This Is the Closest Ever Image of a Galaxy-Eating Quasar

The super-bright galactic core is powered by quasar 3C 273, first discovered in 1963.

A brand-new Hubble image delivers an incredible view of a quasar, enabling the space telescope to “peer closer than ever into the throat of an energetic monster black hole.” The new views, described as “weird,” show what could be a group of galaxies falling into a black hole.

Quasars are wildly energetic cosmological objects powered by mass accretion onto a supermassive black hole. Observed with masses as significant as tens of billions of Suns, quasars glow brightly at the center of galaxies as their black hole consumes surrounding material.

Hubble’s new video of the environment near the quasar shows many “weird things,” per Bin Ren from the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France.

“We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes, and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure. This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole,” says Ren. The black hole is affecting potential galaxies that are 9.4058e+16 miles away. That’s 9.4 with 16 zeroes.

NASA says some of these objects, including the filamentary structures in the bottom right area of the image, might be small satellite galaxies “falling into the black hole.” These galaxies provide the necessary energy for the central supermassive black hole, “powering the bright lighthouse” that is the quasar.

“Thanks to Hubble’s observing power, we’re opening a new gateway into understanding quasars,” Ren says. “My colleagues are excited because they’ve never seen this much detail before.”

An annotated image of Quasar 3C 273. The top image does not include the coronagraph, so the quasar is extremely bright. The bottom image shows the core light blocked.

As NASA explains, quasars “look starlike as point sources of light in the sky,” which is why they are called quasi-stellar objects, “quasar” for short. This specific quasar is 3C 273, identified in 1963 by the astronomer Maarten Schmidt as among the first observed quasars. 2.5 billion light-years away, Schmidt determined it could not be a star — it was too energetic. 3C 273 is 10 times brighter “than the brightest giant elliptical galaxies.” Unsurprisingly, 3C 273’s discovery opened up a cosmological can of worms. What could power something so energetic? The most likely explanation is material accreting onto a black hole.

In 1994, Hubble captured a detailed view of the environment surrounding a quasar, and the scene was significantly more complex than expected.

“The images suggested galactic collisions and mergers between quasars and companion galaxies, where debris cascades down onto supermassive black holes. This reignites the giant black holes that drive quasars,” writes NASA.

Given the energy of quasars like 3C 273, NASA says it is akin to Hubble looking directly into a car’s bright headlight “and trying to see an ant crawling on the rim around it.” It is very challenging to photograph quasars, and 3C 273 “pours out thousands of times the entire energy of stars in a galaxy.”

Fortunately, Hubble’s onboard Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) can act as a coronagraph, blocking light from central sources, similar to how the Moon blocks the Sun during a total solar eclipse. Astronomers have long used the STIS to block bright light sources and get a better look at the surrounding area. The Hubble coronagraph “allowed astronomers to look eight times closer to the black hole than ever before.”

“With the fine spatial structures and jet motion, Hubble bridged a gap between the small-scale radio interferometry and large-scale optical imaging observations, and thus we can take an observational step towards a more complete understanding of quasar host morphology. Our previous view was very limited, but Hubble is allowing us to understand the complicated quasar morphology and galactic interactions in detail. In the future, looking further at 3C 273 in infrared light with the James Webb Space Telescope might give us more clues,” Ren says.

Scientists believe there are at least a million quasars scattered throughout the sky. For now, this is the best view of one people have ever had.

Image credits: NASA, ESA, Bin Ren (Université Côte d’Azur/CNRS); Acknowledgment: John Bahcall (IAS); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)