With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope and several ground-based observatories, an international team of astrophysicists
This discovery is the first confirmeddetection of a closely spaced pair of supermassive black holes during the era of "cosmic noon" (cosmic high noon). This is a period in the evolution of the Universe, which was characterized by rapid star formation. The collision of galaxies observed by telescopes occurred about 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
In the process of observation, scientists have already foundsimilar systems in the early universe. But they all showed two galaxies that were just beginning to merge: they were still separate cosmic objects. The results of a new observation show a pair of quasars, the distance between which is only 10 thousand light years. In this case, the parent galaxies gradually turn into a single giant elliptical structure.
Quasars are one of the brightest objects inUniverse. Scattered across the sky, they shine brighter than the stars. But their light changes over a relatively short (cosmic scale) time. This is due to the fact that the light of quasars depends on the supply of additional "fuel" to the supermassive black hole. Variable light makes it difficult to find such objects.
The researchers believe that the detection of distantpairs of two quasars will help develop a method to search for other similar systems. The early universe was a turbulent place where galaxies often collided with each other and even merged, which means that there must be many more black holes moving towards each other in deep space.
We're starting to uncover this tip of the icebergearly population of binary quasars. This is the uniqueness of this study. What this actually tells us is that this population exists, and we now have a method for identifying binary quasars that are less than the size of a single galaxy between them.
Xin Liu, co-author of the study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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On the cover: an artistic illustration of two merging quasars. Image: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani, J. da Silva