12 Billion Years Ago... (QSO J0831+5245) (Stardust23)

12 Billion Years Ago... (QSO J0831+5245)

Revision title: (Annotated)

The universe is still young. Only 1.6 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, and quasar QSO J0831+5245 is piercing the blackness of space with 10^15 times the brightness of the Sun. Water is in this quasar too. A lot of it... over 34 billion times the mass of the Earth, and the largest amount of water in one spot in the universe. At the heart of the quasar is a supermassive black hole 10 to 23 billion times the mass of the Sun, swirling and heating the gas of its accretion disk to millions of degrees Celsius, while simultaneously emitting incredibly powerful X-rays that blow matter away from the black hole. As the light from these effects leaves the quasar and travel through unimaginable stretches of distance, it interferes with a tilted spiral galaxy, creating three separate images of the same object. This brightens the light by 100 times as it continues on a journey to a seemingly unremarkable area of the universe.

The light travels for 7.4 billion years.

A star and several planets form from a solar nebula up ahead. One of these planets develops an ocean, then life, then complex life.

It has been another 4.6 billion years.

The light passes through the atmosphere of this planet, bounces off a series of small mirrors, and finally ends its journey in the sensor of a camera operated by one of the complex life forms.

After some integration and processing, the little red dot in the above image is the result of this 12 billion year journey. It is a small piece of the universe as it looked when it was only 12% of the age it is now. It is among the furthest in time we can look back.

I've annotated this quasar (QSO J0831+5245) along with some other galaxies with untold stories (and much shorter ones at that).

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Title: (Annotated)

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8686355
PixInsight job	48QAXU2FSVPP961EXKX90DW5FZOR71JR
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	08h30m53s.368
RA (top/left)	08h31m18s.420
RA (top/right)	08h26m15s.393
RA (bottom/right)	08h30m29s.488
RA (bottom/left)	08h35m35s.983

Dec (center)	+52°45′06″.58
Dec (top/left)	+53°32′22″.60
Dec (top/right)	+52°23′48″.96
Dec (bottom/right)	+51°57′45″.84
Dec (bottom/left)	+53°05′54″.79

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