In recent months there has been a lot of news regarding the discovery of news regarding theearly universe, Innovation possible thanks to new scientific tools (such as the JWST), new research methods and the intuition of scientists. The latest discovery was made thanks to data from Hubble Space Telescope discovered the two quasars in as many galaxies as the universe “only” 3 billion years.
This type of analysis is useful for scientists to understand how our universe came into being and how it evolved (in detail) and what structures it produced, and to be able to imagine future scenarios. Here’s what the study recently published in the journal Nature found.
The Hubble Space Telescope and the two quasars in the early Universe
The study from which the news was extrapolated is titled A close quasar pair in a disk-to-disk galaxy merger at z=2.17. According to scientists, it is a couple quasars located within two merging galaxies. THE quasars They are special types of supermassive black holes that are active because they have material around them that is attracted to the singularity beyond the event horizon.
In general, collisions between galaxies, which merged to create new, larger, and more massive ones, were common in the early universe. In the past, however, it was hardly possible to detect two quasars merging. Thanks to the new tools (the Hubble Space Telescope is not so new) and methods of analysis, these types of observations are more common.
Yu Ching Chen (first author of the study) explained this “Knowing the progenitor population of black holes will ultimately tell us about the formation of supermassive black holes in the early Universe and how common these mergers might be.”.
The difficulty in detecting quasars so close together is that the resolution of the instruments must understand that it is not a single object, but two objects. Not only that Hubble Space Telescope but also the Keck, Gemini, Jansky and Chandra observatories, which made it possible to collect different wavelengths and therefore a greater number of data.
HST extension However, it was important to understand that they were actually two very close quasars and not other types of celestial objects. Always, the space telescope has also shown a distortion of the emission due to the large mass being collected in a very small point “stars with tails”. There was a possibility of confusing these two quasars as a single deformed source due to gravitational distortions, a contingency that has been ruled out thanks to Keck.
At present, what appears to us to be two galaxies in the process of merging should have formed a single large elliptical galaxy after about 10 billion years. THE quasars instead, they could have merged into one large supermassive black hole. Thanks to instruments like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, they will allow us to collect more data on this type of celestial body.
