LONDON: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured dramatic images of a set of wispy, green objects near dead quasars, which once flickered into life and then faded.
According to NASA, the images that were taken by Hubble show that the glowing structures have looping, helical, and braided shapes. Astronomers believe that the discovery will shed more light on the baffling behavior of galaxies with energetic cores.
Astronomers believe that these phantom wispy structures outside the host galaxy could have been illuminated by powerful ultraviolet radiation from a supermassive black hole at the center of the host galaxy. The most active of these galaxy cores are called quasars, which shine material heated to a point that sends a bright beam into deep space.
Bill Keel, researcher from the University of Alabama, and lead author of the study, said, “However, the quasars are not bright enough now to account for what we’re seeing; this is a record of something that happened in the past. The glowing filaments are telling us that the quasars were once emitting more energy, or they are changing very rapidly, which they were not supposed to do.”
