APM 08279+5255

[tomato]

The moon was too bright last night for any photogenic galaxy imaging, so fired up by @Astro Waves recent topic on what is the furthest object you have imaged, I got two hours of luminance on APM 08279+5255, a Quasar in the constellation Lynx. It  has an apparent magnitude of 15.2 so not a difficult object to image, and to look at it's nothing special,  but some of the numbers associated with this object are just mind blowing:

Luminosity of 10 ¹⁴ to 10¹⁵  times the luminosity of the sun.

The active galactic nucleus is powered by one of the largest known supermassive black holes, 10-23 billion solar masses.

Using comparative spectral measurements, this galaxy has been determined to contain the largest mass of water in the known universe, 100 trillion times the mass of the Earth's combined oceans. This is evidence that water formed early in the life of the universe, the radiation was emitted only 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang.

Oh, and it just happens to be 12.05 Gly (12050 000 000 light years) distant from us.

Hopefully I have copied these numbers from Wikipedia correctly, thanks for looking.

 

 

 

[Astro Waves]