Why the discovery of a bevy of quasars will boost efforts to understand galaxies’ origins

Late last year, an international team including researchers from the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University announced the discovery of more than 60 extremely distant quasars, nearly doubling the number known to science — and thus providing dozens of new opportunities to look deep into our universe’s history.

“Just as a lighthouse’s beam might shine on nearby land forms, making them visible from far away, quasars enable us to investigate the very distant universe and understand the physics of primordial galaxies.”

“My colleagues and I used both the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Pan-STARRS survey to find the quasars that we recently reported. Before those surveys began, we really knew very little about distant quasars,” said Linhua Jiang, the Youth Qianren Research Professor at the KIAA and an author on two studies published in November and December in The Astrophysical Journal about the newfound quasars.

“Knowing more about the black holes powering quasars will allow us to know more about how galaxies develop,” said Marta Volonteri, the research director at the Observatory of Paris and the principal investigator of the BLACK project, which investigates how supermassive black holes influenced their host galaxies, especially as quasars, in the early universe.

Source: Why the discovery of a bevy of quasars will boost efforts to understand galaxies’ origins

Originally published at Cogly.