Sometimes I’m dissatisfied with this little spinning puffball we’re stuck on, but then I see that there’s a supermassive black hole out there with a mass of two of our suns, powering an unfathomably large quasar. Luckily, it’s very, very distant.
How distant? Far away enough that it’s revealing facts about the way the universe sat immediately after the Bing Bang itself – the quasar light hitting us is a perfectly preserved image of itself 12.9 billion years ago. It’s a remarkable find, because hitherto its discovery, astronomers weren’t sure that quasars of that magnitude had existed in the infancy of the cosmos. “It is like finding a 6-foot-tall child in kindergarten,” explains one University of Michigan astrophysicist. [Gemini Observatory via Science News]
Graeme
Friday, July 1, 2011 at 12:11 PMI think a 6′ tall kid would be pretty easy to find in a kindergarten. He’s the one being used as a climbing frame.
Lindsay
Friday, July 1, 2011 at 12:38 PMOh man, nothing makes more giddy that awesome space stuff.
I never really did grow up, did I?
*blissful sighs*…
Davo
Friday, July 1, 2011 at 12:51 PMErm, I think it’s the mass of 2 billion of our suns. 2 wouldn’t be a particularly supermassive black hole.
Luke
Friday, July 1, 2011 at 2:23 PMBing Bang – explosion of the new Microsoft search engine.
Also, wouldn’t finding a 6-foot-tall child in a kindergarten start to make you wonder if it really was a kindergarten, and maybe the kindergarten didn’t come about by a random explosion of a few clouds of gas?
Iordan
Friday, July 1, 2011 at 3:23 PM“Also, wouldn’t finding a 6-foot-tall child in a kindergarten start to make you wonder if it really was a kindergarten, and maybe the kindergarten didn’t come about by a random explosion of a few clouds of gas?”
lol fail
Will
Saturday, July 2, 2011 at 11:11 PMLol, a black hole with only twice the Sun’s mass? Clever.
katesisco
Saturday, October 22, 2011 at 8:49 AMI have been sitting here in the library at MSU reading and rereading W Thornhill’s October 2011 posting at his site and this:
What of the fainter and more short-lived supernovae in highly-redshifted galaxies? Arp has shown that faint, highly-redshifted objects, like quasars, are intrinsically faint because of their youth and not their distance. Quasars are ‘born’ episodically from the nucleus of active galaxies. They initially move very fast along the spin axis away from their parent. As they mature they grow brighter and slow down, as if gaining in mass. Finally they evolve into companion galaxies. The decreasing quasar redshift occurs in discrete steps which points to a process whereby protons and electrons go through a number of small, quantized (resonant) increases in mass as the electrical stress and power density within the quasar increases. The charge required comes via an electrical ‘umbilical cord,’ in the form of the parent galaxies’ nuclear jet. Based on Arp’s discovery and the electric model of galaxies and stars, both stars and supernovae type 1a are naturally dimmer, and the supernovae more short-lived, in high-redshift galaxies than in low-redshift galaxies because of the smaller galactic power density and lower mass (energy) of all subatomic particles making up the former.
There is an accompanying diagram that you can look up yourself that shows the path of the quasar on the galaxy’s spiral axis. I have a site in which I ponder how we acquired Fluff. I think maybe Fluff is the remains of Pal, our twin sun, and the reason we have such a weak heliosphere is due to the adoption of Pal’s planets. I think maybe there is a neutron remanent of Pal and it would have to have been ejected on Pal’s spin axis. it would have slowed almost immediately. It would be very small. After all, there is the Crab Nebula.