Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
A quasar from the universe’s first billion years has been spotted, flickering wildly in brightness. Detected by NASA’s NuSTAR telescope, it could reveal how early black holes grew at astonishing speeds, rewriting cosmic history.
Announced at the American Astronomical Society, this quasar, J1429+5447, is the most distant object ever detected by NuSTAR. Its extreme brightness shifts suggest a powerful, fast-moving jet aimed directly at Earth.
Lea Marcotulli, Yale astrophysicist and lead author of The Astrophysical Journal Letters study, confirms that J1429+5447’s X-ray emissions doubled in just four months—meaning it fluctuated dramatically in only two weeks in its own timeframe.
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Quasars help astronomers understand reionization, the cosmic event that ended the universe’s "dark ages." Thomas Connor from the Chandra X-ray Center suggests that supermassive black holes could have played a key role in this era.
Meg Urry, Yale physicist, explains that Einstein’s relativity amplifies the quasar’s changes. Its jet, traveling near light speed, distorts time and space, making it appear to flicker at an impossible rate from Earth’s perspective.
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Quasars form when supermassive black holes consume matter, creating bright jets. This quasar’s jet stretches nearly a million light-years, transporting high-energy particles and possibly influencing galaxy formation across the early universe.
If these black holes existed so soon after the Big Bang, how did they grow so fast? The discovery raises new questions about whether quasars with jets accelerate black hole growth, challenging previous models of galactic evolution.
NASA-supported research aims to find more early-universe quasars with jets. Identifying more of these objects could solve the mystery of how black holes expanded at such rapid rates in just a fraction of the universe’s lifetime.
As astronomers scan the skies for similar objects, the discovery of J1429+5447 opens a thrilling chapter in understanding cosmic evolution. Every new quasar found could bring us closer to solving the universe’s greatest puzzles.
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