Through the use of Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers from Virginia Tech have found a startling fact about galactic objects called quasars! They aren't just energetic material that could shine even a thousand times over than the galaxies they are into. Some of them have tsunami-like powers that could push 46-million-MPH winds blasting out the annual weight material of the sun a hundred times over! This phenomenon could also create ripples throughout galaxies.
What are quasars?
Quasars are among the most vibrant objects in the universe. They are powered by massive black holes that eat up a significant amount of materials in the galaxy.
Quasars materialize as supermassive black holes consume matter from neighboring galaxies and spit out jets of matter. These energetic galactic object could also heat surrounding materials, resulting in the creation of superheated disks capable of blasting out "winds" through radiation and magnetic pressure.
The astronomers who carried out the experiment wanted to find out the amount of energy the winds have. The objective was quite challenging as qasars are found as far as 10bn light-years away.
Good thing, there's hubble space telescope which was able to capture light photos of this galactic object at its best. It has for instance captured a streaky jet object that has a length of 200,000 lightyears. That's four times bigger than the radius of the Milky Way galaxy!
Read Also: Stunning Hubble Snapshot Showcases Ancient And Far-Off Galaxies
Measuring the velocity of a quasar's wind
The astronomers also use Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), another Hubble instrument, to measure the velocity of a wind produce by quasar. COS is the sole device capable of capturing a particlular UV light range required to measure the presence of Doppler shift in the outflow of the galactic object. It paves the way for understanding the jets' composition and speed.
By measuring jets on some quasars, what the team of astronomers are quite mind-blogging!
According to the results, some jets are blasting out winds that could 'snowplow' a galactic object away from the center at a considerable speed of light. Of the 13 quasars examined, one of them started to produce winds at 43-million MPH and hit 46-million MPH speed three years thereafter. Its speeding up faster than any of its kind yet.
Lead researcher of the team Nahum Arav said, "the winds are pushing hundreds of solar masses of material each year".
He added that "the amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy."
Arav noted that the qasar could probably glow across visible light spectra and X-ray as its shock wave warm its surrounding material to billions of degrees.
Read Also: Nest Of Superstars Spotted By Hubble Space Telescope | Tech Times
