A rare case of a quasar acting as a gravitational lens allows a precise determination of the mass of the quasar's host galaxy and offers a new path to studying the connections between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.
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A stellar black hole (or stellar-mass black hole) is a black hole formed by the gravitational collapse of a star. They have masses ranging from about 5 to several tens of solar masses. The process is observed as a hypernova explosion or as a gamma ray burst. These black holes are also referred to as collapsars. By the no-hair theorem, a black hole can only have three fundamental properties: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum. The angular momentum of a stellar black hole is due to the conservation of angular momentum of the star or objects that produced it.
A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) or a point particle between a distant light source and an observer that is capable of bending the light from the source as the light travels toward the observer. This effect is known as gravitational lensing, and the amount of bending is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Treating light as corpuscles travelling at the speed of light, Newtonian physics also predicts the bending of light, but only half of that predicted by general relativity.
While the presence of any mass bends the path of light passing near it, this effect rarely produces the giant arcs and multiple images associated with strong gravitational lensing. Most lines of sight in the universe are thoroughly in the weak lensing regime, in which the deflection is impossible to detect in a single background source. However, even in these cases, the presence of the foreground mass can be detected, by way of a systematic alignment of background sources around the lensing mass.
We report the identification of 64 new candidates of compact galaxies, potentially hosting faint quasars with bolometric luminosities of L-bol = 10(43)-10(46) erg s(-1), residing in the reionization epoch within the redshift range of 6 less than or similar ...
We investigate the fueling mechanisms of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) by analyzing 10 zoom-in cosmological simulations of massive galaxies, with stellar masses 1011-12 M circle dot and SMBH masses 108.9-9.7 M circle dot at z = 0, featuring various majo ...
We study a new population of extremely red objects (EROs) recently discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) based on their NIRCam colors F277W - F444W > 1.5 mag. We find 37 EROs in the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) field ...
