USA: One of the universe's most enigmatic objects recently became a little less enigmatic.

Astronomers have been perplexed by quasars for sixty years, ever since they were first discovered. They are among the universe's brightest and most potent objects, as far as we were aware.

They are so far away from Earth that they can shine as brightly as a trillion stars while condensing into a region no bigger than our solar system. This indicates a highly concentrated amount of energy.

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However, until this week, astronomers were unsure of the exact reason behind these extreme explosions.

Because astronomers like Hong-Yee Chiu, who coined the term, were completely perplexed by these strange interstellar objects when they were first discovered, they gave them the nickname "quasar," which is a concatenation of the words "quasar" and "radio source."

Their strong gravitational pull can produce gravitational lensing illusions, in which light is warped to resemble cosmic magnifying glasses. It was difficult to even determine which direction this lensing was coming from just a few decades ago. 

As we've focused, we've discovered that galaxies, which are huge swirling discs of stars, gas, dust, and dark matter connected by gravity, contain quasars at their centres. Although it might seem obvious, galaxies need a central object to spin around.

The centre of most galaxies, including our own, is a supermassive black hole, so-called because it can contain dead stars that are between 100,000 and ten billion times as massive as the Sun.

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A supermassive black hole with the charming name Sagittarius A* orbits the Milky Way. We haven't yet discovered the merger of two supermassive black holes, despite the fact that it hasn't been very long since humans developed the telescope technology to detect black hole mergers. 

AGNs, or active galactic nuclei, are very different objects that are found at the centre of some galaxies. Blazars, which are AGN that shoot out jets of ionised matter travelling at almost the speed of light, are an example of how volatile these can be. However, quasars are AGNs that are even more powerful. They are propelled by supermassive black holes, which occasionally emit matter waves capable of suffocating young stars. They now play a crucial role in how we understand the evolution of galaxies and the early universe.

Sadly, due to their extreme distance and brightness, quasars are challenging to study despite their significance and mind-boggling destructive power. Additionally, they don't have very long lifespans in comparison to the time between their triggering events, and their brightness can change over time, complicating observations and obscuring data. These factors have all made their ancestry hazy.

A recent study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society sheds light on the subject of quasars, essentially resolving one of the fundamental questions surrounding how quasars form. Galactic collisions may hold the key to the solution.

The conditions for the birth of a quasar appear to be created, as the researchers explain, by galaxies colliding. In fact, even before the two galaxies fully merge, these violent interweavings can cause enough gas to flow towards the supermassive black holes at the centre, sparking quasar activity.

Although this theory has been put forth previously, there has never been such strong direct evidence before. Nearly 50 galaxies that are home to quasars were observed by the researchers, who were led by Jonathon Pierce, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, and they were contrasted with more than 100 galaxies that are quasar-free. Similar comparisons have frequently been made, but this is the first time that a large number of quasars have been imaged with this level of sensitivity.

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They came to the conclusion that galaxies hosting quasars are roughly three times more likely to be colliding or interacting with other galaxies using deep imaging observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, one of Spain's Canary Island colonies.

Our knowledge of quasars, which is crucial to forming our theories on how the universe formed and where it is headed, has evolved over many years of research. Lead author of the study Pierce said in the same statement that "studying the earliest galaxies in the Universe was one of the main scientific motivations for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, and Webb is capable of detecting light from even the most distant quasars, emitted nearly 13 billion years ago. Our understanding of the evolution of the universe and perhaps even the future of the Milky Way depends heavily on quasars.