This artist's concept depicts the brilliant light of two quasars residing in the cores of two galaxies that are in the chaotic process of merging.
(Image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI))
Some of the brightest objects in the universe may also hold the key to understanding how galaxies evolve — especially when gravity transforms them into giant cosmic magnifying glasses.Using artificial intelligence to search through data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), astronomers have identified seven promising candidates for quasars acting as gravitational lenses — natural cosmic magnifying glasses created when a massive object's gravity bends and magnifies light from a more distant object.These unusual systems could help researchers better understand how actively growing supermassive black holes evolve, according to a statement from Ohio State University."Quasars are like the baby pictures of a supermassive black hole," Everett McArthur, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University, said in the statement. "So exploring how we get from quasars to those black holes is really important."Quasars are the intensely bright centers of galaxies powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes. Studying these objects can help researchers understand how black holes evolve into the enormous ones found throughout the modern universe. But as these black holes pull in gas and dust, they release so much energy that they can outshine their entire host galaxies, making those galaxies difficult to study.Rare cases where a quasar acts as a gravitational lens offer a way around that problem, giving astronomers a unique opportunity to observe both the quasar and the distant galaxy whose light is magnified by its gravity.
