What burns brighter than a quasar – the hungry, supermassive black holes what transcends entire galaxies if they reach everything within reach?
What about a “double quasar?”
In a new study, astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to look 10 billion years into the cosmic past, where they have detected two giant quasars at the point of collision. These hungry quasars sit at the centers of their respective galaxies and have less than 10,000 ligjare breathing space between them, which places them much closer to each other than EarthThe sun is in the middle of the Milky Way (about 26,000 light-years away).
To telescopes on the ground, the quasar neighbors look like a single object – and thanks to the unstoppable collision of their home systems, they will one day become one.
Related: Universe’s oldest known quasar discovered 13 billion light years away
This is not the first double quasar astronomers have ever discovered; according to the study authors, more than 100 have been discovered to date. However, the ancient pair of burning candles is by far the oldest double quasar in the known universe. And actually it is not alone; in the same study, published April 1 in the journal Natural Astronomy, the researchers reported that the detection of a second double quasar – also ten billion years ago – dates.
“We estimate that in the distant universe there is one double quasar for every 1,000 quasars,” said lead author Yue Shen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. “So it’s like finding these double quasars a needle in a haystack.”
For their new study, the researchers carefully plucked their haystacks. The team focused their search on the distant universe, as the formation of stars probably peaked in the universe about 10 billion years ago, and the merging of galaxies was much more common then, the authors said. These mergers led large amounts of material to the black holes lurking in the core of galaxies; While the black holes sucked matter at almost the speed of light, they released a flood of radiation and became quasars.
Quasars can exceed large galaxies, although their brightness can vary every few days, weeks, or months, depending on how much matter they engulf at the time. Due to this fine dining grid, a double quasar may appear to “twist” in place when one member of the pair becomes brighter or dimmer while the other remains static. With the help of the Gaia Space Observatory and Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the study authors targeted several rippling quasars in the distant universe and then zoomed in with the Hubble Telescope.
Two of these rippling light sources appear to be the ancient double quasars that flicker after their inevitable collisions.
According to the researchers, the fusion of quasars can help them understand the nuances of galaxy formation – and destruction. As quasars grow, their radiation can produce powerful winds that can eventually blow all the star-forming gas out of their way. When this gas disappears, the formation of stars ends and the galaxies that house the quasars begin to retire early, waiting slowly for all their old stars to burn out and disappear.
“Quasars have a major influence on the formation of galaxies in the universe,” said co-author Nadia Zakamska of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “It is important to find double quasars in this early period, because we can now test our long-standing ideas about how black holes and their host systems develop together.”
Originally published on Live Science.