In yet another fascinating discovery, scientists — with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope — have captured the gaze of two gravitationally-bound quasars generating a massive amount of brightness inside two merging galaxies, Nasa revealed in its official statement.
The universe has always been an active place of merging or colliding of space objects which always intrigued astronomers. However, the quasars existed when the universe was merely three billion years old, according to the press release.
Quasars are objects emitting a large number of energies as they absorb gas, dust and anything within their gravitational area. They are powered by supermassive black holes.
The findings were mentioned in the study published in the journal Nature.
The lead author of the study Yu-Ching Chen noted in a statement that "We don't see a lot of double quasars at this early time in the universe. And that's why this discovery is so exciting."
The study of finding a pair of quasars is relatively a new area of research and the modern technologically equipped astronomical observatories have enabled scientists to discover the areas where the quasars are active.
There is considerable evidence, according to Nasa, that smaller parts come together and form huge systems and large structures. Similarly, galaxies are also made up of such mergers. During the merger of two galaxies, pairs of supermassive black holes formed within them.
"Knowing about the progenitor population of black holes will eventually tell us about the emergence of supermassive black holes in the early universe, and how frequent those mergers could be," said Chen who is a graduate student of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Xin Liu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign believed that "We're starting to unveil this tip of the iceberg of the early binary quasar population. This is the uniqueness of this study. It is actually telling us that this population exists, and now we have a method to identify double quasars that are separated by less than the size of a single galaxy."
"Hubble's sensitivity and resolution provided pictures that allow us to rule out other possibilities for what we are seeing," Chen also said.
Hubble Space Telescope clearly shows in its picture the pair of supermassive black holes than two quasars.
"Because Hubble peers into the distant past, this double quasar no longer exists. Over the intervening 10 billion years, their host galaxies have likely settled into a giant elliptical galaxy, like the ones seen in the local universe today," Nasa noted.
"The nearby giant elliptical galaxy, M87, has a monstrous black hole weighing 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun. Perhaps this black hole was grown from one or more galaxy mergers over the past billions of years", Nasa added.
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