Scientists have observed X-ray emission from the brightest quasar recorded in the last 9 billion years of cosmic history. Known as SMSS J114447.77-430859.3 or J1144 for short, this quasar provides new insights into the inner workings of quasars and their interactions with the surrounding cosmos. Their results have been reported Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Located somewhere between the constellations Centauri and Hydra in a galaxy about 9.6 billion light-years from Earth, J1144 has an enormous luminosity 100,000 billion times that of the Sun. This quasar’s proximity to Earth, compared to other objects of equal luminosity, gave astronomers an opportunity to learn about the quasar and the black hole that feeds its surroundings.

A Research Fellow at the Institute of Research, Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP), Dr. Elias Kammun and Ph.D. It was conducted by Zsofi Igo. candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE).

Quasars are some of the brightest and most distant objects in the known universe, powered by gas falling into a supermassive black hole. They can be described as very high luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGN) that emit enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation that can be observed in the radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray bands. J1144 was first observed in the visible wavelength range by the SkyMapper Southern Survey (SMSS) in 2022.

For this study, the researchers combined observations from several space observatories: the eROSITA instrument at the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton Observatory, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and NASA’s . Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

The team used data from four observatories to measure the temperature of the X-rays emitted by the quasar. They found that this temperature is about 350 million Kelvin, which is more than 60,000 times the temperature at the Sun’s surface. The team also found that the mass of the black hole at the center of the quasar is about 10 billion times the mass of the Sun, and its growth rate is about 100 solar masses per year.

The X-ray light from this source varied on a time scale of several days; this is not usually seen in quasars with large black holes, such as in J1144. A typical variability timescale for a black hole of this size would be months or even years. The observations also showed that while some of the gas was absorbed by the black hole, some of the gas was ejected as extremely powerful winds that injected large amounts of energy into the host galaxy.

“Despite its extraordinary power, we were very surprised that no X-ray observatory has observed this source,” said Dr Kammun, lead author of the paper.

He adds: “These types of quasars are usually much further away, so they appear much dimmer, and we see them as they were when the universe was only 2-3 billion years old. J1144 is a very rare source because it is so bright and much closer to Earth. (although still very far!), which gives us a unique insight into what such powerful quasars look like.”

“A new tracking campaign for this resource will launch this June and may reveal more surprises from this unique resource.” Source