The data provided by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE (Wide-Angle Infrared Survey Explorer), NASA Aerospace Agency's infrared space telescope, commissioned in 2009, helped astronomers find a previously undocumented galaxy. The discovered object, called WISE J224607.57-052635.0, according to scientists, is the brightest space structure of this type among all previously discovered in the Universe.
In an article in the scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal, a group of astronomers who discovered the new galaxy describe it as an object whose luminosity exceeds the brightness index of more than 300 trillion suns. Apart from the fact that the WISE J224607.57-052635.0 galaxy is the brightest of the previously discovered objects of this type, scientists attribute it to a class of objects that have only recently been discovered by astronomers. We are talking about the so-called super-bright infrared galaxies.
The light emitted by this galaxy is 99 percent related to the infrared spectrum. Since infrared light is invisible to the naked eye, astronomers could not detect this space object until they turned to information collected by the WISE space telescope.
The discovered galaxy is about 12.5 billion light years away. This means that the NASA telescope was able to catch the light of the galaxy, which it gave off very, very long ago, when the cosmos was still young. The age of the universe we know is about 13.8 million years. In other words, the telescope captured the WISE J224607.57-052635.0 galaxy, when the age of space was only 1/10 of its present.
Scientists suspect that WISE J224607.57-052635.0 emits such an incredible amount of infrared light (more than any other objects of this type currently known) because there is a giant black hole in its center. It sucked the gas and matter around it, simultaneously heating the remaining part of these substances to temperatures of several million degrees. The result was the emission of visible, ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, which heated up local dust clouds around the black hole, which in turn began to emit infrared light, making the galaxy the brightest object of this type in the Universe.
"A supermassive black hole pulled gas and matter to itself, forming a rotating disk warmed to several million degrees, emitting high-energy, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray light."
“This light was blocked inside the“ cocoon ”of local dust. The dust has heated up and began to emit infrared radiation, ”NASA scientists explained in an article describing the discovery of the galaxy WISE J224607.57-052635.0.
Of course, other galaxies also have black holes at their center, but they are not as bright as the new one found. Scientists say that "it all depends on how hungry these black holes turn out to be."
The article is based on materials .
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