WASHINGTON: A giant nebula in the early universe hits the jackpot when it comes to rare, bright objects known as quasars, boasting four within surprisingly close proximity to one another. The first known quasar quartet lies in a cloud of cool gas that could provide a clue to the objects’ unusual closeness.
“Multiple-quasar systems are rare, because quasars themselves are rare,” Joseph Hennawi, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, told Space.com by email.
“The typical distance between any two quasars is about 100 million light-years, whereas we found four quasars within 700,000 light-years of each other,” he said. “The … probability of that occurring is extremely small — about 1 in 10 million odds.”
The center of every galaxy boasts a supermassive black hole millions of times the mass of the sun. Material swirling around the rim of the black hole travels near the speed of light, emitting an enormous amount of energy before it is consumed. If the supply is large enough, it enters the quasar phase of its evolution, far outshining its parent galaxy to become one of the brightest objects in the universe.
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