- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has discovered 31 of the most ancient quasars ever found. Two of these giant and dazzling galaxy cores, powered by gargantuan black holes, are the earliest quasars yet observed in cosmic history. They shone with the light of a trillion Suns back when the Universe was 670 million years old – just 5% of its current age.
Jets of material, a byproduct of the accretion disk and the black hole at the center:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xKVwPSZ-k1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tcghbbglf4
A good analogy might be water swirling down a toilet. Or a hurricane, viewed from above. As gas swirls in, it heats up/“speeds” up so much that some of it tends to get flung out at the poles of the disk very quickly.
The actual physics of how that happens are unintuitive in like a hundred different ways, though, as the conditions are ridiculously extreme. It’s very hot, the density of stuff varies wildly, there’s a lot of radiation and electromagnetic interaction; it doesn’t really resemble anything on Earth.