Quasars, the most extreme phenomena in the universe, are triggered when galactic collisions deliver gas to feeding black holes, new research suggests.
Scientists may have solved a 60-year-old mystery by discovering that quasars — energetic objects that are powered by ravenous supermassive black holes and can outshine trillions of stars combined — form when galaxies collide and merge.
Related: 'Runaway' black hole the size of 20 million suns caught speeding through space with a trail of newborn stars behind it "To understand how quasars are ignited we need to determine how gas can fall into the center of the host galaxies at sufficiently high rates," lead study author Clive Tadhunter, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., told Live Science via email."One idea is that the necessary radial infall is caused by collisions between galaxies, whose associated gravitational forces can perturb the gas from its usual circular orbits.
The team's research isn't the first time galactic mergers have been linked to quasars. Tadhunter pointed out, however, that attempts to test this hypothesis by hunting for distorted structures at the outer parts of galaxies that are characteristic of such collisions had previously proved ambiguous.
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