{"id":157652,"date":"2025-06-04T14:01:08","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T14:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/157652\/"},"modified":"2025-06-04T14:01:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T14:01:08","slug":"newly-discovered-cosmic-himalayas-quasar-cluster-defies-explanation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/157652\/","title":{"rendered":"Newly discovered ‘Cosmic Himalayas’ quasar cluster defies explanation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cosmic<\/p>\n

The densest cluster of supermassive black holes identified in the universe. The background image was taken by Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope. The red and blue shadows represent the density of the supermassive black holes (quasars) and the surrounding hundreds of young, star-forming galaxies, respectively. The white squares frame the quasars, and the larger squares show close up images. Credit: Subaru Telescope \/ SDSS, Liang et al<\/p>\n

Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the universe. A quasar is powered by large amounts of matter falling into the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Collisions and mergers between galaxies can cause quasar activity by feeding additional matter into the center of a galaxy.<\/p>\n

Quasar activity peaked in the early universe<\/a>, but even then they were relatively rare. So an international research team led by Yongming Liang at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan was surprised when they found a group of 11 quasars<\/a> in an area of space where you would normally expect to see maybe one, while analyzing data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The previous record holder for quasar over-density had been five. Their paper is published<\/a> on the arXiv preprint server.<\/p>\n

Follow-up observations with the Subaru Telescope revealed another mystery. The quasars do not coincide with a dense group of galaxies. Instead, they sit on the boundary between two groups. If galaxy collisions and mergers<\/a> are responsible for quasar activity, then the densest groups of quasars should be found in the densest group of galaxies.<\/p>\n

\"Cosmic<\/p>\n

The “Cosmic Himalayas”\u2014a towering cluster of energetic quasars shaping the cosmic landscape. Yellow X marks indicate the positions of quasars. The color scale represents the density of neutral hydrogen gas, with red indicating high density and blue indicating low density, or in other words, the blue region is rich in ionized gas. Therefore, the neutral gas concentrates in the left cluster of galaxies, while the ionized gas preferentially appears around the right galaxy clump. Black contour lines show the galaxy density. Gray regions are masked areas due to poor image mosaic or saturation near bright stars. Credit: Subaru Telescope \/ SDSS, Liang et al<\/p>\n

This structure, dubbed the “Cosmic Himalayas,” cannot be explained by conventional theories, forcing astronomers to rethink the formation scenarios for quasars. The team hopes that new data from next-generation instruments like the Prime Focus Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope will help to solve the mystery.<\/p>\n

The research team named this formation the Cosmic Himalayas in reference to how the towering Himalayas on Earth form a boundary between plains and plateaus. The Cosmic Himalayas sit 10.8 billion light years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cetus.<\/p>\n

More information:<\/strong>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tYongming Liang et al, Cosmic Himalayas: The Highest Quasar Density Peak Identified in a 10,000 deg2 Sky with Spatial Discrepancies between Galaxies, Quasars, and IGM HI, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550\/arxiv.2404.15963<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJournal information:<\/strong>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tarXiv<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tProvided by
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNational Astronomical Observatory of Japan<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCitation<\/strong>:
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNewly discovered ‘Cosmic Himalayas’ quasar cluster defies explanation (2025, June 3)
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tretrieved 4 June 2025
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tfrom https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2025-06-newly-cosmic-himalayas-quasar-cluster.html\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The densest cluster of supermassive black holes identified in the universe. The background image was taken by Hyper…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[75,76,74,71,70,72,53,73,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-157652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-materials","9":"tag-nanotech","10":"tag-physics","11":"tag-physics-news","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-science-news","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-technology-news","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}