Galactic nuclei on the verge of merging Hubble spotted a double quasar about 10.6 billion years ago | Sorae Portal site to the Universe

This is the double quasar “J0749 + 2255” in the direction of “Gemini”. The image was created from data acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The lower left scale bar indicates 1 arcsecond (about 1/1800th of the apparent diameter of the full moon).

A quasar is a term for a particularly bright type of active galactic nucleus (AGN) that emits powerful electromagnetic waves from a narrow region in the galactic center. Double quasars such as J0749+2255 are thought to appear as a pair of quasars because the nuclei of two merged galaxies each shine as quasars.

The driving force behind active galactic nuclei, including quasars, is believed to be supermassive black holes (supermassive black holes), whose masses range from hundreds of thousands to billions of times that of the Sun. Material such as gas drawn into the black hole does not fall straight down, but spirals while forming a structure called an accretion disk as the black hole rotates. When the gravitational energy is released in the process of falling matter, the accretion disk heats up and emits electromagnetic waves of different wavelengths. The two black holes driving J0749+2255 are estimated to have masses of about 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion times that of the Sun, respectively.

According to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which operates the Hubble Space Telescope, we’re looking at J0749+2255 about 10.661 billion years ago (redshift z=2.17). Despite being very old, in other words, very far out in space, the Hubble Space Telescope has managed to isolate two quasars only about 12,000 light-years away. After more than 10 billion years, J0749+2255 may have evolved into a giant elliptical galaxy.

The first image was actually released two years ago in April 2021, but it shows the effect of a gravitational reversal of another galaxy between the quasar and Earth.（※）One image of a quasar that greeted the quasar may have split in two on Earth. This time, according to the research results announced by the research team led by Yu-Ching Chen, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as a result of observations at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, galaxies that cause gravitational lensing exist.

* … space-time is distorted by the mass of the celestial body in front of it (the lens of the celestial body), the direction of transmission of the light emitted by the celestial body (the light source) on the far side changes, and the image on the ground is distorted or enlarged., A phenomenon in which the image of the same celestial body sometimes appears divided into Multiple parts.

Related: Oldest ’10-billion-year-old quasar’ discovered at once (April 11, 2021)

According to STScI, it was rare to find a double quasar when the universe was only three billion years old. Observations of ancient double quasars such as J0749+2255 provide evidence of the evolution of galaxies during the era known as the “cosmic noon,” when intense star formation occurred about 10 billion years ago. It is expected to be so

【▲ Image of a galaxy merged with twin quasar J0749 + 2255[Credit:NASAESAJosephOlmsted(STScI))】

source

• Image credit: NASA, ESA, Yu-Ching Chen (UIUC), Hsiang-Chih Hwang (IAS), Nadia Zakamska (JHU), Yue Shen (UIUC) and Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
• STScI – Hubble unexpectedly discovered a double quasar in a distant universe
• NOIRLab – A pair of bright quasars at the center of the galaxy merger
• Illinois News Bureau – Hubble unexpectedly found a double quasar in a distant universe
• Yu-Qing Chen et al. – a close quasar pair in a galactic disc-disk merger at z = 2.17 (Nature, arXiv)

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