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A Quasar at Cosmic Dawn Flickers into View

June 22, 2026
A Quasar at Cosmic Dawn Flickers into View
By Carolyn Collins Petersen (https://ift.tt/DlztSRQ)

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a quasar flickering from the very early universe. This artist’s concept illustrates a quasar accretion disk and a jet of superheated material streaming out to space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have detected a flickering quasar called J0439+1634 as it appeared only 850 million years after the Big Bang. That discovery raises fresh questions about black hole formation and activity in the early Universe. The flickering light of this distant cosmic lighthouse showed that black hole at the heart of the quasr has a flat, pancake-shaped accretion disk. That shape is more familiar in modern-day quasars, which leads astronomers to wonder how these objects formed so quickly in the infant cosmos?



June 23, 2026 at 01:56AM
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