One of the brightest flares in the universe photographed

One of the brightest objects ever seen so far in the universe has been photographed: it is a quasar, literally a 'quasi-stellar radio source', that is to say a galaxy at the center of which is located a gigantic and very active black hole, which swallows the surrounding matter with extraordinary rapidity. The image was obtained by the international collaboration Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the same that obtained both the first photo of a black hole and the first photo of the black hole that is located at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*.

The research, that has seen the participation of dozens of scholars from around the world, has been published in The Astrophysical Journal and was coordinated by astronomers Svetlana Jorstad, of Boston University and Maciek Wielgus of the German Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

The light from the quasar, called NRAO 530, traveled for 7.5 billion years before reaching Earth and is the most distant cosmic object so far observed by the radio telescopes of the EHT collaboration, that are distributed around the world. It is a particular type of quasar called a blazar, which directs its jet of matter towards the Earth. The images are the most detailed ever obtained of such an object and will help to better understand these cosmic phenomena.

Black holes themselves do not emit light, but the matter around them can become very bright due to gravity and friction. Part of the matter is also channeled along the magnetic field lines to the poles, from which it is hurled into space in the form of jets of plasma at a speed close to that of light. Just like the images of the two black holes, the quasar image took years of work. The first observations date back to April 2017 and, said Wielgus, "with the power of the EHT we see the details of the source structure".