A Colombian researcher is analyzing the signals from thousands of “quasi-stellar objects” in space to unlock the mystery of their role in the formation of galaxies.
Quasars are objects in space found in the centers of some galaxies, emitting and powered by a high-speed sprial of gas into an extremely large black hole, while their “cousins,” called quasi-stellar objects look the same but don’t emit strong radio waves and are theorized to represent a beginning phase in the formation of galaxies
Karla Alejandra Cutiva-Alvarez, a doctoral candidate at the astronomy department of the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, says, that along with her main advisor Dr. Roger Coziol, her research looked at the rate formation (birth) of stars in these quasi-stellar objects.
The researchers look at over 1300 quasi-stellar objects detected on the visible spectrum of light and observed in the infrared via NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope, to study in more detail “the star formation rate variation processes” at different at wavelengths.
“We can determine how these galaxies will rapidly form their stellar populations compared to the growth in mass of their supermassive black holes,” she says, “Comparisons of these variations at different red-shift allowed us to determine how the formation of the black holes is related to the formation process of the host galaxies.”
Cutiva-Alvarez says that their discoveries so far “make it clear and relevant to continue discovering and studying in depth these beautiful exotic galaxies called QSOs.”
She explains the research is important because it gives us a much larger and broader view of how these galaxies were formed after the Big Bang, where its characteristics or its main purpose is to look at its black hole, which is “important and relevant to the study of galaxies.”
From Huila To The Stars
Cutiva-Alvarez was born in Neiva, Huila, Colombia and went on to live in almost 17 different towns in another part of Colombia, as her father was a policeman. Her passion for physics was sparked at the age of 15.
“My physics teacher at school was a woman who filled her students with excitement when she explained some interesting and striking topic in physics, and clearly the films of Carl Sagan filled me with great emotion and to think that at some point I would be like him.,” she ays.
With the encouragement of her sister, she began to “fall in love with this great study of the universe,” and says, “As women in STEM, we can advocate for justice and equity in science and technology, work to remove systemic barriers and biases, and promote the inclusion of diverse voices in scientific and policy decision-making.”
Cutiva-Alvarez explains that by enabling scientists from the Global South to lead research and innovation, local scientific and technological capacities are strengthened, which contributes to sustainable development and empowerment of communities.
“Its critical to addressing historical imbalances in access to and distribution of scientific resources and knowledge,” she says,
Exploring The Time The Universe Lit Up
Another Colombian astronomer, Sofía Rojas Ruiz, used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the first-born bright galaxies and quasars that contributed to the process of illuminating the universe from complete darkness about 13 billion years ago.
Rojas, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in the team of Prof. Tommaso Treu, says these galaxies, from the Epoch of Reionization, are the fore-runners of our Milky Way but were able to grow a powerful bubble around them, breaking the clouds of neutral hydrogen that were submerging the universe into darkness.
“You can think of the universe as a sponge made out of neutral hydrogen that is growing and evolving… with time, the stars conglomerate into galaxies that start growing powerful enough to make bubbles that eventually will break, allowing us to see light from neighboring galaxies, just as we can now see Andromeda in a clear night,” she says.
Rojas says that as an undergraduate student, she led a project finding some of these bright galaxies by analyzing images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
“The HST findings point to a set of galaxy candidates, however, we cannot learn more about their star composition and ability to make ionizing bubbles in the Epoch of Reionization,” she says. “