NASA detects rare 'double quasar' in ancient corner of the universe - Livescience.com

What burns brighter than a quasar — the hungry, supermassive black holes that outshine entire galaxies as they voraciously gobble up everything in reach.

However, the ancient pair of blazing lights is by far the oldest double quasar in the known universe.

And in fact, it's not alone; in the same study, published April 1 in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers reported the detection of a second double quasar — also dating to 10 billion years ago.

"We estimate that in the distant universe, for every 1,000 quasars, there is one double quasar," lead study author Yue Shen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement.

The team focused their search on the distant universe, as star formation is thought to have peaked in the universe about 10 billion years ago, and galactic mergers were much more common then, the authors said.

These mergers funneled huge amounts of matter toward the black holes lurking in the cores of galaxies; As those black holes sucked in matter at near-light-speed, they released a flood of radiation, becoming quasars.

With the help of the Gaia space observatory and Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the study authors targeted several jiggling quasars in the distant universe, then zoomed in with the Hubble telescope.

"Finding dual quasars at this early epoch is important because we can now test our long-standing ideas of how black holes and their host galaxies evolve together."