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Astronomy

Outflows from the first quasars

Nature volume 489, pages 42–43 (2012)Cite this article

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Black holes are best known for pulling matter in. But a distant supermassive black hole, observed as it was when the Universe was less than a billion years old, has been seen pushing gas out of its host galaxy.

Astronomers have long known of elliptical galaxies, which contain mostly old stars and are largely devoid of interstellar gas. But the finding1,2 in 2004 that such objects existed about 11 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 3 billion years old, was surprising — it hadn't generally been thought that such galaxies could have formed so early. The most popular explanation3 was that these ancient ellipticals once hosted the earliest quasars (accreting supermassive black holes), and that the energy released during this quasar phase was sufficient to blow out the galaxy's gas. Maiolino and colleagues4 now provide a significant boost for the quasar-outflow model in a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The authors made the remarkable discovery that one such distant quasar, known as SDSS J1148+5251, which is seen as it was when the Universe was less than 1 billion years old, has just the sort of gas outflow required by these models.

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Figure 1: Ejection of gas from a galaxy hosting a quasar.

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  1. Daniel Mortlock is in the Departments of Physics and of Mathematics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK.,

    Daniel Mortlock

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  1. Daniel Mortlock
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Correspondence to Daniel Mortlock.

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Mortlock, D. Outflows from the first quasars. Nature 489, 42–43 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/489042a

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