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2w ago

VLT Interferometry Reweighs Distant Quasar’s Black Hole to About 1 Billion Suns

By resolving gas motions with GRAVITY+, astronomers found powerful outflows that likely inflated earlier mass estimates by roughly an order of magnitude.

Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani
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Overview

  • The quasar SMSS J052915.80-435152.0 (J0529), more than 12 billion light-years away, now has a dynamical mass estimate of roughly 0.8–1 billion solar masses.
  • Earlier single-epoch spectral methods pegged the black hole far higher, but GRAVITY+ measurements indicate those techniques were biased for this early-universe object.
  • Combining light from four telescopes at ESO’s Very Large Telescope, GRAVITY+ spatially resolved the broad-line region to separate orbital motion from non-gravitational flows.
  • The team detected extreme outflows near 10,000 km/s, with most nearby gas being blown away rather than accreting, a process that can make quasars appear more massive.
  • The analysis is posted on arXiv and linked to an Astronomy & Astrophysics submission, and further VLT campaigns are planned to see if many early black hole masses need recalibration.