Researchers discover rare triplet of quasars

Paris - Astronomers from Switzerland and the United States have discovered what appears to be the first known triplet of quasars, the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) said Tuesday on its website. Quasars - or quasi stellar sources - are extremely bright objects in deep space that are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes usually found at the centre of galaxies. About 100,000 quasars have been found to date, including a few dozen pairs found close together, 'but this is the first known case of a close triple quasar system,' the ESO said. According to the California Institute of Technology's George Djorgovski, who led the research team, 'Quasars are extremely rare objects. To find two of them so close together is very unlikely if they were randomly distributed in space. To find three is unprecedented.' The three quasars are separated by 'only' about 100,000 to 150,000 light-years, which is about the size of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The quasars and their trio of supermassive black holes lie about 10.5 billion light years from the Earth. The discovery was made by scientists from Caltech and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland using ESO's Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal, Chile, and the WM Keck Observatory's 10m telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. © 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

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Researchers discover rare triplet of quasars

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