麻豆淫院

Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the universe. A quasar is powered by large amounts of matter falling into the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Collisions and mergers between galaxies can cause quasar activity by feeding additional matter into the center of a galaxy.

Quasar activity peaked in the early universe, but even then they were relatively rare. So an international research team led by Yongming Liang at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan was surprised when they found a group of 11 quasars in an area of space where you would normally expect to see maybe one, while analyzing data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The previous record holder for quasar over-density had been five. Their paper is on the arXiv preprint server.

Follow-up observations with the Subaru Telescope revealed another mystery. The quasars do not coincide with a dense group of galaxies. Instead, they sit on the boundary between two groups. If galaxy collisions and mergers are responsible for quasar activity, then the densest groups of quasars should be found in the densest group of galaxies.

This structure, dubbed the "Cosmic Himalayas," cannot be explained by conventional theories, forcing astronomers to rethink the formation scenarios for quasars. The team hopes that new data from next-generation instruments like the Prime Focus Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope will help to solve the mystery.

The research team named this formation the Cosmic Himalayas in reference to how the towering Himalayas on Earth form a boundary between plains and plateaus. The Cosmic Himalayas sit 10.8 billion light years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cetus.