Scientists combined telescopes on Earth and in space to learn that this famous quasar has a core temperature hotter than 10 trillion degrees! That’s much hotter than formerly thought possible.
By combining signals recorded from radio antennas on Earth and in space – effectively creating a telescope of almost 8-Earth-diameters in size – scientists have, for the first time, gotten a look at fine structure in the radio-emitting regions of quasar 3C273, which was the first quasar known and is still one of the brightest quasars known. The result has been startling, violating a theoretical upper temperature limit. Yuri Kovalev of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, Russia, commented:
We measure the effective temperature of the quasar core to be hotter than 10 trillion degrees!
This result is very challenging to explain with our current understanding of how relativistic jets of quasars radiate.
Aired on Earth & Sky. See more at: http://earthsky.org/space/the-extremely-hot-heart-of-quasar-3c273