What is a Quasar?
Did you know that the brightest object in the Universe is a black hole's mouth? Yeah, it is true... Quasars are the active cores of galaxies, powered by supermassive black holes that devour matter on a massive scal. At the center of a galaxy, a giant black hole pulls in gas, dust and even stars, and this material forms an accretion disk around the black hole, spinning at very high speeds. The friction within the disk heats the matter to millions of degrees, emitting radiation across the entire spectrum, for example, visible light, X-Rays, ultravviolet and so on. Part of this energy is released in relativistic jets, in other words, colossal beams of particles traveling close to the speed of light.
Why is it so impressive?
Well, despite the fact of it seems to be amazingly beautiful, a single quasar can shine brighter than its entire home galaxy. Quasars also have been observed more than 13 billion light-years away, meaning that it exists since the beggining of the Universe, as we know so far from the big bang theory. They are natural labs for studying black holes, galactic formation, cosmology and as we saw, the beggining of the Universe itself.
The name "Quasar" comes from "Quasi-stellar radio source", because they were first discovered as point-like objects that looked like stars, but emitted enormous amounts of radio waves.
Water in Quasars
In 2011, astronomers detected the largest and most distant reservoir of water vapor ever observed in the Universe surrounding a Quasar. This massive clod of water vapor contains around 140 trillion times more water tha all of Earth's oceans combined, or even, it is enough to fill the entire Milky Way with dense clouds of vapor. In other words, a lot o water! It was found in a quasar named APM 08279+5255, located about 12 billion light-years away.
The extreme radiation and heat generated by the supermassive black hole at the quasar's center heat up the surrounding gas, including water molecules, forming a cloud of interstellar vapor. To maintain water in vapor form, the region must be rich in dust, molecular gas, and have relatively high temperatures - around -53 Celsius degrees. For us, it seems very cold, but in cosmic terms, it is war enough to keep water gaseous.°
Why is this important?
The presence of water around quasars shows that complex molecules already existed very early in the Universe - just 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. It suggests that the chemical processes that form water and other essential molecules are universal and happen even in extreme environments. Sutdying these clouds helps us understand the evolution of matter and the formation of galaxies and stars.
