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Largest-Ever Map of Supermassive Black Holes 'Spurring So Much New Science'


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Astronomers have crafted a map of the most powerful form of supermassive black holes across several billion light years of space.

The three-dimensional map plots the locations of 1.3 million quasars, some of which were active when the universe was barely born, 12.2 billion years ago, according to a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

These quasars are some of the brightest objects in the universe and are powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. As matter falls into these black holes, it forms an accretion disk, which emits vast amounts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays and gamma rays. These objects can release more energy than entire galaxies combined.

The nearest quasar to Earth is several hundred light years away, meaning that the map of quasars spans an immense distance in space. This also implies that quasars were more common in the early days of the universe, as objects further away in space are being seen longer ago in time due to the limited speed of light.

supermassive black holes
The location of quasars from our vantage point, the center of the sphere (main) and a stock image of a black hole (inset). The regions empty of quasars in the map are where the disk... ESA/Gaia/DPAC; Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation; K. Storey-Fisher et al. 2024 /ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS

"This quasar catalog is different from all previous catalogs in that it gives us a three-dimensional map of the largest-ever volume of the universe," paper author David Hogg, a senior research scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and a professor of physics and data science at New York University, said in a statement.

"It isn't the catalog with the most quasars, and it isn't the catalog with the best-quality measurements of quasars, but it is the catalog with the largest total volume of the universe mapped."

The map was made using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, which picked up signals from quasars in the background of other observations. The map has a donut-shaped gap in the middle where the Milky Way blocks our view of the rest of the universe.

"We were able to make measurements of how matter clusters together in the early universe that are as precise as some of those from major international survey projects—which is quite remarkable given that we got our data as a 'bonus' from the Milky Way–focused Gaia project," study author Kate Storey-Fisher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Donostia International Physics Center in Spain, said in the statement.

map of quasar
An infographic explaining the creation of a new map of around 1.3 million quasars from across the visible universe. The data came from the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope. ESA/Gaia/DPAC; Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation; K. Storey-Fisher et al. 2024

Quasars are often surrounded by haloes of dark matter, which is a type of matter that does not interact with regular matter or the electromagnetic field except by gravity and is, therefore, incredibly difficult to observe with our current technology. Around 27 percent of the known universe is thought to be comprised of dark matter.

The researchers hope to use this quasar map to learn more about how dark matter clumps together in space.

"It has been very exciting to see this catalog spurring so much new science," Storey-Fisher says. "Researchers around the world are using the quasar map to measure everything from the initial density fluctuations that seeded the cosmic web to the distribution of cosmic voids to the motion of our solar system through the universe."

"This quasar catalog is a great example of how productive astronomical projects are," agreed Hogg. "Gaia was designed to measure stars in our own galaxy, but it also found millions of quasars at the same time, which give us a map of the entire universe."

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