Artist’s impression of Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua above Maunakea (IMAGE)
Caption
An artist’s impression of Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, the oldest compact pair of quasars ever observed. Quasars are actively feeding supermassive black holes that emit enormous amounts of energy, and are represented here as two extremely luminous sources of light in the center bubble.
Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua was discovered using the Gemini North telescope, located on the dormant volcano Maunakea in Hawai‘i, pictured here at the base of the image. It is because of the dry, stable air above Maunakea that Gemini North was able to resolve the very distant, closely-separated pair of quasars that otherwise would not be detectable from the ground.
The pair is seen extremely far away in both distance and time, only 900 million years after the Big Bang. This era of cosmic history is known as the epoch of reionization, a time when the Universe’s first massive stars and galaxies sent out shock waves of intense ultraviolet light, tearing apart nearby neutral hydrogen atoms and creating localized spheres of ionized, or excited, gas. This is represented by the bubbles at the top of the image, each with its own central bright source.
The space between the top of Maunakea and Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua transitions from the dense band of the Milky Way to a field of stars and distant galaxies, representing the expansive distance across the cosmos that lies between us and the compact pair of quasars.
Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua’s name translates to “Two celestial bodies of fathomless powerful darkness in the brilliance of heat reincarnating energy into the Universe.” The name was created by the A Hua He Inoa program at the ʻImiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaiʻi and the University of Hawai‘i’s Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani (Hawaiian Language College).
Credit
International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld/M. Zamani
Usage Restrictions
Credit must be given to the creator.
License
CC BY