S5 0014+81 is a distant, compact, hyperluminous, broad-absorption-line

quasar A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is pronounced , and sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. This emission from a galaxy nucleus is powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass rangin ...

, or

blazar A blazar is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) with a relativistic jet (a jet composed of ionized matter traveling at nearly the speed of light) directed very nearly towards an observer. Relativistic beaming of electromagnetic radiation from t ...

, located near the high declination region of the constellation Cepheus, near the North Equatorial Pole.

Characteristics

The object is an OVV (optically violent variable) quasar, a type of

. It belongs to the most energetic subclass of

active galactic nuclei An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that has a much-higher-than-normal luminosity over at least some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with characteristics indicating that the luminosity is not prod ...

, which are produced by the rapid accretion of matter by a central

supermassive black hole A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical obj ...

, changing

gravitational energy Gravitational energy or gravitational potential energy is the potential energy a massive object has in relation to another massive object due to gravity. It is the potential energy associated with the gravitational field, which is released (conve ...

to light energy that can be visible across cosmic distances. In the case of S5 0014+81, it is one of the most luminous quasars known, with a total

luminosity Luminosity is an absolute measure of radiated electromagnetic power (light), the radiant power emitted by a light-emitting object over time. In astronomy, luminosity is the total amount of electromagnetic energy emitted per unit of time by a s ...

of over 10⁴¹

watt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James Wa ...

s, equal to an absolute bolometric magnitude of −31.5. If the quasar were at a distance of 280

light-year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 101 ...

s from

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surf ...

, it would give out as much energy per square meter as the

Sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared rad ...

does at Earth, despite being 18 million times more distant. The quasar's luminosity is therefore about 3 × 10¹⁴ (300 trillion) times that of the Sun, or over 25,000 times as luminous as all the 100 to 400 billion stars of the

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked ey ...

combined,The Milky Way absolute visual magnitude is -20.6. making it one of the most energetic objects in the

observable universe The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because the electromagnetic radiation from these obj ...

. However, because of its huge distance of 12.1 billion light-years it can only be studied by

spectroscopy Spectroscopy is the field of study that measures and interprets the electromagnetic spectra that result from the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and matter as a function of the wavelength or frequency of the radiation. Matter ...

. The central black hole of the quasar devours an extremely huge amount of matter, equivalent to 4,000

solar mass The solar mass () is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, equal to approximately . It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. It is approximately equal to the mass o ...

es of material every year. The quasar is also a very strong source of radiation, from

gamma ray A gamma ray, also known as gamma radiation (symbol γ or \gamma), is a penetrating form of electromagnetic radiation arising from the radioactive decay of atomic nucleus, atomic nuclei. It consists of the shortest wavelength electromagnetic wav ...

s and

X-ray X-rays (or rarely, ''X-radiation'') are a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. In many languages, it is referred to as Röntgen radiation, after the German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered it in 1895 and named it ' ...

s down to

radio wave Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, typically with frequencies of 300 gigahertz ( GHz) and below. At 300 GHz, the corresponding wavelength is 1 mm (sho ...

s. The quasar's designation, S5, is from the ''Fifth Survey of Strong Radio Sources'', 0014+81 was its coordinates in

epoch In chronology and periodization, an epoch or reference epoch is an instant in time chosen as the origin of a particular calendar era. The "epoch" serves as a reference point from which time is measured. The moment of epoch is usually decided by ...

B1950.0. It also has the other designation 6C B0014+8120, from the Sixth Cambridge Survey of Radio Sources by the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

. The host galaxy of S5 0014+81 is a giant elliptical

starburst galaxy A starburst galaxy is one undergoing an exceptionally high rate of star formation, as compared to the long-term average rate of star formation in the galaxy or the star formation rate observed in most other galaxies. For example, the star formatio ...

, with the

apparent magnitude Apparent magnitude () is a measure of the brightness of a star or other astronomical object observed from Earth. An object's apparent magnitude depends on its intrinsic luminosity, its distance from Earth, and any extinction of the object's li ...

of 24.

Supermassive black hole

The host galaxy of S5 0014+81 is an FSRQ (Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar)

, a giant elliptical galaxy that hosts a

at its center. In 2009, a team of astronomers using the Swift spacecraft used the luminosity of S5 0014+81 to measure the mass of its black hole. They found it to be about 10,000 times more massive than the black hole at the center of our galaxy, or equivalent to 40 billion solar masses. 17:53:24 GMT. This makes it one of the most massive black holes ever discovered, more than six times the value of the black hole of

Messier 87 Messier 87 (also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, generally abbreviated to M87) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars in the constellation Virgo. One of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local uni ...

, which for 60 years was the largest known black hole, and was dubbed an "ultramassive" black hole. The

Schwarzschild radius The Schwarzschild radius or the gravitational radius is a physical parameter in the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein's field equations that corresponds to the radius defining the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. It is a characteris ...

of this black hole is 120 billion kilometers, giving a diameter of 240 billion kilometers, 1,600

astronomical unit The astronomical unit (symbol: au, or or AU) is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and approximately equal to or 8.3 light-minutes. The actual distance from Earth to the Sun varies by about 3% as Earth orbi ...

s, or about 40 times the radius of

Pluto Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest k ...

's orbit, and has a mass equivalent to four

Large Magellanic Cloud The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), or Nubecula Major, is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (≈160,000 light-years), the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the ...

s. The fact that such a large black hole existed so early in the universe, at only 1.6 billion years after the

Big Bang The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from t ...

, suggests that supermassive black holes can form very quickly. Evolution models based on the mass of S5 0014+81's supermassive black hole predict that it will live for roughly years (near the end of the Black Hole Era of the universe, when it is more than 10⁸⁸ times its current age), before it dissipates via

Hawking radiation Hawking radiation is theoretical black body radiation that is theorized to be released outside a black hole's event horizon because of relativistic quantum effects. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking, who developed a theoretical ar ...

. See in particular equation (27).

References

External links

QSO S5 0014+81
Beobachtungen zu Eduard's Astropage, 29th Oct. 2009 {{DEFAULTSORT:S5 0014+81 Cepheus (constellation) Active galaxies Quasars Supermassive black holes

Characteristics

Supermassive black hole

See also

References

External links