We Just Got Uttermost Close-Up of One of The Cosmos’s Brightest Objects

Uttermost close-up of one of the brightest objects in the universe has just been taken. Using HST (the Hubble Space Telescope), astrophysicists homed in on a quasar called 3C 273, some 2.5 billion light-years away from Earth. It’s one of the nearest quasars to Earth, and tremendously bright, making it a major target for understanding the forces that illuminate these enthralling galaxies.

The new observations expose some of the galaxy’s distinct structures that we’ve never ever been able to tease out before, which not only tells us about the object itself – it authenticates a new method for understanding how quasars function. “Thanks to Hubble’s observing power, we’re opening a new gateway into understanding quasars,” says astronomer Bin Ren belonging to the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in France. “My colleagues are excited because they’ve never seen this much detail before.”

Quasars are splendid – among the brightest objects in the Cosmos, behind gamma-ray bursts and supernovae. Though, unlike other bright objects, quasars stick around. They are believed to be powered by SMBHs that lurk at the heart of each galaxy.

Black holes discharge no light we can detect on their own. But the dust and gas around a feeding black hole does. That material spins around in a disk, raining down on the black hole from its inner rim. The gravity and friction inside the disk are so high that they heat it to astounding temperatures, causing the material to blaze with light across the spectrum, a last scream of brilliance before it disappears into the darkness forever.

That is the light we see when we gaze at a quasar. But they’re all really distant; and even the ones that are closer are so bright that features are hard to resolve. 3C 273 is not the nearest quasar to Earth, but it is amongst the brightest from our perspective, dazzling with the light of trillions of Suns, all packed into a miniscule galactic center. It’s so very bright that you can see it with a backyard telescope, across 2.5 billion light-years even.

To see the structures that may be hiding in this light, the new HST observations used the Space Telescope Imaging System (STIS) to create a improvised coronagraph that obscures the brightest source of light. It’s like holding a hand in front of your eyes when someone is flashing a flashlight right at you – it lets you to see the other things the light is illuminating without being blinded by the glare. The new observations, 8 times closer compared to any obtained beforehand, revealed never-before-seen details in the structures around the centre of the quasar, in a radius of 16,000 light-years.