Quasars
Even Microquasars are Powerful Particle Accelerators
Quasars are the actively feeding supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies and can contain millions or even billions…
Black Hole Jets Seen Forming in Real-Time
A short time ago, astronomers observed a distant supermassive black hole (SMBH) located in a galaxy 270 million light-years away…
This Quasar Helped End the Dark Ages of the Universe
After the Big Bang came the Dark Ages, a period lasting hundreds of millions of years when the universe was…
New Research may Explain how Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Grew so Fast
Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered into Cosmic Dawn, the cosmological period when the first galaxies…
Hubble Gets its Best Look At the First Quasar
The term quasar comes from quasi-stellar objects, a name that reflected our uncertainty about their nature. The first quasars were…
Why are Some Quasars So Lonely?
At the centre of most galaxies are supermassive black holes. When they are ‘feeding’ they blast out jets of material…
This Ancient Galaxy Merger Will Produce a very Luminous Quasar
In the contemporary Universe, massive galaxies are plentiful. But the Universe wasn't always like this. Astronomers think that galaxies grew…
Webb Looks at One of the Best Gravitationally Lensed Quasars Ever Discovered
It looks like a distant ring with three sparkly jewels, but the Webb telescope's (JWST) most recent image is really…
The Earliest Merging Quasars Ever Seen
Studying the history of science shows how often serendipity plays a role in some of the most important discoveries. Sometimes,…
There’s Another, More Boring Explanation for those Dyson Sphere Candidate Stars
Dyson Spheres have been a tantalising digression in the hunt for alien intelligence. Just recently seven stars have been identified…