ASU Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have looked at one of the most distant quasars in the universe. Interestingly enough, said galaxy has such a tremendous amount of dust shrouding it, that viewing the stars which feed the quasar is difficult at best with current technology. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope might be able to peer through the dust and reveal details of the host galaxy to this dust-obscured quasar.

Quasars (quasi-stellar object) are extremely powerful objects. Powered by the emissions of powerful radiation from a central super-massive black hole, the light can often appear to astronomers on Earth as a jet-like feature. Additionally, if the beam of light emitted from the central black hole points directly at Earth, the accretion disk of material around the black hole, and the resulting “jet” can appear as a quasar, which typically outshine its host galaxy by over a hundred times. The team speculates that the black hole is devouring the equivalent mass of a few suns per year. It may have been eating at a more voracious rate earlier to bulk up to an estimated mass of three billion solar masses in just a few hundred million years.

“If you want to hide the stars with dust, you need to make lots of short-lived massive stars earlier on that lose their mass at the end of their lifetime. You need to do this very quickly, so supernovae and other stellar mass-loss channels can fill the environment with dust very quickly,” said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, Ariz. “You also have to be forming them throughout the galaxy to spread the dust throughout the galaxy,” added Matt Mechtley, also of ASU.
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