In another extraordinary discovery, NASA revealed in an official statement that scientists – with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope – have captured this view of two gravitationally bound quasars producing enormous brightness in two merging galaxies.
The universe has always been an active place for merging or colliding celestial bodies which has always intrigued astronomers. However, quasars existed when the universe was only three billion years old, according to a press release.
Quasars are objects that emit large amounts of energy when they absorb gas, dust, and anything else within their gravitational zone. They are powered by supermassive black holes.
The results are reported in research published in the journal Nature.
“We didn’t see many paired quasars in the early universe. That’s why this discovery is so exciting,” said Yu-Ching Chen, lead author of the study, in a statement.
The study of finding pairs of quasars is a relatively new field of research, and modern, technologically equipped astronomical observatories have enabled scientists to detect areas where quasars are active.
There is ample evidence, according to NASA, that smaller fragments come together to form massive systems and massive structures. Likewise, galaxies are also formed from the merger. During the merger of the two galaxies, a pair of supermassive black holes formed in them.
“Knowing the early inhabitants of black holes will ultimately tell us about the emergence of supermassive black holes in the early universe, and how often these mergers occurred,” said Chen, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. .
Shen Liu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign believes that “we are starting to reveal parts of this iceberg for early binary quasar clusters. This is the uniqueness of this research. This really tells us that these clusters exist, and now we have a way to identify the pairs of quasars that separate them.” less than the size of one galaxy.
Chen also said, “Hubble’s sensitivity and resolution provide images that allow us to rule out other possibilities for what we see.”
This Hubble Space Telescope image clearly shows a pair of supermassive black holes from two quasars.
NASA notes that “as Hubble looked far back in time, this double quasar no longer exists. Over the course of 10 billion years, their parent galaxies most likely settled in giant elliptical galaxies, like the ones we see in the local universe today.” “.
NASA added, “The nearest giant elliptical galaxy, M87, contains a supermassive black hole weighing 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. These black holes may have arisen from one or more galactic mergers over the last billion years.”
