New luminous quasar detected by astronomers

Tomasz Nowakowski is a member of the physics.org community.

A new quasar has been detected by an international team of astronomy researchers. Over the last 9 billion years of history, the most Luminous quasar has been found. A paper on the discovery was published in June.

Active quasars are very high in luminosity and emit high levels of radiation. They are among the most distant objects in the universe and serve as fundamental tools for many studies. Quasars have been used to investigate the structure of the universe. They helped us understand the dynamics of black holes and the universe.

The bright, blue, point-like source was selected from the SkyMapper Southern Survey Data Release 2 (SMSS DR2). The study was conducted with theSAAO's 1.9-meter telescope and its SpUpNIC instrument and found that the source is a quasar at a redshift of 0.83.

The most Luminous quasar of the last 9 billion years is J 1144. At a redshift greater than 0.4, it is the most bright quasar in the world.

The mass of the black hole in J1144 is estimated by the astronomer. The Eddington ratio for this quasar is at a level of 1.4.

A large size of its broad line region is suggested by the high luminosity of J 1144. According to the research, the H emitting region is about 1,200 light days. The BLR is expected to be in excess of 100 microarc seconds.

The authors of the paper explained how the properties of J1144 could be useful.

An extremely bright quasar like J1144 could be used as a background source. The researchers wrote in the paper that UV Spectroscopy of J1144 could be used to investigate the circumgalactic medium.

The ANU 2.3m telescope has been used to identify about 80 new bright quasars. The census of bright quasars will be closer to completion thanks to their new study.

More information: Christopher A. Onken et al, Discovery of the most luminous quasar of the last 9 Gyr. arXiv:2206.04204v1 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2206.04204

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