NASA's Hubble finds formative years of quasars

Washington, June 20: By using Hubble Space Telescopes infrared vision, astronomers have uncovered the mysterious early formative years of quasars, the brightest objects in the universe. (11:23) Hubble's sharp images unveil the chaotic collisions of galaxies that fuel quasars by feeding supermassive central black holes with gas. "The Hubble observations are definitely telling us that the peak of quasar activity in the early universe is driven by galaxies colliding and then merging together," said Eilat Glikman of the Middlebury College in Vermont, US. "We are seeing the quasars in their teenage years, when they are growing quickly and all messed up," Glikman noted. Discovered in the 1960s, a quasar, contraction of "quasi-stellar object," pours out the light of as much as one trillion stars from a region of space smaller than our solar system. The source of the light is a gusher of energy coming from supermassive black holes inside the cores of very distant galaxies.