UA Science

Photo courtesy of X. Fan.

The Most Distant Quasar in the Universe Discovered: A Massive Black Hole at Cosmic Dawn

An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Eduardo Bañados at Carnegie Observatory, including UA Professor Xiaohui Fan and postdoctoral fellow Jinyi Yang, announced in Nature the discovery of the most distant quasar yet known. This object is at a redshift of 7.54, or a distance of more than 13 billion light years. The quasar is powered by a supermassive black hole 800 million times more massive than the Sun. Remarkably, this black hole was fully formed when the Universe was only 700 million years old, or 5% of its current age. Detailed observations of this quasar further reveal that the quasar resides in a primarily neutral and cold Universe. Soon afterwards, radiation from the earliest generations of galaxies reheated the intergalactic gas ('reionization') in the...

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Photo courtesy of NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry

Most Massive Galaxy in the Early Universe Shown as it Assembles

A group of astronomers led by Steward Observatory's Dr. Daniel Marrone has found a titanic clash of galaxies in the infant universe (Steward collaborators include Marrone, former Steward grad student Justin Spilker (PhD 2017), and current grad students Katrina Litke and Mengtao Tang). The galaxies, observed when the universe was only 780 million years old, were originally discovered using the NSF's...

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