Word: quasars
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That insight might merely confirm that the Caltech astronomers have found an oddball quasar. Or it could herald the discovery of an entirely new and remarkable celestial object...
...ordinary cosmic bodies in its celestial neighborhood. But this pinpoint of light is anything but ordinary. Spotted more than three years ago, it seemed at first to be a garden-variety star--but it wasn't. It might have turned out to be an unremarkable galaxy or quasar--but it didn't. Frustrated in their attempts to learn its nature, and even its distance from Earth, astronomers have begun to refer to the mystery object as, well, the "mystery object...
...personal guess," says Djorgovski. "is that we're dealing with a very special, sub-sub-sub-category of quasar. There may be only one of them." Or, he muses, his team may be looking at a quasar through a "very special" line of sight, a line that passes through a strange cloud of gas that accounts for its curious absorptions. But, he stresses, "I wouldn't stake any money on either of these possibilities...
Bahcall has used the telescope to take pictures of quasars, starlike objects so bright they can be seen halfway across the universe. Most theorists think quasars are intimately related to giant black holes like the one Ford found; presumably their intense light comes from gas compressed with such force that it explodes in bright bursts of energy. That implies that every quasar should have a galaxy around it, but in several cases Bahcall found no clear evidence of one. "This," he said when he announced his observations, "is a giant leap backward in our understanding of quasars...
...nearly the speed of light. (Because of its angle, the jet gives the illusion of moving faster than light, a physical impossibility.) The jet presumably comes from gas falling from an orbiting companion star into a black hole that weighs as much as a handful of stars. Typical quasars, in contrast, emanate from something with the mass of a million stars or more. Unfortunately, galactic dust largely hides the mini-quasar, so there is a limit to how much astronomers will be able to learn from it. But since they have found one, they might find others. And that could...