Supermassive black holes are lighting up the cores of two merging galaxies in the early universe.
The merger process supplies gas to galaxies' central, which will also eventually merge and form even larger black holes. When these black holes feed on this material, they blast out massive amounts of radiation that can outshine all the stars in their home galaxy combined. This powers AGNs and links this phenomenon to galactic mergers.
While astronomers have had a lot of success in spotting galactic mergers with dual quasars in the local universe, more distant examples of such events that happened when the universe was much younger have been elusive. That's what makes the new discovery so exciting, study team members said. They used a variety of ground and space-based telescopes to study a closely bound pair of actively feeding supermassive black holes at cosmic noon, about three billion years after the universe's birth.
The two quasars seen by the team are just 10,000 light-years apart, meaning that the merger between their host galaxies is well underway and they are close to becoming a single giant elliptical galaxy. This fact distinguishes the new discovery from similar observations, team members said, as other merging galaxies of the era have been seen in earlier stages of unification and can be clearly distinguished as separate entities.
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