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Black Holes
Distant Universe
The Subaru Telescope has discovered a pair of relatively faint quasars 12.8 billion light-years away (900 million years old, the “dawn of the universe”).
Quasars are objects that shine brightly due to the energy released when a large amount of gas falls into a supermassive black hole.
Observations of this object with the ALMA telescope revealed that the two mother galaxies hosting each quasar have merged.
Professor Takuma Izumi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan predicts that this object will fully merge in a few hundred million years and evolve into an intensely bright quasar as more gas flows into the central black hole.
