Thanks to Hubble’s observing power, astronomers can peer closer than ever into the throat of an energetic monster black hole powering a quasar. Recently, Hubble offered views of the environment around the quasar—3C 273-. The observations showed many ‘weird things’—details that have never been seen before.
Astronomers saw a few blobs of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure within 16,000 light-years of the black hole.
Astronomer Maarten Schmidt originally identified the quasar 3C 273 in 1963 as the first quasar. At a distance of 2.5 billion light-years, the object was too far to be a star, suggesting it was far more energetic than previously imagined, with a luminosity more than 10 times greater than that of the brightest giant elliptical galaxies.
This discovery led to an unexpected puzzle in cosmology: what drives such massive energy production? The most likely explanation is that material is accreting onto a supermassive black hole, which would account for the extraordinary energy output.
Scientists observed the innermost structure of quasar jet
For the Hubble Space Telescope, observing the quasar 3C 273 is akin to trying to spot an ant crawling around the rim of a blinding car headlight. The quasar emits thousands of times the total energy of all the stars in a galaxy. Despite its immense brightness, 3C 273 is one of the closest quasars to Earth, 2.5 billion light-years away.
Hubble‘s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) functions as a coronagraph, blocking the light from central sources like how the Moon blocks the Sun’s glare during a total solar eclipse. Astronomers have used STIS to reveal dusty disks around stars, aiding in studying planetary system formation.
NASA, ESA, Bin Ren (Université Côte d’Azur/CNRS); Acknowledgment: John Bahcall (IAS); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
It is used to gain deeper insights into quasars’ host galaxies. This coronagraph has helped astronomers observe regions eight times closer to the black hole than previously possible.
Scientists gained rare insight into the quasar‘s 300,000-light-year-long extragalactic jet, which travels across space at nearly the speed of light. By comparing new STIS coronagraphic data with archival images taken 22 years apart, the team determined that the jet moves faster and farther from the supermassive black hole.
With its detailed spatial imaging of the jet’s motion, Hubble bridged the gap between small-scale radio interferometry and large-scale optical observations, advancing our understanding of quasar host morphology. Hubble has provided a more detailed view of quasar structures and galactic interactions. In the future, Webb may offer detailed observations of 3C 273 in infrared light.