Black holes open up a yawning chasm in the fabric of space itself. Surrounding material is relentlessly drawn in, swirling around the plug hole and awaiting its turn for oblivion.
This queue of material forms an accretion disc that becomes super-heated, often creating searing radiation that surges from the region just outside the point of no return.
Quasars are objects where these effects are taken to the extreme. The light from the black hole’s environs can outshine the rest of its host galaxy - a collection of hundreds of billions of stars. Quasars are so bright that they can be seen almost all the way across the vastness of space.
This week, astronomers at MIT have announced their discovery of the earliest (and therefore farthest) flickering quasar ever found. It was active just 850 million years after the Big Bang and burned as bright as 12 trillion Suns.
The quasar flickers due to fluctuations in the amount of material the black hole is snacking on. From the way this quasar flickers, astronomers can tell that the accretion disc is shaped like a flat pancake. This was unexpected. Well ordered, flat accretion discs are normally associated with more modern, mature quasars.
Quasars raging in the universe’s youth were expected to be more disordered and chaotic. This discovery adds to a growing mystery surrounding supermassive black holes: how come they formed and matured so quickly after the Big Bang?
"I think what this suggests is that all the messy, very rapid growth phases that we expect all black holes to go through at some point happen very, very early on.”
- team member Anna-Christina Eilers.
📸 Image of The Week
New Horizons looking back at Pluto and seeing sunlight filtering through the dwarf planet’s thin atmosphere.
🏛️ From the Club’s Museum of Cosmic Curiosities
🏛️ The Star That Opened The World’s Fair
Chicago, 1933. The World’s Fair is coming to town and organisers are looking for a unique way to open proceedings.
Enter astronomer Edwin Frost, the retired director of the local Yerkes Observatory.
Forty years earlier, in 1893, the Windy City had hosted its first great fair - the World’s Columbian Exposition. Frost came up with an ingenious way to link the two events: the star Arcturus.
According to the best measurements of the time, Arcturus sits 40 light years away. In other words, its light takes 40 years to reach us. Light arriving in Chicago in 1933 would have left Arcturus at the time of the last fair in 1893.
Light from Arcturus was focussed through a telescope onto a photo cell, creating an electrical signal that was sent via Western Union telegraph lines to Chicago, triggering the illumination of the fairgrounds at 9:15 p.m.
There’s only one problem. We now know that Arcturus is in fact 37 light years away, not 40. Still, it was a symbolic celestial gesture and a clever one at that.
(The University of Chicago Library has a lot more detail on what when into the planning of the event).
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