Closest Quasar

Today I have a picture of a very unique object to show you: the first quasar ever discovered. I had meant to take this picture before the transit of Venus, but the combination of poor weather and a heavy workload made it impossible. Luckily for me, Virgo was still high in the sky when I took this picture on the 11th of July.

A short note about quasars: quasars (short for quasi-stellar objects) are believed to be comparatively small accretion disks around supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. They are known as quasi-stellar objects because they appear star-like to all but the most powerful telescope due to their extremely great distances. They give off tremendous amounts of light all across the electromagnetic spectrum, from X-rays to infrared. Some also give off copious amounts of gamma rays and radio waves.

The quasar below is thought to be the closest quasar to us at 2.44 billion light-years away. Yes, that's billion with a "b". Our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,00 light-years across, so nearly 25,000 galaxies like the Milky Way could fit between this quasar and our galaxy. And that's the closest quasar to us. Most quasars are much further away, and due to their extreme luminosity are some of the farthest objects visible in the universe. This quasar, though, is likely the farthest object you could reasonably expect to see through an amateur-sized telescope.

Anyway, enough explanation. Here it is, entry 273 in the Third Cambridge Catalog of Radio Sources, 3C 273 itself!

3C 274, the closest quasar to us. Located 2.44 billion light years away in the constellation Virgo.

Kindly hold all applause until the end of the blog post. I know it's not much to look at, but it's remarkable because of what it represents. With a 4-inch telescope and a CCD camera you and I can see the light from the mind-bogglingly intense region of warped space-time around a black hole with more than 800 million times the Sun's mass from over 2,440,000,000 light-years away. It's staggering to me that such a thing is even possible. Hopefully you can see why this is such an amazing picture, even if it isn't as showy as some of the ones I put up here.

3C 273 is an interesting object because it was the first quasar to have its spectrum taken (due to the fact that it is the brightest quasar in the visible light range), which helped show that it wasn't a star and was in fact very much further away than previously thought. Although we know more about quasars now than ever before, they continue to remain mysterious objects and there are many questions about them yet to be answered.

Black-Eyed Galaxy

I haven't traditionally done a lot of galaxy images in the past, but today I have a picture of a slightly mysterious galaxy with a rather evocative name. Messier 64 is also known as “The Black Eye Galaxy” or “The Sleeping Beauty Galaxy”, and it's a really neat celestial sight. It is a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair, named after the legend of Queen Berenice II of Egypt, her missing sacrificial hair, and a quick-thinking court astronomer. But you can read that story for yourself at the link up there).

Messier 64, the Black Eye Galaxy, in Coma Berenices.

M64 gets its name the Black Eye Galaxy from its appearance in a small telescope. This is mainly due to the massive clouds of dust circulating through it, especially the prominent band silhouetted in front of the bright galactic nucleus, which I've seen myself through a moderate-size telescope. If it weren't for the dust clouds in the outer regions of the galaxy blocking most of the light, M64 would be a lot brighter.

Surprisingly, given its large apparent size, the distance to M64 is not very well known. The best figures I could find suggested a distance of 17-19 million light-years, but there are estimates ranging from 12 to 40 million. Given its redshift and applying the Hubble Law would give a rough distance of about 16 million; however, M64 sits on the outskirts of the humongous Virgo Galaxy Cluster, which gives it an unknown extra component to its radial velocity that makes the Hubble Law only very roughly approximate. Since even 40 million light-years is essentially just down the block in the cosmic neighborhood, it's rather surprising that the distance isn't known more accurately, as the Cepheid variable stars used as standard candles for determining distance in nearby galaxies ought to be visible. One possible reason the distance isn't known better is that to date no supernovae have been observed in M64. One of those would definitely help pin down the distance.

M64 is about 80,000-90,000 light-years across, similar in size to (about 10% smaller) than our own Milky Way Galaxy (about 100,000 light-years across). One extremely interesting feature of this galaxy, however, is that the innermost 6,000 light-year-across region seems to be rotating in the opposite direction to the rest of the galaxy. This is quite unusual, and may hint at a possible galactic merger sometime in the galaxy's past. At the border, the differently spinning clouds of gas may be colliding with each other, possible spurring a wave of star formation. This certainly isn't your run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy. (Though to be fair, pretty much every spiral galaxy is unique in some way.)