Star Vistas

The Quasar image in Star Vistas shows a fairly unremarkable region of sky with an unremarkable looking dim red star highlighted by an arrow.  Clearly, although the star looks fairly unimpressive, there must be more here than meets the eye, and the Guinness Book of Records actually states that this is (actually, was) the brightest object in the Universe, which seems a little odd!  The dim red star, which was actually mistaken for a carbon star lying within our own Milky Way, is in fact a Quasar.  The reason it is a deep red colour is due to its enormous red shift of 3.87, which places it, around 12.9 billion light years away.  The Quasar is designated APM08279+5255 and it lies in the Northern constellation of Lynx.

 

Although nobody is completely certain what a Quasar is, the consensus opinion is that it is a black hole emitting enormous amounts of energy from beyond its event horizon as it captures material from nearby stars.  Quasar itself is the contraction of Quasi-stellar object.

 

APM08279+5255 is a magnitude 15.2 object, so it cannot be seen at all by the naked eye, but in astronomical terms it is extraordinarily bright.  One reason it appears so bright to us is that as well as being a Quasar, between it and us lies a galaxy that acts as a “Gravitational lens” that “magnifies” the weak light from the distant quasar making it more easily detected by Earthbound telescopes, including those in amateur’s gardens.  If you consider that the Universe apparently erupted out of the Big Bang only something like 13.7 billion years ago, then APM08279+5255 is even more amazing.  In astronomical terms this quasar came into being only an instant after the creation of the Universe itself.

 

The colour image was taken in a suburban garden in Brockenhurst, Hampshire.  The equipment used was a Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS reflecting telescope with an 11” primary mirror and an attachment called a Hyperstar lens.  The Hyperstar lens turns the reflector from a “slow” f#10 telescope into a “fast” f#1.85 telephoto lens.  The detector used was a Starlight Xpress SXV-H9C one-shot colour CCD camera that is cooled to allow long exposure times.  For this image the total exposure time was only 48 minutes consisting of 46 sub-exposures of 50 seconds each.  Photons from 12.9 billion light years distance have been caught in just 38 minutes using amateur equipment located in a New Forest garden, and then processed into a clear colour image.

 

Where to find it:

 

Quasar APM08279+5255 can be found at R.A. 08hours 31 minutes 41.60 seconds and DEC. +52 degrees 45 minutes 16.80 seconds.  A telescope with “goto” capabilities can be easily programmed to slew to this object.