The Hubble Space Telescope captured some weird, unidentified stuff in the most detailed photos ever taken of the immediate space surrounding a quasar.
Quasars, a shortening of the term “quasi-stellar objects,” are blindingly bright galaxy cores in the early universe. Though these extremely distant objects look like stars in the sky, they’re the resulting light from feasting supermassive black holes.
The telescope, a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency, zoomed in on quasar 3C 273, about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth. What it saw in the quasar’s midst was astounding and will prompt more research in the years to come.
“My colleagues are excited because they’ve never seen this much detail before,” said Bin Ren, an astronomer at the Université Côte d’Azur in France, in a statement.
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