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Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you’re an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the Sun. At least the quasar H1821+643 doesn’t have parents to be disappointed in it. But its underachievement could shed light on how quasars, a potent type of black hole, can come to influence entire clusters of galaxies, as described in a new paper from researchers at the University of Nottingham and Harvard.
Both the quasar and its surrounding galaxy are shrouded in a field of hot gas that showed up as a fuzzy haze in Chandra’s X-ray dataset. That fuzzy haze, which would let astronomers understand what was happening to the gas in the galaxy at large, was massively overwhelmed by the brightness of the X-rays emitted from the quasar itself.
Without those outbursts, though, the local environment appears to be rife for star formation. The authors estimate that gas equivalent to about 3,000 times the mass of our Sun cools below the point where it emits X-rays every year. Some of that cooling gas is formed into about 120 solar masses worth of new stars yearly, while the black hole itself swallows up another 40 solar masses. What happens with the thousands of solar masses of gas left over after those two processes is anyone’s guess.
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