Europe’s Euclid optical space telescope discovers 31 new quasars in the very early universe
The uncertainty of science: The Europe Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid optical space telescope — with a mirror half the size of Hubble’s — has now identified 31 new quasars in the very early universe, all of which really shouldn’t be there based on present theories as to how long it should take for them to form.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has discovered 31 of the most ancient quasars ever found. Two of these giant and dazzling galaxy cores, powered by gargantuan black holes, are the earliest quasars yet observed in cosmic history. They shone with the light of a trillion Suns back when the Universe was 670 million years old – just 5% of its current age.
UPDATE: Astronomers using the Keck telescopes in Hawaii have now confirmed 21 of the 31 one quasars identified by Euclid.
The scientific problem is that, according to most theories on the evolution and formation of galaxies and black holes and quasars, it takes billions of years for such large supermassive black holes to accrete their mass. Yet, these exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The numbers do not compute.
Euclid doesn’t get the publicity of Hubble, partly because ESA does not do as good a job of selling its work as NASA, partly because it is a European project and the American propaganda press is thus generally uninterested, and partly because it is simply smaller and a later telescope, thus not ground-breaking. Nonetheless, with a mirror 1.2 meters across, it is capable of truly spectacular optical astronomy, being above the atmosphere as well as above the many satellite constellations now in orbit. It is placed in the Lagrange point 2, a million miles from Earth.
In fact, Euclid is exactly the kind of space telescope the astronomy community should be building, in huge numbers, rather than whining about those satellite constellations blocking its big ground-based telescopes. The future of astronomy is in space, and it is high time astronomers recognized this.
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Indeed. Well said.
The usual answer to this appears to be that to do the most bleeding-edge science they have to have the most bleeding-edge equipment, even as they leave plenty of science undone that won’t be as sexy but can still be interesting and productive.
Actually, the real reason astronomers continue to push ground-based telescopes is more mundane. They are protecting their turf. Many are tightly captured by the bureaucracy of these ground-based telescopes and the infrastructure to build them. To switch to space-based telescopes means abandoning that infrastructure, from which their prestige and power comes.
That doesn’t surprise me. What I wrote is just a reason I’ve seen given repeatedly.
I have seen those reasons given as well. That’s the public reason, typical of bureaucratic types: Give us more money! I was giving the real reason.
Written with a smile.
And, no more trips to Hawai’i.
One thing I noticed while I was a grad student, particularly for my last two degrees, was that academic research wasn’t so much about new ideas or new knowledge but image and, more importantly, lots of $$$$. Bragging rights were considered important.
Someone like Musk, who funded his ideas himself, probably wouldn’t last long in that environment. Enterprise and initiative were frowned upon.
just did a cursory look at the link;
At what distance are these assumed to be?
At only 700 million years before the Big Bang, that would place them about 13 billion light years away.
So a question: Where does one point your telescope to see the beginning of the big bang?
It doesn’t matter which direction you point, you won’t see it. The universe’s expansion (whatever the rate) causes optical light to shift into the infrared, so that only Webb can see that far back. But even there, Webb has so far seen only later effects predicted by this cosmological theory, though none have been exactly as expected and they have been sprinkled with other things that should not be there (such as these quasars).
There is one ground based telescope that could easily dwarf the impact of all the above telescopes combined. The special thing about it is it has an 8.4 meter mirror AND a 3.4 degree field of view. A full moon is only .5 degrees. Its purpose it to image the whole southern sky, repeatedly, at resolutions previously available only for the tiniest and most interesting parts of it. It collects and processes far more data than any telescope before it. Rubin will be a household name in 5 years, after no one but us space nerds remember JWST. Bet on it. The only downer is it’s on earth. It could do so much more from space.