Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope, with help from Gemini North, have found the earliest known pair of quasars, Space.com reports. The compact pair is designated J1602+4228AB and nicknamed Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua. It’s seen as it was 900 million years after the Big Bang, in the era called Cosmic Dawn, when objects this massive weren’t expected to have had time to grow.
The two supermassive black holes sit only about 18,100 light-years apart, roughly a fifth of the Milky Way’s diameter, with masses of 1.5 billion and 400 million times the Sun. That makes this the most compact quasar pair found from that period, and the oldest and most distant pairing observed so far.
“There is no definitive theoretical explanation for how a single one of these giant quasars exists so early in the age of our universe, much less two,” said research lead Silvia Onorato of NOIRLab. The team noted that the universe was only about a thirteenth of its present age, and the black holes are already as massive as many we see today.
My take
I love a result that makes the theorists shrug. Webb keeps finding structures that got big earlier than the models were ready for. Two of them, that close together, that early, is a delightful kind of problem. The universe is bigger, and stranger, than our first draft of the story.
God Bless, and Happy hacking!
