The Hubble Space Telescope has provided its closest-ever view of a quasar, revealing unusual structures near its core. The quasar, designated 3C 273, lies billions of light-years from Earth and is one of the brightest known objects in the universe. This discovery was made possible by Hubble’s imaging spectrograph, which minimises the intense glare from the supermassive black hole powering the quasar, allowing astronomers to examine its surroundings in unprecedented detail.

According to a NASA report, Bin Ren, a researcher at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, described the findings as peculiar, stating that they have got a few blobs of different sizes and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure within 16,000 light-years of the black hole. These features may include small galaxies feeding the black hole with gas and dust, fuelling the quasar’s immense brightness.

The Unique Properties of Quasars

Quasars, powered by supermassive black holes, are the luminous centres of active galaxies. Their brightness is a result of matter falling into the black hole and forming an accretion disk, where immense gravitational forces heat the material until it glows. Magnetic fields near the poles of these black holes accelerate some particles to nearly the speed of light, creating jets of plasma that can extend hundreds of thousands of light-years.

There are around a million quasars visible from Earth, with most of them formed approximately 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Not all galaxies, however, host quasars, as this depends on the availability of surrounding matter to sustain the black hole’s activity.

New Insights into Quasar 3C 273

The Hubble observations also allowed researchers to study the jet extending 300,000 light-years from 3C 273. By comparing images taken over 22 years, astronomers noted that the jet appears to move faster the farther it is from the black hole. Ren indicated that future studies, including observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, may provide additional insights into the quasar’s complex structure and galactic interactions.