By: Brett X

Disclaimer: I know only enough about this subject to be dangerous. I have a light academic background in this information and this field, a great interest, have read a number of news articles, a few FAQs, a couple of help sections, and had a couple of questions answered by some scientists. That being said, it doesn’t take much these days for anyone who’s curious about anything to do a science. Citizen science projects are plentiful, and Zooniverse, at www.zooniverse.org, is one of the best sites out there. Many of their projects are astronomy-based, but there are biological and historical projects as well that need nothing more than a person with an interest and a bit of free time to click some images. No background, no math, no thinking really required.

So in that sense, let the “adventure” of my discovery of SDSS J131234.73+111003.3, a potential quasar, or “quasai-stellar object”, inappropriately named before it was figured out that these are no stars, but ancient (10+ billion years old) supermassive black holes at the centers of the first galaxies, blazing bright with starforming and stardestroying activity, begin.

SDSS J131234.73+111003.3. Doesn’t sound like much, but it could be a big deal; or it could be nothing at all. Either way, its just another sign of how awesome it is to live in 2014. In this year, I, who have little more scientific training than the average sophomore, maybe early-junior year physics or astrophysics major, have been able to “discover” a quasar. And I did this while sitting on my couch, drinking a glass of chianti, wearing pajama pants.

I hit a couple buttons on my computer, type in the right address, and I get to see a picture overlaid from two separate satellites. These satellites show “pictures” in spectrums that our eyes cannot see, few organisms on this planet can see (at least both of them) and that 100 years ago, we didn’t even know existed as ways of showing “pictures”. An infrared picture overlaid on a radio-spectrum picture, showing the same tiny patch of sky, barely bigger than a few “arcseconds”, a measurement of distance used in astronomy to depict an area no bigger than a couple pinpricks in our normal view of the sky. And within this picture are a dozen or so objects that are just impossibly old, impossibly vast, and impossibly mysterious.

For the sake of this not being the world’s longest blog post, I will save how we managed to get to this point, but those who know more than me and have invested a lot more of their talents and time into these subjects have found out that a “bright spot” on the radio spectrum indicates a high velocity, high temperature stream of particles. Those particles could be electrons, they could be protons, they could be neutrons; and most likely, they are just floating free. They are in this “unnatural” state of being because they have come close to, but never quite entered the maw of a black hole and because of that been launched off in three directions (the three spots seen on the radio image) at absolutely incredible energies. This black hole is at the center of a galaxy that existed billions of years ago. It’s a window to the beginnings of the universe. The particles that produced, through the never-ending pursuit of the lowest possible energy state by all things in the universe, the light that activated those pixels on the camera whose image I was looking at, left their source were born before not only the earth was formed, but the sun, and probably not only the star that went supernova to form the sun, but the star that went supernova to form that star. And I can look at this triple-spot in a certain configuration and know that what I am seeing is a galaxy that is literally exploding with star formation. It is glowing brighter than anything does today, it is consuming more matter in a few seconds than we use on this planet in a year. And it is located billions of light years away. Most likely something on the order of 5 to 6 x 1022 miles away. That’s a 5 or 6 with 22 0s after it.

Now that I’ve “discovered” this quasar, this brightly burning supermassive black hole at the center of one of the first galaxies ever formed, a galaxy tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of light years across, it may have more secrets to reveal. That’s out of my hands now; that falls now to some woefully underpaid, incredibly overworked post-doctoral kid, probably in his mid-20s, most likely not American (because Americans with that much math and science skill can usually get better paying jobs) to look at a rainbow of the light from this quasar. This rainbow will have a series of dark lines on it of varying widths. Those widths will be able to tell the scientist how much hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and other elements are in that quasar. It might end there, but hey, who knows, maybe that quasar holds the secret to something even cooler; it might even be the quasar that gets used to try to test if free will is a real thing or not. But that’s for another blog post.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading, I hope you followed. If this doesn’t amaze you, if it doesn’t blow your mind, then I just can’t wrap my head around why you’re not more curious about the world around you. Science. For the win. But if it does amaze you, check out zooniverse.org and do a science yourself. Scientists are underfunded, overworked, and produce more amazement per pound than any other source on the planet. Help them out with your volunteer time.

Thanks,

Brett

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Check out Brett’s piece on quasar zombies