![]() It’s fortunate, then, that quasars are found at vast distances of billions of light-years away in early galaxies. That means that if a quasar existed even at the edge of the solar system, its light output would boil away all of our planet’s oceans in seconds. Many quasars are so luminous they can outshine the sun by as much as 27 trillion times. Galactic mergers such as this also provide fuel for quasars, powerful cosmic events that can outshine the combined light of every star in the galaxy that hosts them. This collision isn’t just triggering bouts of extreme star formation as part of an ongoing process that will see these two individual galaxies eventually form as one massive elliptical galaxy, however. ![]() The first tightly bound pair of quasars ever seen, this collision-discovered using a vast array of ground and space-based observatories-is occurring during a period of intense star birth that astronomers call “cosmic noon.” In April 2023, astronomers announced they had discovered a partnership between two closely bound quasars, representing a merger between galaxies just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
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