Lots of Ink: Record-distant quasar means young universe lit up quick, a mystery.
Data have the jarring habit of messing up sweet theory with hard fact. Cosmologists a few years ago were happily sketching out a timeline for the early universe – After the bang faded, a murk of hydrogen spawned a few giant bright stars to re-ionize and thus clear the haze, more stars agglomerated into big galaxies, and gradually in galactic cores black holes gained mass until they had the brawn to blaze away as quasars. Now comes evidence that at least one or (and thus surely a lot) more fully formed supermassive black hole every bit as mature-looking as what we see at much later epochs was gobbling dust and stars a ‘mere’ 700 million years after time zero. Who ordered that?
This from the journal Nature. A team led by British astronomers got the infrared data, with painstaking effort, from telescopes in Hawaii,Chile, and elsewhere. Nature ran a commentary by another Brit who said this monstrous signal is rubbishing some hypothesis on how things went in those early aeons. The mystery how it got to a mass two billion times that of the sun so early will give theorists panic attacks. Having something that is the farthest and oldest-which-really-means-earliest-ergo-youngest anything is news. Having it wreck an arcane but deeply-felt paradigm is even better. That it is baffling is best. Those, and a few press releases, roused a platoon of the science journalism corps to action.
Hmmm – wonder if we’ll ever know whether this biggie is in a galactic core, proto or otherwise, and if so how massive that galaxy it. With so much evidence that masses of galaxies and their black hole hearts are today well-correlated, it’d be great to know if this one fit that pattern.
Stories:
- AP – Alicia Chang: Scientists discover brightest, earliest quasar ; Clear enunciation that the signal may be ancient, but the source is of one of the first of these to form, hence young. The hed says brightest. Story does not. Neither does the journal article. But it does say it is very bright.
- AFP – Bright galaxy sheds light on early universe ; The galaxy part is guesswork. Nobody can see a galaxy there, but one may be supposed. Hed should have just referred to what is seen, a quasar. The story says quasars are galaxies. They do tend to be in galaxies.
- Science News – Nadia Drake: Most distant quasar raises questions ;
- Wired – Mark Brown – Infancy of Universe Seen in Brightest Quasar Yet ; I am starting to lose confidence that it is not the brightest ever seen, for this is the second news report to say it is. It is extremely massive, hence very bright. And it is at the Eddington Limit, meaning it is consuming matter fast as it can. But I still don’t see in the paper or the accompanying commentary that it is the brightest. The ESO release calls it brightest seen yet in the early universe, not of all time.
- The Atlantic – Nicholas Jackson: Early Quasar Is Brightest Object Ever Found in the Universe ; Rewritten from AP, largely. And it says it is the brightest “because is took nearly 13 billion years for its light to reach Earth.” I remain unconvinced.
- BBC – Jonathan Amos: ‘Monster’ driving cosmic beacon;
- ABC (Australia) : Faraway quasar sheds light on early universe ;
- Cosmos (Australia) Iain Coleman: Universe’s most distant quasar found ;
- Washington Post (blog) Elizabeth Flock: Quasar found from dawn of time ; Derived from AP – it is unclear why to bother posting on it rather than just running the AP account.
- Scientific American – John Matson: Brilliant, but Distant: Most Far-Flung Known Quasar Offers Glimpse into Early Universe ;
Grist for the Mill:
European Southern Observatory Press Release; Imperial College London Press Release ;
