Cold quasar

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A cold quasar is a galaxy with a quasar at the center and abundant cold gas that can still produce new stars.

Discovery

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. [1]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quasar</span> Active galactic nucleus containing a supermassive black hole

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.

An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that emits a significant amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, with characteristics indicating that the luminosity is not produced by stars. Such excess, non-stellar emissions have been observed in the radio, microwave, infrared, optical, ultra-violet, X-ray and gamma ray wavebands. A galaxy hosting an AGN is called an active galaxy. The non-stellar radiation from an AGN is theorized to result from the accretion of matter by a supermassive black hole at the center of its host galaxy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microquasar</span>

A microquasar, the smaller version of a quasar, is a compact region surrounding a stellar black hole with a mass several times that of its companion star. The matter being pulled from the companion star forms an accretion disk around the black hole. This accretion disk may become so hot, due to friction, that it begins to emit X-rays. The disk also projects narrow streams or "jets" of subatomic particles at near-light speed, generating a strong radio wave emission.

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Christopher Fulton McKee is an astrophysicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Burbidge</span> British-born American astrophysicist

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.

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Kenneth Irwin Kellermann is an American astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He is best known for his work on quasars. He won the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society in 1971, and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 2014.

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William Nielsen Brandt is the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and a professor of physics at the Pennsylvania State University. He is best known for his work on active galaxies, cosmological X-ray surveys, starburst galaxies, normal galaxies, and X-ray binaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon White</span> British astronomer

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">ULAS J1120+0641</span> One of the most distant quasars known

ULAS J1120+0641 was the most distant known quasar when discovered in 2011, surpassed in 2017 by ULAS J1342+0928. ULAS J1120+0641 was the first quasar discovered beyond a redshift of z = 7. Its discovery was reported in June 2011.

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SDSS J1254+0846 is a face-on binary quasar pair which is in the process of merging. This binary quasar is the first resolved luminous pair to be observed in the act of merging. The pair is composed of two luminous radio-quiet quasars located at redshift z=0.44, being SDSS J125455.09+084653.9 and SDSS J125454.87+084652.1, or SDSS J1254+0846 collectively. These designations also refer to their host galaxies. This pair provide evidence for the theory that quasars are switched on by galactic collisions. The pair are optically separated by 3.6 arcseconds, giving the real separation as 21 kpc. Tidal tails some 75 kpc have been detected around the galaxies. Thus the two galaxies involved are disc galaxies. The pair was first detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, hence the "SDSS" designations. The tidal tails were first observed by the Magellan Telescopes. A computer simulation by Thomas Cox of the Carnegie Institute corroborated the hypothesis that these were two merging galaxies. This binary quasar, was at the time of discovery in 2010, the lowest redshift binary quasar then observed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neta Bahcall</span> Israeli astrophysicist and cosmologist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">TON 618</span> Quasar and Lyman-alpha blob in the constellation Canes Venatici

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dara Norman</span> Astronomer

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.

References

  1. "AAS 234 Press Conference: Cold Quasars & Hot Cosmology". AAS Press Office via YouTube. 12 June 2019. Retrieved 13 June 2019.