![]() The quasars appear as single objects in the Gaia's data because they are so close together. Gaia measures the positions, distances and motions of nearby celestial objects very precisely. The team enlisted Gaia, a satellite and research mission launched in 2013, to pinpoint potential double-quasar candidates. However, Hubble's sharp resolution alone isn't good enough to go looking for these dual-light beacons, the researchers said. And Hubble shows a tidal feature from the merging of two galaxies, where gravity distorts the shape of the galaxies, forming two tails of stars. Hubble shows unequivocally that this is indeed a genuine pair of supermassive black holes rather than two images of the same quasar created by the optical effects of a foreground gravitational lens. “Hubble's sensitivity and resolution provided pictures that allow us to rule out other possibilities for what we are seeing,” said Chen. The European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory helped in the original discovery of the double quasar. This was a needle-in-a-haystack search that required the combined power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. It is actually telling us that this population exists, and now we have a method to identify double quasars that are separated by less than the size of a single galaxy.” “We're starting to unveil this tip of the iceberg of the early binary quasar population,” said Illinois astronomy professor and study co-author Xin Liu. “Knowing about the progenitor population of black holes will eventually tell us about the emergence of supermassive black holes in the early universe, and how frequent those mergers could be,” said Chen. During that process, pairs of supermassive black holes formed within the merging galaxies. Smaller systems come together to form bigger systems and ever-larger structures. There is increasing evidence that large galaxies are built up through mergers. Align image left align image center align image right
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