A pair of quasars from aggregating galaxies, as depicted in an artist’s art.
NASA
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope offers even more informative images from the cosmos. It captured two quasars that looked fairly close together, from a pair of fusing galaxies – and then discovered a second collection, according to findings published last week in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Real images of the quasars.
NASA
According to NASA, a quasar is an intense light coming from the center of a galaxy. It can be so bright that it exceeds the galaxy itself and, according to the space agency, is fueled by a ‘supermassive black hole that greedily feeds on inflated material and unleashes a shower radiation’.
A dual quasar situation is on the rare side, explained lead researcher Yue Shen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “We estimate that in the distant universe there is one double quasar for every 1,000 quasars.” Finding two pairs is even rarer.
According to researchers, the quasars in both cases are less than 10,000 light-years apart. Eventually, the galaxies will merge to form an even larger black hole. By making observations about this process, scientists will better help to better understand the formation of galaxies and the role that quasars play in them.
So far, researchers have found about 100 double quasars in aggregate galaxies.