Astronomers wonder if galaxies are falling into this giant black hole

The Hubble Space Telescope captured some weird, unidentified stuff in the most detailed photos ever taken of the immediate space surrounding a quasar. 

Quasars, a shortening of the term "quasi-stellar objects," are blindingly bright galaxy cores in the early universe. Though these extremely distant objects look like stars in the sky, they're the resulting light from feasting supermassive black holes. 

The telescope, a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency, zoomed in on quasar 3C 273, about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth. What it saw in the quasar's midst was astounding and will prompt more research in the years to come.

"My colleagues are excited because they've never seen this much detail before," said Bin Ren, an astronomer at the Université Côte d'Azur in France, in a statement. 

The Hubble Space Telescope took closeup images of quasar 3C 273. Credit: NASA / ESA / Bin Ren / Joseph DePasquale

Though "blobs" may not sound very scientific, that is exactly how Ren and the research team described what they observed in their paper, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics earlier this year. Along with a variety of blobs, they spotted a mysterious L-shaped thing. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which runs Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, announced the findings this week. 

So what could these things be? 

Scientists have suggested at least some of the objects could be small orbiting galaxies on the precipice of falling into the central black hole, which is what's powering the quasar. All of the objects were found within 16,000 light-years of the black hole. 

But that's just an educated guess. Astronomers may be able to better identify those weird things with follow-up observations by the Webb telescope, the leading space observatory that senses light at infrared wavelengths. 

Astronomers used a coronograph, an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope, to blot out the blindingly bright light of the quasar so they could study its surroundings. Credit: NASA / ESA

Black holes are some of the most inscrutable phenomena in space. They don't have surfaces, like a planet or star. Instead, they have a boundary called an "event horizon," or a point of no return. If anything swoops too close, it will eventually fall in, never to escape the hole's gravitational clutch.

How supermassive black holes form is even more elusive. Astrophysicists believe these invisible giants lurk at the center of virtually all galaxies. Recent Hubble observations have bolstered the theory that they begin in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly assembled, but scientists are still teasing that out. 

Quasar 3C 273, which was the first of its kind discovered, is as luminous as 4 trillion suns or 100 times brighter than the entire Milky Way.

"For Hubble, staring into the quasar 3C 273 is like looking directly into a blinding car headlight and trying to see an ant crawling on the rim around it," according to the Space Telescope Science Institute. 

When astronomer Maarten Schmidt found it in 1963, it looked like a star but it was much too far away for a single star to have been the source. Scientists have since learned that quasars are relics of a much earlier time in the universe.  

The nearest quasars to Earth are still several hundred million light-years away, meaning they are observed now as they were hundreds of millions of years ago. That quasars aren't found closer to home is a clue they existed when the universe was much younger. 

Since Schmidt's discovery, many other quasars have been found. Scientists continue to study them because they provide insight into the evolution of the universe. 

A jet emerging from the quasar's supermassive black hole seems to be speeding up the farther it travels from the source. Credit: NASA / ESA / J. Olmsted illustration

In order to see the proverbial ant on a headlight, the research team used a Hubble instrument that blots out a light source, much like how a solar eclipse blocks the face of the sun with the moon, to reveal the quasar's surrounding environment. The so-called coronagraph allowed the scientists to look eight times closer around the black hole than ever before.

In addition to seeing mysterious blobs, the researchers got a better look at the 300,000 light-year-long jet of material emerging from the quasar. Their findings revealed something perhaps counterintuitive: The farther the jet got from the black hole, the faster it went.