startswithabang:

A newfound cluster of quasars challenges our most cosmic of expectations

“Quasars are normally very rare, well-separated objects, but for some reason there are four of them, all active at once, in a single region of space. What we’re seeing is very likely the formation of a large galaxy cluster, which itself isn’t so crazy. But the fact that we have four active, supermassive black holes all at once, powered by much more gas than our simulations and other observations tell us should be there, means we’ve got a mystery on our hands.”

Get a supermassive black hole feeding on matter, particularly on large amounts of cool, dense gas, and you’re likely to get a quasar: a luminous, active galaxy emitting radiation from the radio all the way up through the X-ray. Our best understanding and observations indicate that these objects should be rare, transient, and isolated; no more than two have ever been found close together before. Until this discovery, that is, where we just found four within a million light years of one another, posing a problem for our current theories of structure formation in the Universe.