This discovery should speak for itself: Scientists have discovered a crazy example of a crazy thing at a crazy distance. We’re talking about the furthest quasar yet—the incredibly bright light from a supermassive black hole 800 million times the mass of the Sun, from just 690 million years after the Big Bang.
“I don’t know!” is among the most scientific phrases you can utter. “I don’t know” is the reason you do science, after all. “I don’t know” means more funding, more jobs, more mysteries, and ultimately, more “now I knows.” Astronomers have now uncovered an “I don’t know” that might become an important tool to study…
If active galactic nuclei don’t make you say “holy shit,” what will? Lots of galaxies contain incredibly bright regions at their center, spewing high-energy jets into the depths of space, brighter than the light the galaxy’s stars can produce.
Three and a half billion light years away in the Virgo constellation, two supermassive black holes are on the verge of smacking into one another. In 100,000 years, their cosmic collision will send ripples across the fabric of spacetime.
Human teenagers don’t have the best rep for being stable, rational individuals. And so too with quasi-stellar objects in their formative years, which scientists are now calling “all messed up”.
Using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), astronomers have catalogued 20 previously undetected galaxies that are so bright they belong to an entirely new class of objects, including one that releases 10,000 times more energy than the Milky Way — even though it’s smaller.
The Hubble Telescope captured images of these galaxies surrounded by glowing green clouds. They’re remnants of major astronomical events, but the amazing thing is what’s lighting them up.
Astronomers say all of the galaxies in the universe are connected by a vast cosmic web of filaments, but we've never actually seen this supposed network. That's changed, however, thanks to the tumultuous activity of a distant quasar that's illuminating the celestial backdrop.
Astronomers have found a mind-bogglingly large structure in a remote part of the Universe — an expanse of space that's so big it takes light 10 billion years to traverse.
Astronomers from York University in Canada have identified an undocumented type of quasar where gas appears to be getting sucked into a black hole. This may not sound surprising, but current theories say that isn't supposed to happen.
We already knew that the universe had a distinct starting point, and now researchers at MIT have actually seen the very first stars born from that beginning.
