Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2019

14 MARCH-APRIL 2019 SPACE CHRONICLES one visible to them. “We don’t ex- pect to find many quasars brighter than that in the whole observable universe,” said lead investigator Xi- aohui Fan of the University of Ari- zona, in Tucson. The super-bright quasar, cataloged as J043947.08+163415.7, could hold the record of being the brightest in the early universe for some time, making it a unique object for fol- low-up studies. Shining with light equivalent to 600 trillion Suns, the quasar is fueled by a supermassive black hole at the heart of a young galaxy in the process of forming. An immense amount of energy is emitted as the black hole consumes material around it. The detection provides a rare opportunity to study a zoomed-in image of how such black holes accompanied star forma- tion in the very early universe and influenced the assembly of galaxies. Besides being bright in visible and infrared wavelengths, the lensed quasar is also bright in submillime- ter wavelengths, where it was ob- served with the James Clerk Max- well Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. This is due to hot dust heated by intense star formation in the galaxy hosting the lensed quasar. The formation rate is esti- mated to be up to 10,000 stars per year (by comparison, our Milky Way galaxy makes one star per year). “Clearly, this black hole is not only accreting gas, but has a lot of star formation around it,” said team member Jinyi Yang at the University of Arizona. “However, because of the boosting effect of gravitational lensing, the actual rate of star for- by NASA/ESA Hubble sees the brightest quasar in the early Universe A stronomers have discovered the brightest object ever seen at a time when the uni- verse was less than one billion years old, with the help of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The brilliant bea- con is a quasar, the core of a galaxy with a black hole ravenously eating material surrounding it. Though the quasar is very far away — 12.8 bil- lion light-years — astronomers can detect it because a galaxy closer to Earth acts as a lens and makes the quasar look extra bright. The gravi- tational field of the closer galaxy warps space itself, bending and am- plifying the distant quasar’s light. This effect is called gravitational lensing. Though researchers have searched for these very remote qua- sars for over 20 years, a rare and for- tuitous celestial alignment made this