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Post Info TOPIC: Quasars


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RE: Quasars
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Discovery in the early universe poses black hole growth puzzle

Quasars are luminous objects with supermassive black holes at their centers, visible over vast cosmic distances. Infalling matter increases the black hole mass and is also responsible for a quasar's brightness. Now, using the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii, astronomers led by Christina Eilers have discovered extremely young quasars with a puzzling property: these quasars have the mass of about a billion suns, yet have been collecting matter for less than 100,000 years. Conventional wisdom says quasars of that mass should have needed to pull in matter a thousand times longer than that - a cosmic conundrum. The results have been published in the May 2 edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
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First Quasars
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Title: On the formation of the first quasars
Author: Rosa Valiante, Bhaskar Agarwal, Melanie Habouzit, Edwige Pezzulli

Observations of the most luminous quasars at redshift z>6 reveal the existence of numerous supermasssive black holes (>10^9 Msun) already in place about twelve billion years ago. In addition, the interstellar medium of the galaxies hosting these black holes are observed to be chemically mature systems, with metallicities (Z>Zsun) and dust masses (>10^8 Msun) similar to that of more evolved, local galaxies. The connection between the rapid growth of the first supermassive black holes and the fast chemical evolution of the host galaxy is one of the most puzzling issues for theoretical models. Here we review state-of-the-art theoretical models that focus on this problem with particular emphasis on the conditions that lead to the formation of quasar seeds and their subsequent evolution at z>6.

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ESO's VLT Detects Unexpected Giant Glowing Halos around Distant Quasars

An international team of astronomers has discovered glowing gas clouds surrounding distant quasars. This new survey by the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope indicates that halos around quasars are far more common than expected. The properties of the halos in this surprising find are also in striking disagreement with currently accepted theories of galaxy formation in the early Universe.
An international collaboration of astronomers, led by a group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, has used the unrivalled observing power of MUSE on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Paranal Observatory to study gas around distant active galaxies, less than two billion years after the Big Bang. These active galaxies, called quasars, contain supermassive black holes in their centres, which consume stars, gas, and other material at an extremely high rate. This, in turn, causes the galaxy centre to emit huge amounts of radiation, making quasars the most luminous and active objects in the Universe.

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Hubble Sees the 'Teenage Years' of Quasars

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope's infrared vision to uncover the mysterious early formative years of quasars, the brightest objects in the universe. Hubble's sharp images unveil chaotic galaxy collisions that give birth to quasars by fuelling their energy source: a supermassive central black hole devouring infalling material.
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Title: A Hubble Diagram for Quasars
Author: Guido Risaliti, Elisabeta Lusso

We present a new method to test the cosmological model, and to estimate the cosmological parameters, based on the non-linear relation between ultraviolet and X-ray luminosity of quasars. We built a data set of ~1,250 quasars by merging several literature samples with X-ray measurements at 2 keV and SDSS photometry, which was used to estimate the extinction-corrected 2500~\AA\ flux. We obtained three main results: (1) we checked the non-linear relation between X-ray and UV luminosities in small redshift bins up to z~6, confirming that it holds at all redshifts with the same slope; (2) we built a Hubble diagram for quasars up to z~6, which is well matched to that of supernovae in the common z=0-1.4 redshift interval, and extends the test of the cosmological model up to z~6; (3) we showed that this non-linear relation is a powerful tool to estimate cosmological parameters. With present data, assuming a Lambda CDM model, we obtain Omega_M=0.21^{+0.08}_{-0.10} and Omega_\Lambda=0.95^{+0.30}_{-0.20} (Omega_M=0.28±0.04 and Omega_\Lambda=0.74±0.08 from a joint quasar-SNe fit). However, much more precise measurements will be achieved in the future. A few thousands SDSS quasars already have serendipitous X-ray observations with Chandra or XMM-Newton, and at least 100,000 quasars with UV and X-ray data will be available from the eROSITA all-sky survey in a few years. Euclid, LSST, and Athena surveys will further increase the sample size to at least several hundred thousands. Our simulations show that these samples will provide tight constraints on the cosmological parameters, and will allow to test possible deviations from the standard model with higher precisions than available today.

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Existence of a group of "quiet" quasars confirmed

Apart from very distant, ultraluminous quasars -evolving rapidly and associated with galaxy mergers - there is likely another population of quasars that evolves slowly
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Title: The most luminous quasars do not live in the most massive dark matter haloes at any redshift
Authors: N. Fanidakis, A. V. Maccio, C. M. Baugh, C. G. Lacey, C. S. Frenk

Quasars represent the brightest Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in the Universe and are thought to indicate the location of prodigiously growing Black Holes (BHs), with luminosities as high as 10^48 erg/sec. It is often expected though that such an extremely energetic process will take place in the most massive bound structures in the dark matter (DM) distribution. We show that in contrast to this expectation, in a galaxy formation model which includes AGN feedback, quasars are predicted to live in average DM halo environments with typical masses of a few times 10^12 solar masses. This fundamental prediction arises from the fact that quasar activity (i.e., BH accretion with luminosity greater than 10^46 erg/sec) is inhibited in DM haloes where AGN feedback operates. The galaxy hosts of quasars in our simulations are identified with over massive (in gas and stars) spheroidal galaxies, in which BH accretion is triggered via a galaxy merger or secular processes. We further show that the z=0 descendants of high redshift (z~6) QSOs span a wide range of morphologies, galaxy and halo masses. The z~6 BHs typically grow only by a modest factor by the present day. Remarkably, high redshift QSOs never inhabit the largest DM haloes at that time and their descendants are very seldom found in the most massive haloes at z=0. We also show that observationally it is very likely to find an enhancement in the abundance of galaxies around quasars at z~5. However, these enhancements are considerably weaker compared to the overdensities expected at the extreme peaks of the DM distribution. Thus, it is very unlikely that a quasar detected in the z\gtrsim5 Universe pinpoints the location of the progenitors of superclusters in the local Universe.

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Title: The Discovery of Quasars
Authors: K. I. Kellermann

Although the extragalactic nature of quasars was discussed as early as 1960, it was rejected largely because of preconceived ideas about what appeared to be an unrealistically high radio and optical luminosity. Following the 1962 occultations of the strong radio source 3C 273 at Parkes, and the subsequent identification with an apparent stellar object, Maarten Schmidt recognised that the relatively simple hydrogen line Balmer series spectrum implied a redshift of 0.16 Successive radio and optical measurements quickly led to the identification of other quasars with increasingly large redshifts and the general, although for some decades not universal, acceptance of quasars as being by far the most distant and the most luminous objects in the Universe. Curiously, 3C 273, which is one of the strongest extragalactic sources in the sky, was first catalogued in 1959 and the magnitude 13 optical counterpart was observed at least as early as 1887. Since 1960, much fainter optical counterparts were being routinely identified using accurate radio interferometer positions, measured primarily at the Caltech Owens Valley Radio Observatory. However, 3C 273 eluded identification until the series of lunar occultation observations led by Cyril Hazard, although inexplicitly there was an earlier misidentification with a faint galaxy located about an arc minute away from the true position. Ironically, due to calculation error, the occultation position used by Schmidt to determine the redshift of 3C 273 was in error by 14 arcseconds, and a good occultation position was not derived until after Schmidt had obtained his 200 inch spectrum.

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Gone, with the Wind

The case of the missing quasar gas clouds has been solved by a worldwide team of astronomers, and the answer is blowin' in the wind.
Astronomers Nurten Filiz Ak and Niel Brandt of the Pennsylvania State University led the team, which announced their results in a paper published in today's issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The paper describes 19 distant quasars in which giant clouds of gas seemed to disappear in just a few years.

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Spitzer, Hubble See Galaxy-Altering Quasars Ignite

NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes have caught sight of luminous quasars igniting after galaxies collide. Quasars are bright, energetic regions around giant, active black holes in galactic centers. 
The new observations shed light on a key early period of galactic evolution when quasars and their host galaxies begin to interact, but before the two have settled down after recent galactic smashups.

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