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Dual Quasar (Artist’s Illustration)

Artist's concept showing a chaotic, nebulous, tangled blur of blue, brown, red, white and gold against a black, deep-space field peppered with stars and galaxies.

This artist's concept shows the brilliant glare of two quasars residing in the cores of two galaxies that are in the chaotic process of merging. The gravitational tug-of-war between the two galaxies ignites a firestorm of star birth.

Quasars are brilliant beacons of intense light from the centers of distant galaxies. They are powered by supermassive black holes voraciously feeding on infalling matter. This feeding frenzy unleashes a torrent of radiation that can outshine the collective light of billions of stars in the host galaxy.

In a few tens of millions of years, the black holes and their galaxies will merge, and so will the quasar pair, forming an even more massive black hole.

  • Release Date
    April 5, 2023
  • Science Release
    Hubble Unexpectedly Finds Double Quasar in Distant Universe
    Read the release
  • Credits
    NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

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Dual Quasar (J0749+2255)

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The Hubble Space Telescope photograph of two, closely spaced, white objects is overlaid with a color key, scale bar, and compass arrows.

Dual Quasar Compass Image

This compass image shows a Hubble Space Telescope photograph of a pair of quasars that existed when the universe was just 3 billion years old. They are embedded inside a pair of colliding galaxies. The quasars are separated by less than the size of a single galaxy. Quasars are...

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Last Updated
Mar 11, 2025
Contact
Media

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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