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Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you\u2019re an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the Sun. At least the quasar H1821+643 doesn\u2019t have parents to be disappointed in it. But its underachievement could shed light on how quasars, a potent type of black hole, can come to influence entire clusters of galaxies, as described in a new paper from researchers at the University of Nottingham and Harvard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Using X-ray data from the Chandra observatory, the researchers looked closely at H1821+643 and decided it influenced its local environment much less than expected. Granted, a lot was expected of it \u2013 quasars are super powerful black holes that rapidly pull in new material rapidly and eject radiation as well as sometimes emitting powerful streams of particles. In particular, H1821+643 is a quasar located about 3.4 billion light-years away from Earth at the center of a cluster of galaxies.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both the quasar and its surrounding galaxy are shrouded in a field of hot gas that showed up as a fuzzy haze in Chandra\u2019s X-ray dataset. That fuzzy haze, which would let astronomers understand what was happening to the gas in the galaxy at large, was massively overwhelmed by the brightness of the X-rays emitted from the quasar itself.<\/p>\n \n