Quasars tagged posts

Subaru Telescope spots 13-billion-year-old quasars powered by black holes...

This is an artist’s impression of a quasar and neighboring merging galaxy. The galaxies observed by the team are so distant that no detailed images are possible at present. This combination of images of nearby counterparts gives an impression of how they might look in more detail.
Credit: The image was created by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy using material from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

A team of astronomers has discovered a new kind of galaxy which, although extremely old – formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang – creates stars more than a hundred times faster than our own Milky Way. The team’s discovery could help solve a cosmic puzzle – a mysterious population of surprisingly massive galaxies from when the universe was only about 10% of its current age...

This is an artist’s concept of the metric expansion of space, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections. Note on the left the dramatic expansion (not to scale) occurring in the inflationary epoch, and at the center the expansion acceleration. The scheme is decorated with WMAP images on the left and with the representation of stars at the appropriate level of development. Credit: NASA

Scientists have created computer simulations of events soon after the Big Bang to better understand how stars today are being formed. Researchers have formed the clearest picture yet of massive explosions that controlled the creation of galaxies, including our own, and continue to influence star formation today...

This schematic representation illustrates the technique used to probe the small-scale structure of the cosmic web using light from a rare quasar pair.
Credit: J. Onorbe / MPIA

A team of astronomers have made the first measurements of small-scale ripples in this primeval hydrogen gas using rare double quasars. Although the regions of cosmic web they studied lie nearly 11 billion light years away, they were able to measure variations in its structure on scales 100,000 times smaller, comparable to the size of a single galaxy.

Intergalactic gas is so tenuous that it emits no light of its own. Instead astronomers study it indirectly by observing how it selectively absorbs the light coming from faraway sources known as quasars...