UK astronomers find brightest quasar in the early universe

This artist's impression shows how the distant quasar may have looked
(Credit: ESO / M Kornmesser)

UK astronomers are part of a European team that has discovered the most distant quasar ever seen. It is the brightest object to be observed in the early universe and is powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun. The results are published on 30 June 2011 in the journal Nature.

Light from the quasar started its journey towards Earth when the universe was only 6% of its present age, a mere 770 million years after the Big Bang. Due to its extreme brightness, the quasar is of particular interest because, for the first time, it can tell us what conditions were like in the early universe.

The discovery was made using data from an ongoing infrared sky survey (UKIDSS) being conducted at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii and was confirmed by observations made with the Liverpool Telescope, Gemini North telescope (also in Hawaii) and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

The quasar was initially spotted using WFCAM, an infrared camera which was designed and built by the STFC UK Astronomy Technology Centre. The research team, led by Imperial College London, sifted through images of over 10 million sources. The data are managed by the survey support groups at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh.

Prof Gary Davis, Director of UKIRT said: "It was for just this sort of discovery that we began this ambitious survey in 2005."

STFC is the UK sponsor of astronomy. It funds the UK access to the telescopes used in this research. STFC operates the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh and the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii.

View ESO's press release (link opens in a new window).

View the Gemini press release (link opens in a new window).