Timing a sextuple quasar
Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - 08:40
in Astronomy & Space
Quasars are galaxies with massive black holes at their cores around which vast amounts of energy are being radiated. Indeed, so much light is emitted that the nucleus of a quasar is much brighter than the rest of the entire host galaxy, and their tremendous luminosities allow quasars to be seen even when they are very far away. The quasar SDSSJ1029+2623, for example, is so distant that its light has been traveling towards us for 11.4 billion years, 83% of the age of the universe. This quasar is particularly unusual because it happens to have five quasar neighbors in the sky that look very similar to it and moreover are located at the same cosmological distance.