Quasars tagged posts

Digital Sky Survey maps the entire sky, providing new data to astronomers

The fifth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is collecting data about our universe for Vanderbilt University astronomers and other project members to use to explore the formation of distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, and to map the Milky Way.

The SDSS-V will make full use of existing satellites, including NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission, to lead to new discoveries. Keivan Stassun, Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, is co-investigator of NASA TESS, which enabled the discovery of a newly formed exoplanet in June 2020. That discovery boosted the potential for a joint effort with SDSS data.

“SDSS-V will magnify the exoplanet discoveries from TESS, both retrospectively and prospectively,” Stassun said...

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Feeding a Galaxy’s Nuclear Black Hole

A near-infrared Hubble image of the luminous, barred spiral galaxy ESO320-G030. Infrared observations and modeling of over a dozen molecular species at its center reveal massive inflows of gas to a nuclear region undergoing a burst of star formation and dominated by three-components, a small warm core, a disk, and an outer envelope.
NASA/HST; Alonso-Herrero et al.

A galactic bar is the approximately linear structure of stars and gas that stretches across the inner regions of some galaxies. The bar stretches from one inner spiral arm, across the nuclear region, to an arm on the other side...

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Astronomers discover 83 Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe

Astronomers from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University have discovered 83 quasars powered by supermassive black holes in the distant universe, from a time when the universe was less than 10 percent of its present age. In this photograph taken by the Hyper-Suprime Camera on the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, light shines from one of the most distant quasars known, powered by a supermassive black hole lying 13.05 billion light-years away from Earth. The other objects in the field are mostly stars in our Milky Way or galaxies along the line of sight.
Credit: Image courtesy of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

Subaru Telescope spots 13-billion-year-old quasars powered by black holes...

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Just after the Big Bang: Galaxies Created Stars a 100x faster now

This is an artist's impression of a quasar and neighboring merging galaxy. The galaxies observed by the team are so distant that no detailed images are possible at present. This combination of images of nearby counterparts gives an impression of how they might look in more detail. Credit: The image was created by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy using material from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

This is an artist’s impression of a quasar and neighboring merging galaxy. The galaxies observed by the team are so distant that no detailed images are possible at present. This combination of images of nearby counterparts gives an impression of how they might look in more detail.
Credit: The image was created by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy using material from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

A team of astronomers has discovered a new kind of galaxy which, although extremely old – formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang – creates stars more than a hundred times faster than our own Milky Way. The team’s discovery could help solve a cosmic puzzle – a mysterious population of surprisingly massive galaxies from when the universe was only about 10% of its current age...

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