Subj : Daily APOD Report
To   : All
From : Alan Ianson
Date : Tue Feb 22 2022 00:37:18

                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                              2022 February 22

                        Illustration: An Early Quasar
              Illustration Credit & License: ESO, M. Kornmesser

   Explanation: What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars
   are now known to involve supermassive black holes in the centers of
   active galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows
   brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that
   formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious,
   though. Featured, recent data has enabled an artist's impression of an
   early-universe quasar as it might have been: centered on a massive
   black hole, surrounded by sheets of gas and an accretion disk, and
   expelling a powerful jet. Quasars are among the most distant objects we
   see and give humanity unique information about the early and
   intervening universe. The oldest quasars currently known are seen at
   just short of redshift 8 -- only 700 million years after the Big Bang
   -- when the universe was only a few percent of its current age.

                       Tomorrow's picture: open space
     __________________________________________________________________

       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
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                      A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC
                             & Michigan Tech. U.

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