Quasars are bright objects powered by supermassive black holes that blast out energy as they consume gas, dust, and anything else within their gravitational grasp.
Within a pair of merging galaxies in the distant universe, Hubble detected a pair of quasars that existed when our universe was just 3 billion years old!
Because of the amount of time it takes distant light to reach Hubble through the cosmos, this double quasar no longer exists. Over the intervening 10 billion years, their host galaxies have likely settled into a giant elliptical galaxy, and the quasars have merged to become an emormous, supermassive black hole at its center.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
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