Even teenage Quasars happen to be a 'hot mess'

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope recently observed that quasars emerging quickly in their 'teenage' years, are indeed all messed up.

They used the Hubble Space Telescope's infrared vision to uncover the mysterious early formative years of quasars--the brightest objects in the universe. Hubble's sharp images unveil chaotic galaxy collisions that give birth to quasars by fueling their energy source: a supermassive central black hole devouring infalling material.

Though it had been previously theorized that the mergers of two galaxies could do the trick, the overwhelming glow of the quasar drowns out the light of the accompanying galaxy, making the signs of mergers difficult to see.

The quasars light up because the gravitational forces of the merger rob much of the angular momentum that keeps gas suspended in the disks of the colliding galaxies. The gas then falls directly toward the supermassive black hole. The accretion zone around the black hole is so engorged with fuel it converts it into a gusher of radiation that blazes in spectacular fashion across the universe.

Eilat Glikman of Middlebury College in Vermont looked for candidate "dust-reddened quasars" in several ground-based infrared and radio sky surveys. Active galaxies in this early phase of evolution are predicted to glow brightly across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, making them detectable in radio and near-infrared wavelengths that are not as easily obscured as other radiation.

Glikman then used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to take a detailed look at the best candidate targets. Glikman looked at the dust-reddened light of 11 ultra-bright quasars that exist at the peak of the universe's star-formation era, which was 12 billion years ago. The infrared capability of Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 was able to probe deep into the birth of this quasar era.