A beautiful, bejeweled halo of warped light generated by a monstrous black hole takes center stage in one of the latest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images. The luminous loop, which looks strikingly like a “Einstein ring“, is decorated with four points of light, but not all of them are real. The star-studded halo in … Read more
It looks like a distant ring with three glittering jewels, but the latest image from the Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is actually the view of a distant quasar surrounded by a nearby elliptical galaxy. The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) spotted the faint apparition during a study of dark matter and its distribution in the universe. … Read more
A double quasar has been discovered moving towards a major merger, lighting the ‘cosmic dawn’ just 900 million years after the Big Bang. They are the first quasar few spotted so far back in cosmic time. Quasars grow quickly supermassive black holes in the cores of hyperactive galaxies. Streams of gas are forced down the … Read more
Supermassive black holes appear to be present at the center of every galaxy, dating back to some of the earliest galaxies in the universe. And we have no idea how they got there. It shouldn’t be possible for them to grow from supernova remnants to supermassive sizes so quickly. And we are not aware of … Read more
This illustration shows two quasars in the process of merging. Using both the Gemini North Telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, which is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and managed by NSF NOIRLAb, and the Subaru Telescope, a team of astronomers has observed a pair of merging quasars discovered … Read more