The most distant quasar ever observed challenges our understanding of how black holes formed.
Two Black Holes in a Gravitational Dance
In August I wrote about evidence of a binary supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. Now there’s news of another binary in a different galaxy.
Twin Giants
A supermassive black hole lurks in the center of our galaxy. But two supermassive black holes lurk in some galaxies.
Sizing Things Up
How do we determine the size of a quasar billions of light years away? We observe the rate at which they vary in brightness.
Foamy Evidence
New observations of distant quasars find no evidence for quantum foam, and proves that the universe is not a hologram.
Four in a Row
A cluster of four quasars with a million light years of each other has been found, and we aren’t quite sure how such a cluster could have formed.
Green Goblins
Eight galaxies have been found with emission nebula much brighter than the central quasar, and might be due to binary black holes from a galactic merger.
That’s a Big Twinkie
We’ve discovered a 12 billion solar mass black hole that formed when the universe was only 900 million years old. We’re not entirely sure how it formed.
Marking Time
Radio astronomy is so precise that by observing quasars we can measure not only changes in Earth’s rotation, but also tectonic drift between radio telescopes.