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Astronomy

Quasars signpost massive galaxies

Nature volume 545, pages 418–419 (2017)Cite this article

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The neighbourhoods of extremely bright astronomical objects called quasars in the early Universe have been incompletely probed. Observations suggest that these regions harbour some of the most massive known galaxies. See Letter p.457

Quasars are the brightest non-transient emitters of light in the Universe. These remarkable objects have been discovered to exist as early as 750 million years after the Big Bang1,2 and are thought to be powered by black holes that are at least a billion times more massive than the Sun3,4. Since the discovery of such quasars in the early Universe, major questions have persisted regarding how these extreme objects formed in such a relatively short time. On page 457, Decarli et al.5 report the discovery of four massive star-forming galaxies around distant quasars. The results improve our understanding of the formation of quasars, and provide astronomers with a potentially powerful approach to studying the most massive galaxies in the early Universe.

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Figure 1: A distant quasar and its companion galaxy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden, NL-2333, The Netherlands

    Rychard Bouwens

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  1. Rychard Bouwens
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Correspondence to Rychard Bouwens.

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Bouwens, R. Quasars signpost massive galaxies. Nature 545, 418–419 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/545418a

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