Scientists keeping an almost all-seeing eye aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found not one but two astronomical needles in two galactic haystacks; aggregation of pairs of quasars that can reveal how galaxies form.
Using the wealth of information gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite and the ground-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the researchers narrowed down their search for this rare, though extremely bright double quasars, under the stars across the universe. .
A quasar is the extremely bright core of a galaxy, fueled by the insatiable appetite of a nearby supermassive black hole, whose greedy eating habits trigger a massive explosion of radiation so bright that it can protrude entire galaxies like our own Milky Way .
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‘We estimate that there is one double quasar in the distant universe. So finding these double quasars is like finding a needle in a haystack, ‘ said lead researcher Yue Shen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Looking back ten billion years in space, researchers have found a pair of quasars that look so close together that they are one violent object. They then quite serendipitously find another quasar pair in a separate colliding pair of galaxies.
The discovery will deepen humanity’s understanding of the exact process behind the rather violent fusion of two massive celestial structures, which will provide new insights into the merging of galaxies and the collisions of supermassive black holes.
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When the quasars, or galactic nuclei come together, it generates galactic winds that sweep the remaining gas out of the merging galaxies, slowing down or stopping new star formation, causing the new single galaxy to form into an elliptical shape.
Just over 100 of these double quasars have been discovered so far, though none are as old as these two new pairs. The quasars in each of the two new pairs are only 10,000 light-years apart. For reference, the Sun is 26,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole in the middle of the Milky Way.
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