Using powerful telescopes humanity can effectively look back in time, catching a view of light that was produced millions if not billions of years ago. Now astronomers have captured a signal of two supermassive black hole quasars merging in the early days just after the Big Bang.
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00:00Using powerful telescopes, humanity can effectively look back in time, catching a view of light
00:08that was produced millions, if not billions of years ago.
00:11Now astronomers have captured a signal of two supermassive black hole quasars, merging
00:16in the early days just after the Big Bang.
00:19Quasars are galaxies spun up by supermassive black holes at their centers.
00:23The quasars recently observed merged just 900 million years after the Big Bang, a period
00:28known as the cosmic dawn.
00:30This period of time would have been a wild one for the universe, with experts saying
00:34that galactic collisions would be happening right and left.
00:37However, this is the first time one of them has been observed directly, with the researchers
00:40saying quote, The existence of merging quasars in the epoch of reionization has been anticipated
00:46for a long time.
00:47It has now been confirmed for the first time.
00:50Using the Subaru telescope, this is the image that was initially captured, showing two red
00:54splotches, which experts say are only 40,000 light years apart.
00:58Each of these is a quasar galaxy, with the black holes at their center being upwards
01:02of 100 million times the mass of the sun.
01:05For reference, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is only 4.3 million
01:11solar masses.