Astronomers Discover 63 New Quasars: Key To Unlock Secrets Of The Universe

A team of astronomers led by Eduardo Bañados, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, have recently identified 63 new quasars. The newly found quasars almost double the number of quasars we have knowledge of from the early universe.

Quasars are like the cosmic lighthouses that are powered by supermassive black holes, billion times more massive than our sun. They are so bright that they even eclipse the ancient galaxies that they're a part of. Billions of light-years away, they are probably the most far away objects that scientists currently study.

"They illuminate our knowledge of all the early universe," Bañados stated in a news release. Quasars are very difficult to identify, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. But a survey that was conducted by Eduardo Bañados and his colleagues has nearly doubled the number of quasars known in the early universe. The survey is to be reported in the 'Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series'.

Bañados stated that the very bright quasars offer some of the best tools to study the early universe. Quasars can very much help the scientists to better understand the incidents that occured after the Big Bang.

Until now, the number of ancient quasars known to us was so small that scientists had very limited opportunities to know more about them. The newly discovered quasars will give scientists very valuable insights about the first billion years after the Big Bang. "The number of quasars at z>5.6 presented in this work almost double the quasars previously known at these redshifts, marking a transition phase from studies of individual sources to statistical studies of the high-redshift quasar population, which was impossible with earlier, smaller samples," the researchers wrote in the news release.

The Big Bang is the most popular theory of the universe's origin. The first sources of light that may supposedly have included quasars emerged some time after the Big Bang when gravity slowly condensed the hydrogen atoms.

Much about this period, when the lights from the universe were curved back on, are still covered in mystery. But scientists believe by studying these ancient quasars, they may be able to decipher what really happened in the first billion years after the occurrence of the Big Bang.