The Hubble Space Telescope has made its closest-ever observation of a quasar, discovering unusual features near the supermassive black hole at its center. Quasars are incredibly bright centers of active galaxies powered by feeding supermassive black holes.
The one Hubble studied, 3C 273, is one of the closest quasars to Earth and is incredibly luminous, outshining the sun in our sky if it were tens of thousands of light-years away. A new instrument on Hubble allowed scientists to study this object without the glare from its bright center.
Using a coronagraph-like instrument, Hubble was able to see structures around the black hole like never before. Bin Ren, of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in France, said: “We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure” within 16,000 light-years of the black hole.
These objects could be small galaxies falling towards the black hole, providing it with food in the form of gas and dust. Not all supermassive black holes are hungry, however. The team compared new images of 3C 273 to archival images taken 22 years earlier and found that the jet moves faster when farther away from the black hole.
The discovery provides a rare insight into the quasar’s morphology and galactic interactions. Future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope may offer more clues about this phenomenon.
Source: https://www.space.com/hubble-quasar-black-hole-3C273