Discovery by an international team of astrophysicists with involvement of EUC
An international team of astrophysicists in which Prof. Andreas Efstathiou, Vice Rector for Research and External Affairs of European University Cyprus is a member used data from the infrared satellite telescope WISE, the ground-based ALMA array and the radio telescope VLA to study a sample of distant hyperluminous quasars in which the phenomenon of feedback, believed to have played an important role in the formation of galaxies is observed. The combination of data from these three telescopes and analysis by the team shows that these objects emit up to 10,000 times as much power as our entire Milky Way galaxy and contain black holes with a mass of up to 10 billion solar masses, while simultaneously producing stars at a prodigious rate of thousands of solar masses per year.
The team consists of scientists from 16 universities and research centers around the world including the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The team is led by Prof. Carol Lonsdale of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) based in Virginia United States of America.
The study was recently published in the 27th of October edition of the internationally renowned scientific journal Astrophysical Journal.
Artist’s impression of the ultraluminous quasar Mrk 231 in the local Universe which is believed to be similar to the objects studied by the team.