The international team of astrophysicists has created a three -dimensional space map with 1.3 million kvazarov – ultra -massive black holes in the centers of galaxies surrounded by a brightly luminous substance.
According to the Australian newspaper Cosmos, the map was built using the data of the GAIA space telescope of the European Space Agency.
Although the main goal of the GAIA is to create a map of the Milky Way stars, this tool is also able to detect objects outside the Milky Way.
Professor David Hogg from New York University said that the quasar catalog created by them differs from previous ones in that he gives a three-dimensional map of the largest volume of the Universe in the history of astronomy.
“This is not a catalog with the largest quasar or measurements of quasars of the highest quality, but it displays the largest volume of the universe,” said Hogg.
According to him, the quasar catalog is a good example of how productive astronomical projects can be.
“Gaia was created to identify stars in our galaxy, but it also discovered millions of quasars. This gave us a map of the universe,” the scientist noted.
The results of the study, which, as they hope, will help astronomers to better understand the development of the universe, was published in Astrophysical Journal.
The word “quasar” comes from the connection of two English terms: quasi-stellar (“quasi-star”, “similar to a star”) and Radio Source (“radio source”). Bright cosmic objects received such a name in the late 1950s, when astronomers first began to notice them.
However, it later turned out that the quasars are not stars, but the young galaxies, which are located at a huge distance from the solar system. Quasars are visible from the ground due to its extraordinary brightness, which can be a thousand times higher than the glow of the Milky Way. The mass of such black holes exceeds the mass of the sun by 100 thousand-10 billion times.