eled by supermassive black holes consuming gas, dust, and sometimes entire stars. The one Hubble targeted, designated 3C 273, is among the closest quasars to Earth. Discovered in the 1960s, 3C 273 helped redefine our understanding of the cosmos. If it were just tens of thousands of light-years away instead of billions, it would shine in our sky with a brightness comparable to the sun. Imagine staring into a set of car headlights blazing directly into your eyes—that’s what Hubble has contended with in its earlier attempts to resolve this cosmic powerhouse.
However, a key instrument on Hubble has come to the rescue. Using its imaging spectrograph like a coronagraph—similar to how astronomers block out the sun’s glare to observe the solar corona—Hubble effectively masked 3C 273’s overwhelming brightness. With this glare reduced, the telescope has now captured never-before-seen details in the region immediately surrounding the black hole.
Uncovering “Weird Things” Around the Black Hole
With the quasar’s central brilliance temporarily tamed, astronomers discovered a range of peculiar features within about 16,000 light-years of the black hole’s heart. According to Bin Ren of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in France, Hubble has revealed a few lumps and blobs of varying sizes, plus an intriguing L-shaped filamentary structure. These features, described by Ren as “weird,” may represent small galaxies pulled inward, adding fuel to the black hole’s cosmic feast.
Such incoming galaxies and other matter form an accretion disk around the black hole. As the black hole’s intense gravity tears apart and heats this material, it radiates with extraordinary brightness. Not all the matter spirals inward, however. Some of it is blasted outward along the black hole’s poles as colossal jets of energetic particles traveling near the speed of light, creating a spectacle that can extend hundreds of thousands of light-years into surrounding space.
Not Every Black Hole Is a Voracious Eater
Even though supermassive black holes are believed to lurk at the center of nearly all large galaxies, not all of these cosmic behemoths behave like quasars. Some, like the Milky Way’s own Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), subsist on a trickle of matter so sparse it might be metaphorically compared to a human living on one grain of rice every million years. Without ample “food,” these black holes remain dim and unobtrusive, never lighting up their host galaxies with quasar-level luminosity.
In stark contrast, a well-fed quasar like 3C 273 easily outshines the combined light of billions of stars. This extraordinary energy output offers scientists a unique window into the interplay between black holes and their galactic neighborhoods, shedding light on galaxy mergers, star formation processes, and the life cycles of cosmic structures spanning billions of light-years.
Illuminating the Jet That Stretches for Hundreds of Thousands of Light-Years
3C 273’s dramatic display includes a jet that extends about 300,000 light-years from the quasar’s core—so long that it dwarfs the entire galaxy that hosts it. By comparing Hubble’s fresh data with archival images taken over two decades ago, researchers found that the jet appears to move faster in its more distant regions. Such an observation raises fascinating questions about the forces at work, the jet’s magnetic fields, and the dynamics of how matter can be accelerated to relativistic speeds so far from the central black hole.
Looking Deeper with the Next Generation of Telescopes
In the future, astronomers plan to turn the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) toward 3C 273 for an infrared examination, potentially uncovering additional details that remain invisible even to Hubble. Where Hubble excelled by cutting through the quasar’s glaring light, Webb’s extraordinary sensitivity and infrared capabilities promise an even richer portrait of the quasar’s surroundings—helping scientists piece together how these titanic black holes shape their galaxies and the broader cosmos.
As telescopes grow more powerful and techniques become more refined, our understanding of quasars will continue to evolve. Each observation brings us closer to fully unraveling the secrets behind these enigmatic beacons of the early universe, offering a deeper appreciation for how black holes have sculpted the galaxies we see today.