NASA's Hubble Telescope has picked up the ultra-luminous glow of eight distant quasars.
According to Space.com, quasars are the brightest objects in the universe and the eight newly spotted ones lit up their surrounding clouds a green hue. The researchers involved in spotting and identifying these quasars are reportedly planning to publish their findings in the Astronomical Journal.
"They don't fit a single pattern," Bill Keel, a researchers at the University of Alabama who jumpstarted the survey, said in a press release. "However, the quasars are not bright enough now to account for what we're seeing; this is a record of something that happened in the past.
"The glowing filaments are telling us that the quasars were once emitting more energy, or they are changing very rapidly, which they were not supposed to do."
He said the quasars the telescope picked up could be the results of merged black holes that are now circling a host galaxy. He said the light seems to come from light being pulled between two intense gravitational forces rather than from the center of a black hole.
"The heavy elements occur in modest amounts, adding to the case that the gas originated in the outskirts of the galaxies rather than being blasted out from the nucleus," Keel said. "We see these twisting dust lanes connecting to the gas, and there's a mathematical model for how that material wraps around in the galaxy.
"Potentially, you can say we're seeing it 1.5 billion years after a smaller gas-rich galaxy fell into a bigger galaxy."
