Researchers Find Rarest Quartet of Quasars In Close Proximity For The First Time
Researchers have found a quartet of quasars in the close proximity for the first time. Quasars are extremely rare, separated by hundreds of millions of light-years.
Researchers believe that the discovery could challenge ideas about how galaxies and galaxy clusters formed.
"If you discover something which, according to current scientific wisdom, should be extremely improbable, you can come to one of two conclusions: either you just got very lucky, or you need to modify your theory," said Joseph Hennawi of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
According to researchers, these quasars are believed to have formed when the universe was half its current age.
"Our current models of cosmic structure formation based on supercomputer simulations predict that massive objects in the early universe should be filled with rarefied gas that is about ten million degrees, whereas this giant nebula requires gas thousands of times denser and colder," Sebastiano Cantalupo, one of the study's co-authors from UC Santa Cruz and ETH Zurich.
Discovery of these quasars so close to each other in a massive nebula of cool and dense gas will likely force scientists to reconsider the models of evolution and formation used to date, SlashGear noted.
"There are several hundred times more galaxies in this region than you would expect to see at these distances," said J. Xavier Prochaska, the principal investigator of the Keck observations, where researchers used the 10-meter Keck I Telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to find the quasars.
