Astronomers have, for the first time in history, glimpsed upon four closely grouped quasars. Quasars, the gas bursts that glow around black holes, are not usually found near each other. However, telescopes at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii picked up what appears to be a near perfect row of them together. The light emitted from the quasars is bright enough to light an area nearly one million light years wide, dubbed the Jackpot nebula.
The finding is puzzling scientists. Quasars are known to have short lifespans- ten to one hundred million years, compared to ten billion years for a galaxy- and be no less than one hundred million light years apart. But in this Jackpot system, they are a mere 700,000 light years from each other. This suggests either that something very improbable has been observed, or that old theories and models need to be revised or scrapped, or both. The probability of such an occurrence has been estimated at just one in ten million.
The Nebula Housing the Quadruple Quasars Also Stumps Scientists
The Jackpot Nebula, residence of the neighborly quadruple quasars, also has researchers scratching their heads. The nebula is around ten million light years away, meaning that we’re getting a peek at the early days of the universe when we gaze upon it. It is one of the largest, densest systems ever discovered by man, and sits in a protocluster, a sort of grandfather of the clusters of galaxies that exist today. The protocluster itself is much denser in terms of its galaxy population- nearly twenty times as dense as other, already dense systems of similar type. Previous supercomputer simulations had predicted that the gases in such massive bodies from that era had to be rarefied and extremely hot- ten million degrees. Yet, this giant nebula requires gases that are much cooler and denser.
The fact that these two findings came paired together is no coincidence. Quasars love hot, dense gases, as the gases are responsible for allowing them to burn bright, and the Jackpot nebula has vast quantities of them. Scientists believe the new discoveries may answer questions about how quasars form and under what conditions, as these in particular seemed very conducive to quasar life.
