The celestial objects were unknown until a little more than 60 years ago, but even the name is now part of our lexicon.

Quasars were a mystery when first discovered in the early 1960s. They are extremely distant, starlike objects that emit enormous amounts of energy. Years later, astronomers understood that quasars are ...

Less than a billion years after the Big Bang, two supermassive black holes were already gorging on gas inside the same ...

Observations confirm astronomers' expectation that early-Universe quasars formed in regions of space densely populated with companion galaxies. DECam's exceptionally wide field of view and special ...

A galaxy hosting a quasar in the distant universe, right, jabs another galaxy with its beam of intense radiation as the two bump and collide. Credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Sergei Balashev / ...

This image, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows the molecular gas content of two galaxies involved in a cosmic collision. The one on the right hosts a quasar –– a ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Using combined ...

The jets of a supermassive black hole are one of the cosmos’ greatest spectacles — and also one of its greatest mysteries. These beams of ionized matter burst forth from the cores of galaxies at ...

Quasars, the luminous beacons at the centers of distant galaxies, have puzzled astronomers for decades with their dramatic brightness variations. Recent observations suggest that these celestial ...

Using the Spektr-RG (SRG) space observatory, astronomers from the Russian Academy of Sciences have inspected a radio-loud quasar known as SRGA J2306+1556, which is extremely luminous in the X-ray band ...

A Yale-led team of astronomers has detected an intensely brightening and dimming quasar that may help explain how some objects in the early universe grew at a highly accelerated rate. The discovery, ...

Observations using the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope confirm astronomers’ expectation that early ...