In recent months, the discovery of new quasars has caused much ink to flow.primordial universeThe Primordial Universe is the result of collaboration between scientists, new scientific instruments (such as the JWST), new methods of investigation and the intuition of scientists. The latest discovery was made using data from the JWST. Télescope spatial Hubble who discovered two quasar inside as many galaxies when the Universe had ” only “ 3 billion years.
This type of analysis is useful for scientists to understand how our Universe came to be and how it evolved (in detail) and what structures it spawned, as well as to be able to imagine future scenarios. Here is what emerges from the recent study published in the journal Nature.
The Hubble Space Telescope and the two quasars of the early Universe
The study from which the news was extrapolated is titled A pair of nearby quasars in a merger of disk galaxies at z=2.17. According to scientists, it is a pair of quasar set in two merging galaxies. I quasar are special types of active supermassive black holes, in that they are surrounded by material that is being pulled towards the singularity, beyond the event horizon.
In general, in the early Universe, collisions between galaxies merging to create new, larger and more massive ones were frequent. However, it has hardly been possible in the past to detect two merging quasars. Thanks to new instruments (the Télescope spatial Hubble is not so recent) and the methodologies for analyzing these observations are more frequent.
Yu-Ching Chen (lead author of the study) said that “Knowing the population of black hole progenitors will eventually tell us about the emergence of supermassive black holes in the early Universe and the frequency of these mergers. ».
The difficulty in detecting quasars so close to each other is that the resolution of the instruments must make it possible to realize that it is not a single object but two objects. For this, it is not only necessary to Télescope spatial Hubble but also the Keck, Gemini, Jansky and Chandra observatories, which made it possible to collect different wavelengths and therefore more data.
HST however, made it possible to realize that they were indeed two very close quasars and not other types of celestial objects. The space telescope also showed a distortion of the emission due to the large mass gathered in a very small point, which created a distortion effect. “stars with tails”. Due to gravitational distortions, it was possible to confuse these two quasars into a single distorted source, a possibility ruled out thanks to Keck.
Currently, what appears to us as two merging galaxies should have given rise to a large elliptical galaxy about 10 billion years ago. I quasar may have merged into a large supermassive black hole. Instruments, such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will collect additional data on this type of celestial body.