Quasars, short for quasi-stellar objects, were first identified in 1962 by Maarten Schmidt at the California Institute of Technology. They appear as star-like points, but they lie at enormous ...

Supermassive black holes appear to be present at the center of every galaxy, going back to some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. And we have no idea how they got there. It shouldn’t be ...

Twinkling like cosmic lighthouses on a shore 13 billion light-years from Earth, quasars are some of the oldest, brightest relics of the early universe that astronomers can detect today. Short for ...

This image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows an ancient quasar (circled in red) with fewer than expected neighboring galaxies (bright blobs), challenging physicists’ understanding of ...

Plenty of groups have been theorizing about primordial black holes (PBHs) recently. That is in part because of their candidacy as a potential source of dark matter. But, if they existed, they also had ...

Observations confirm astronomers' expectation that early-Universe quasars formed in regions of space densely populated with companion galaxies. DECam's exceptionally wide field of view and special ...

With the promise of detecting primordial black holes formed at the dawn of time, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is set to offer ...

A new study uses spectroscopy to separate and study baby quasars. Quasars are supermassive black holes that have absorbed enormous brightness. Colors representing gases help researchers distinguish ...

formed when the universe was merely 6 percent of its current age, or about 700 million years after the big bang. How black holes of several billion solar masses formed so rapidly in the very early ...

Astrophysicists know that just about every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. They know that when galaxies merge, so, ultimately, do their black holes. But they don't yet know ...

Quasars, the brightest objects in the cosmos, could act as cosmic signposts, directing astronomers to elusive pairs of supermassive black holes. New research suggests that quasars — the luminous ...

Sort of? You could conceivably red shift something so far that we no longer have the instruments to detect it, but I don't know how. The cosmic microwave background is still detectable, and it is at ...