future, looking further at 3C 273 in infrared light with the James Webb Space Telescope might give us more clues,” said Ren.
At least 1 million quasars are scattered across the sky. They are useful background “spotlights” for a variety of astronomical observations. Quasars were most abundant about 3 billion years after the big bang, when galaxy collisions were more common.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been a cornerstone of astronomical discovery for over three decades, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. A collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), Hubble orbits Earth, capturing stunning images and data that have deepened our knowledge of cosmic phenomena, from distant galaxies to black holes.
Managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, with support from Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Hubble’s operations are a testament to international teamwork and advanced engineering. The telescope’s science operations are conducted by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, run by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. Through its groundbreaking discoveries, Hubble remains a vital tool for exploring the cosmos and inspiring generations of scientists and enthusiasts alike.
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.
6 Comments
Looks like a focused gravitational spin effect similar to “frame drag,” but centered on the spin axis instead of on the spin plane. I’d call it “axial drag” or “focused axial spin drag” or something like that.
General relativity gravity lacks field information flow as it’s not quantizable and thus cannot support any focus in gravitational flow. This is most obvious in the case of spin, but reality has so many more disappointments in store for general relativity club headline propagandists to carefully avoid.
The only prominent person claiming general relativity features quantized gravitational information is some publicity hound prof from Harvard; but then again, he also claims to have found alien technology at the bottom of the sea, so there is that.
“Bin Ren, of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, described the findings as “weird,” noting the discovery of several blobs of varying sizes and a peculiar L-shaped filamentary structure.”
“All of these features are located within 16,000 light-years of the black hole, ”
Are you sure you’ve reported Bin Ren correctly? The image’s scale-marker would put the L-shaped structure an order of magnitude further away from the BH.
I think that you’d really have to be there and touch it with your own two hands before you could really say what it was.
Go’auld Mother ships……………..everyone knows this!!