Quasars are bright objects powered by voracious, supermassive black holes blasting out ferocious fountains of energy as they engorge themselves on gas, dust, and anything else within their gravitational grasp. They existed when the universe was just 3 billion years old. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other space and ground-based observatories, astronomers investigating these developments have made an unexpected and rare discovery: a pair of gravitationally bound quasars, both blazing away inside two merging galaxies. The early universe was a rambunctious place where galaxies often bumped into each other and even merged together. Hubble zoomed in and clearly resolved the pair, as well as their host galaxies. The detection yields clues as to how unsettled the cosmos was long ago, when galaxies more frequently collided and black holes were engorged with flotsam and jetsam from the close encounters.īecause the two quasars flicker at different rates as their inflow of fuel waxes and wanes, they were identified as an unusual activity happening out in space. It's rare to find such a dynamic duo in the far universe. They are embedded inside a pair of galaxies that smashed into each other 10 billion years ago. This fleeting characteristic of quasars helped astronomers find two quasars on a collision course with each other. But the quasar food buffet lasts only so long. That's because they're powered by voracious supermassive black holes gobbling up a lot of gas and dust that gets heated to high temperatures. And, like a brilliant July 4th aerial flare, they are dazzling for a relatively brief time - on cosmic timescales. Scattered all across the sky, they blaze with the opulence of over 100 billion stars. Quasars are among the universe's brightest fireworks.
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