Quasar hunting - light from 12 billion years ago

[ONIKKINEN]

I discovered the great fun that is PixInsight annotation with the milliquas - million quasars catalogue and set out to find the most distant object i have happened to capture. To my great surprise some are over 12 billion light years distant.

Quasars around M106 with a redshift greater than 3:

Closer look below, because these are just a handful of pixels each:

 

2 quasars with a redshift of greater than 3 were also found around NGC4725:

Closer look again:

The 2 z=3.7 quasars around M106 are the most distant objects i have yet to see in my images. Honestly never in a million years would have believed its possible to capture something like this with relatively modest equipment and not that long integration times.

12 billion years. What does that even mean? The brain department goes blank thinking about these numbers, i mean its more than twice the age of the solar system and its 2 billion years more than what the suns total lifespan will be. Even putting it to words like this it still doesn't fully make sense that light from so far away has just happened to hit a 20cm mirror and reflected onto a camera chip that just happened to be exposing at that time.

Now i wonder what is the most distant object that i could reasonably be able to capture. Most of these are magnitude 20 something or 21 something, so i think i should be able to go a little bit deeper with a realistic limiting magnitude probably being in the 23-24 mark based on my recent 35h image of M81/82 which does show some pixels that suggest targets at those magnitudes could be picked up. There is a z= 4.7 quasar in the field of view of a coma cluster image i took last year, but this one is magnitude 24-25 and not a single pixel is seen in the area so i think a little bit too dim for the system.

Thanks for looking, i encourage others to go on the quasar hunt especially now that nights are either short or gone completely for most imagers here.

-Oskari

[WolfieGlos]

12bly? Incredible! I would have discarded those as merely faint, distant stars.

One day when I get pixinsight I will have to try this.

[Clarkey]

On 13/05/2023 at 16:30, ONIKKINEN said:

12 billion years. What does that even mean? The brain department goes blank thinking about these numbers

Don't even think about it. Your brain will turn to mush and dribble out your nose. 😂

Well, the universe is only 13.7 billion years old. Why did we bother with the James Webb telescope?

I think I looked at some Quasars round the Leo triplet - but I think I only managed 10 billion years - 12 billion is impressive stuff.

[ONIKKINEN]

8 hours ago, Clarkey said:

Don't even think about it. Your brain will turn to mush and dribble out your nose. 😂

Well, the universe is only 13.7 billion years old. Why did we bother with the James Webb telescope?

I think I looked at some Quasars round the Leo triplet - but I think I only managed 10 billion years - 12 billion is impressive stuff.

Forgot i had an image of the Leo triplet too! Will have to stack that again as i only have a pretty picture type process of it from long ago that im sure does not have the best possible background for faint object detection. Milliquas catalog finds a silly 180 quasars in the field of view apparently🤪.