(CNN)- Two monster black holes born in the early universe have come incredibly close to each other, constantly devouring matter, creating a unique “double quasar”.
According to Sci-tech Daily, this unique object has been identified by the cooperation of two super-space telescopes, Hubble and Gaia, which are on a mission to find distant worlds for NASA and ESA. American spaceflight and the European Space Agency).Dr. Yue Shen from the University of Illinois, lead author of the study, said this is a type of object called a “double quasar”, which is extremely rare in the universe. They developed a spectroscopic method called Gemini North to understand its nature. A quasar can be understood as an object that closely resembles a star, seen from Earth as a bright star, but it is not. It’s actually a region of intense energy created by a monstrous black hole (i.e., supermassive, supermassive black hole), which is gobbling up surrounding matter too quickly.
The newly found double quasar is the closest ever pair of “monsters” – separated by just 10,000 light-years, a large distance but still small considering the distance between two supermassive black holes.
The analysis results show that the two black holes that make up the double quasar are the two central black holes of the galaxy. The galaxy containing them is actually two galaxies that have just merged to form, of which the two quasars are the central black holes of the two old galaxies.
In particular, this rare image of a double quasar is actually from the young universe, when it was only about 3 billion years old. We only see them now because they are so far away, up to 10 billion light years away, or 10 billion years for light to reach Earth’s telescopes. Therefore, the discovery provides a valuable “window of time” to help scientists study the early objects of the universe, as well as past galactic mergers.
The galaxy containing our Earth, the Milky Way, itself will undergo a merger about 2 billion years from now, with the giant Andromera galaxy.
