NASA to use quasars 'to unlock the secrets of the early universe'

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) James Webb Space Telescope will be using the brightest supermassive black holes known in the universe in a bid to try and unlock the greater secrets of how galaxies and planets came into existence. In a statement on Wednesday, the United States specs agency said that it is training the satellite on six of “most distant and luminous quasars” to study the properties of these quasars and their respective host galaxies along with the reason behind their interconnectedness during early stages of evolution of the galaxies. 

NASA also explained that its researchers will use the quasars to examine the gas present in between the galaxies “particularly during the period of cosmic reionization, which ended when the universe was very young.” The task will be completed using Webb’s extreme sensitivity to “low levels of light and its superb angular resolution.” Through the satellite, the scientists will be able to look back in time because the light from the six distant quasars began its journey to Webb when the universe was not fully developed. The NASA researchers wrote, “We will see things as they were long ago, not as they are today.”

Member of Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) Instrument Science Team, Santiago Arribas who is also a research professor at the Department of Astrophysics of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid Spain has explained, “All these quasars we are studying existed very early when the universe was less than 800 million years old, or less than 6 per cent of its current age. So these observations give us the opportunity to study galaxy evolution and supermassive black hole formation and evolution at these very early times.”

NASA stated, “The light from these very distant objects has been stretched by the expansion of space. This is known as cosmological redshift. The farther the light has to travel, the more it is redshifted. In fact, the visible light emitted at the early universe is stretched so dramatically that it is shifted out into the infrared when it arrives to us. With its suite of infrared-tuned instruments, Webb is uniquely suited to studying this kind of light.”

‘Interested in observing the most luminous quasars’

Chris Willott, a research scientist at the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Victoria, British Columbia also said in a statement, “We’re interested in observing the most luminous quasars because the very high amount of energy that they’re generating down at their cores should lead to the largest impact on the host galaxy by the mechanisms such as quasar outflow and heating. We want to observe these quasars at the moment when they’re having the largest impact on their host galaxies.”

IMAGE: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted