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Scientists have discovered the energetic core of a distant galaxy that shatters the record for the brightest object in the early universe, blazing with the light equivalent to 600 trillion suns.
Researchers identified the object — a black-hole-powered object called a quasar, among the universe's brightest inhabitants — because of a chance alignment with a dim galaxy closer to Earth that magnified its light.
The quasar is 12.8 billion light-years away, and it shines at the heart of a forming galaxy during an early part of the universe's history called the epoch of reionization, when the first stars and galaxies began to burn away a haze of neutral hydrogen across the cosmos. Researchers announced its discovery on Jan. 9 at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Seattle.
"That's something we have been looking for for a long time," Xiaohui Fan, a researcher at the University of Arizona and lead author on the new work, said in a statement from the Hubble Space Telescope team. "We don't expect to find many quasars brighter than that in the whole observable universe!"
Several powerful ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope pooled their observations of the object, now designated J043947.08+163415.7, to learn more about it. The quasar gets its brightness from a supermassive black hole: material from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole falls in, leading to blasts of energy at many different wavelengths, according to the statement. The quasar likely blazed when the universe was less than a billion years old, but some of its light is only now reaching Earth. According to the new observations, the black hole powering this quasar is several hundred million times the mass of the sun.
Despite its intense brightness, the distance to the quasar is so great that it wouldn't have been visible, if not for a lucky trick of positioning. Through a process called gravitational lensing, light from the quasar has bent around a galaxy in between the object and Earth, magnifying our view: the quasar appears three times as large and 50 times as bright as it would have otherwise, researchers said in the statement. And it was only observed at all because the intervening galaxy was dim enough to not drown out the light from the ultra-distant quasar.
Learning more about this quasar, which also appears to be producing 10,000 stars per year, can teach researchers more about this distant but pivotal time in history, when the first stars and galaxies were kindling and shaping the universe to what we know today. Even more telescopes are joining the search to try and discern more about the system.
"This detection is a surprising and major discovery; for decades we thought that these lensed quasars in the early universe should be very common, but this is the first of its kind that we have found," Fabio Pacucci, a researcher at Yale University, a co-author on the work and lead author on a follow-up paper about the quasar, said in a statement from the Keck Observatory. "It gives us a clue on how to search for 'phantom quasars' — sources that are out there, but cannot be really detected yet.
"Our theoretical study predicts that we might be missing a substantial fraction of these 'phantom quasars,'" Paucci added. "If they are indeed numerous, it would revolutionize our idea of what happened right after the Big Bang, and even change our view of how these cosmic monsters grew up in mass." [Reply]
Hagfish are a bit like underwater Spidermen. When they're attacked by a predator, they shoot out a slimy substance that can seal the mouth and clog the gills of said attacker, so they can make an escape. Now, A team of US Navy scientists and engineers have figured out a way to synthesize the slime with the goal of equipping the military force with a valuable new material that could do everything from repelling sharks to providing ballistics defense.
Although hagfish are mostly blind eel-like bottom feeders, the defensive slime they produce is mighty indeed, and has even been compared to spider silk. It consists of two components, thread-like proteins and mucin, a gelatinous lubricant. Inside the animal, the threads, which are only 12 nanometers in width but up to 15 centimeters in length, are tightly coiled. When the slime is shot out into seawater, the proteins holding them together dissolve and the threads spring open. This unique mechanism means that a small tube of slime could quickly expand into a large underwater defensive shield.
"The coiled up thread behaves like a spring and quickly unravels upon contact with water due to stored energy," said Materials Engineer Dr. Ryan Kincer. "The mucin binds to water and constrains the flow between the micro channels created by the thread dispersion. The interaction between the thread, mucin, and seawater creates a three-dimensional, viscoelastic network. Over time, the thread begins to collapse on itself, causing the slime to slowly dissipate. Studies have shown the hagfish secretion can expand up to 10,000 times its initial volume."
While hagfish slime has long been talked about as a new biomaterial, keeping a tank of the slimy critters on hand for manufacturing purposes just wouldn't be practical. So Kincer and biochemist Josh Kogot figured out a way to make the substance in the lab by enlisting the help of E. coli bacteria. They engineered the bugs to produce two of the proteins normally made by the hagfish, called alpha and gamma. They then combined them in solution where they assembled into the slime.
"The synthetic hagfish slime may be used for ballistics protection, firefighting, anti-fouling, diver protection, or anti-shark spray," said Kogot. "The possibilities are endless. Our goal is to produce a substance that can act as non-lethal and non-kinetic defense to protect the warfighter."
"Researchers have called the hagfish slime one of the most unique biomaterials known," added Kincer. "For the U.S. Navy to have its hands on it or a material that acts similar would be beneficial. From a tactical standpoint, it would be interesting to have a material that can change the properties of the water at dilute concentrations in a matter of seconds." [Reply]
Wait, I disagree with more than just your translation of scientific notation. Wouldn’t 3.846 x 1026 x 600T = 2.3076e18? Thereby dividing by 60 gives you 39,460,000,000,000,000 light bulbs? [Reply]
Triple post! After my own research, I see the error. It shouldn’t say 3.846 x 1026, it should be 3.846 x 10^26. This is how you get to 2.3076e41. So I stand by my answer in my first post. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Third Eye:
Wait, I disagree with more than just your translation of scientific notation. Wouldn’t 3.846 x 1026 x 600T = 2.3076e18? Thereby dividing by 60 gives you 39,460,000,000,000,000 light bulbs?
I don't think your initial conversion is correct, but I think you were right about the second part.
I'm pretty sure it should be 3.846e39. I'll screw it up again if I try and write out the zeroes.... [Reply]
Originally Posted by Third Eye:
Triple post! After my own research, I see the error. It shouldn’t say 3.846 x 1026, it should be 3.846 x 10^26. This is how you get to 2.3076e41. So I stand by my answer in my first post.
