![quasar lights quasar lights](https://www.gphg.org/horlogerie/sites/default/files/styles/juicebox_medium/public/watches/gphg2020_quasar_light_003.jpg)
It sees these objects in exquisite detail due to its unrivalled angular resolution. As an infrared observatory with a massive mirror floating beyond the orbit of the moon, it can collect light from the faintest, most distant stars and galaxies – light that has been stretched into infrared wavelengths after travelling through expanding space for billions of years.
![quasar lights quasar lights](https://img.edilportale.com/product-thumbs/b_QUASAR-20-Prisma-by-Performance-in-Lighting-131361-relfe6fd5ab.jpg)
The JWST allows us to peer further into the universe’s distant past than ever before thanks to its special combination of capabilities. After years of delays, a suspenseful launch and months of testing, the most powerful telescope ever made is finally gathering fresh clues relating to questions we could only dream of answering with its predecessors. ON 11 JULY, President Joe Biden unveiled the first deep-field image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), revealing galaxies as they appeared some 13 billion years ago – and raising the curtain on a new era in astronomy. The SDSS team is now keeping its eyes peeled, just in case the inner disk of one of their changing-look quasars fuels up and turns the lights back on again.The first deep-field image from the James Webb Space Telescope "What this work shows is that quasars can change pretty dramatically on even shorter timescales of a few years." Recent theoretical and observational work has suggested that quasars "flicker" on scales of a few hundred thousand years. It adds to a picture of quasars being highly variable systems on a range of timescales," says astronomer Kevin Schawinski of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who is not involved in the work.
![quasar lights quasar lights](https://www.futurity.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/brightest-quasar_770.jpg)
"If you drain the inner part of the disk, it shuts everything down," Runnoe says. J1011 simply consumed its entire inner disk, leaving a signal that looks just like a normal galaxy.
![quasar lights quasar lights](https://miro.medium.com/max/1200/1*yJXTha1uui9osCPBoz2raw.jpeg)
The black holes at the heart of quasars have disks of gas and dust orbiting around them, and it's the innermost part of the disk that burns brightest just before it is sucked in. So they finally concluded that J1011 simply ran out of fuel. They also thought that in 2003 the galaxy could have emitted a brief flare as it tore apart a star and swallowed it up, but other observations showed the quasar was still bright for years after 2003. But this would have taken much longer than a few years for something as big as a quasar. First, a dust cloud could have moved in the way and blocked the light. Ruan and his colleagues considered a number of possible causes for the abrupt change. You can see it happen," says team leader Jessie Runnoe of Pennsylvania State University, University Park.įellow astronomer and team member John Ruan of the University of Washington, Seattle, told the American Astronomical Society meeting here today that he had previously assumed changes to something as big as a quasar would take tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Over the past year, the team has found a dozen other quasars that similarly blinked out, earning them the name "changing-look" quasars. The observers, using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico, sought out observations by other telescopes and found that the abrupt change had taken place over the course of just a few years after 2010. Its bright beacon-a supermassive black hole that is heating the gas around it to millions of degrees- seemed to have switched off, leaving J1011 looking like just any other galaxy. A year ago, they took another look at it and found to their astonishment that it had all but disappeared. KISSIMMEE, FLORIDA-In 2003, astronomers took a snap of quasar-the superbright core of a distant galaxy-called SDSS J1011+5442.