A cold quasar is a rare population of luminous unobscured quasars associated with starburst galaxies with an high rate of star formation of about 1000 solar masses per year. Theses quasars have a significant amount of cold gas at the center of the galaxy. [1] Theses rare types of quasars are not well explained by simplistic models of quasar evolution and fueling. [2]
There are 64 galaxies that are described to host a cold quasar. [1] [2]
The discovery of cold quasars was formally announced in 2019 by Professor Allison Kirkpatrick at the 234th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis. [3]
A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. The emission from an AGN is powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass ranging from millions to tens of billions of solar masses, surrounded by a gaseous accretion disc. Gas in the disc falling towards the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The radiant energy of quasars is enormous; the most powerful quasars have luminosities thousands of times greater than that of a galaxy such as the Milky Way. Quasars are usually categorized as a subclass of the more general category of AGN. The redshifts of quasars are of cosmological origin.
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M☉). Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, including light. Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. For example, the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A*. Accretion of interstellar gas onto supermassive black holes is the process responsible for powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars.
Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey; 12 August 1919 – 5 April 2020) was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy.
Moondragon is a character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by Bill Everett, Mike Friedrich, and George Tuska, the character first appeared in Iron Man #54. She has achieved her extraordinary talents strictly through extreme degrees of personal regimen, unlike most Marvel characters who have gained their paranormal abilities through birth or accident. She is one of the most powerful telepaths on earth. Her abilities also include telekinesis and the power to transform into a dragon. Heather Douglas is known under the codename Moondragon.
A dark galaxy is a hypothesized galaxy with no stars. They received their name because they have no visible stars but may be detectable if they contain significant amounts of gas. Astronomers have long theorized the existence of dark galaxies, but there are no confirmed examples to date. Dark galaxies are distinct from intergalactic gas clouds caused by galactic tidal interactions, since these gas clouds do not contain dark matter, so they do not technically qualify as galaxies. Distinguishing between intergalactic gas clouds and galaxies is difficult; most candidate dark galaxies turn out to be tidal gas clouds. The best candidate dark galaxies to date include HI1225+01, AGC229385, and numerous gas clouds detected in studies of quasars.
John Peter Huchra was an American astronomer and professor. He was the Vice Provost for Research Policy at Harvard University and a Professor of Astronomy at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. He was also a former chair of the United States National Committee for the International Astronomical Union. and past president of the American Astronomical Society.
Phyla-Vell is a character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by Peter David and Paul Azaceta, the character first appeared in Captain Marvel vol. 5 #16. Phyla-Vell is the daughter of superhero Mar-Vell and the sister of Genis-Vell. The character has also been known as Quasar, Captain Marvel, and Martyr at various points in her history.
Guinevere Alice Mei-Ing Kauffmann was born in California. She is an astrophysicist and is known for her work studying galaxies among other subjects.
Simon David Manton White, FRS, is a British-German astrophysicist. He was one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019.
Strong gravitational lensing is a gravitational lensing effect that is strong enough to produce multiple images, arcs, or Einstein rings. Generally, for strong lensing to occur, the projected lens mass density must be greater than the critical density, that is . For point-like background sources, there will be multiple images; for extended background emissions, there can be arcs or rings. Topologically, multiple image production is governed by the odd number theorem.
Françoise Combes is a French astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and a professor at the Collège de France where she has been the chair of Galaxies and cosmology since 2014.
Priyamvada (Priya) Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist and professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly in gravitational lensing and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
Green bean galaxies (GBGs) are very rare astronomical objects that are thought to be quasar ionization echos. They were discovered by Mischa Schirmer and colleagues R. Diaz, K. Holhjem, N.A. Levenson, and C. Winge. The authors report the discovery of a sample of Seyfert-2 galaxies with ultra-luminous galaxy-wide narrow-line regions (NLRs) at redshifts z=0.2-0.6.
Neta Bahcall is an Israeli astrophysicist and cosmologist specializing in dark matter, the structure of the universe, quasars, and the formation of galaxies. Bahcall is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University.
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a NASA-funded citizen science project which is part of the Zooniverse web portal. It aims to discover new brown dwarfs, faint objects that are less massive than stars, some of which might be among the nearest neighbors of the Solar System, and might conceivably detect the hypothesized Planet Nine. The project's principal investigator is Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
TON 618 is a hyperluminous, broad-absorption-line, radio-loud quasar and Lyman-alpha blob located near the border of the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices, with the projected comoving distance of approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth. It possesses one of the most massive black holes ever found, at 40.7 billion M☉.
NGC 585 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Cetus, which is about 245 million light-years from the Milky Way's center. The object was discovered on December 20, 1827, by the British astronomer John Frederick William Herschel.
Dara J. Norman is an astronomer and the deputy director of the Community Science and Data Center at the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in Tucson, Arizona. She is also the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Diversity Advocate at NOAO. Her research centers on the influence of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) on the evolution of galaxies. In 2020, she was inducted into the inaugural cohort of American Astronomical Society Fellows in recognition of her leadership and achievements.
IRAS 05189-2524 is a galaxy merger located in the constellation Lepus. It is located 603 million light-years away from the Solar System and has an approximate diameter of 75,000 light-years.
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