Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers recently discovered a strange astrological anomaly — two quasars, or supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, adrift in empty regions of space.
The discovery was dubbed strange, as quasars were previously thought to exist only in areas with tons of mass, like at the center of galaxies. They’re millions or even billions of times larger than the Sun and contain unfathomable amounts of mass.
They spin rapidly and shoot bursts of energy into space, which is, in theory, from material that falls toward or spins around the black holes. As such, they’re incredibly bright — the brightest objects in the universe. The previous theory was that the phenomena could only form in regions of dense matter, but that seems not to be the case.
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NASA / ESA / J. Olmsted (STScI)
Anna-Christina Eilers, a physicist at MIT who led the research behind the incredible discovery, told Mashable in a statement, “Contrary to previous belief, we find, on average, these quasars are not necessarily in those highest-density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to be sitting in the middle of nowhere. It’s difficult to explain how these quasars could have grown so big if they appear to have nothing to feed from.”
Part of what makes quasars so massive is their constant ability to pull in mass and energy, hungrily eating everything around them. How, then, did the two quasars discovered by the Webb telescope form seemingly in the middle of nowhere? Astronomers are still searching for answers.
Researchers had initially set out to discover the oldest objects in the universe, objects created a mere 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, billions of years before our Solar System would form.
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NASA-GSFC / Adriana M. Gutierrez (CI Lab)
The Webb telescope was employed since it was designed to capture faint, stretched-out light from objects that existed an incredibly long time ago but that’s just now reaching us. The Webb telescope orbits the Sun and is about 1 million miles from Earth.
Eilers said, “It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail. For the first time, JWST enabled us to look at the environment of these quasars, where they grew up, and what their neighborhood was like.”
Researchers are now trying to get to the bottom of not only how the quasars formed in isolation but how they formed so quickly after the Big Bang. It’s possible, Eilers said, that the quasars are, in fact, surrounded by galaxies of their own, but they might be shrouded, either covered by the intense light of the quasars themselves or obscured by gas and dust particles between Earth and the quasars. More observation is necessary, she said.
The Webb telescope was launched as a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency to study both ancient, incredibly distant objects as well as exoplanets right here in the Milky Way.
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